Imagination is magic! Use its power to create a business, a career and a life even better than you dreamed.
Have you ever created something that you didn’t even think was possible?
You imagined it and then it happened.
For me, my whole life is a little bit like that.
When I first moved to Montreal to become a writer, I had no idea how exactly you create a creative career.
And now it’s 25 years later. I’m married and have two adult children. More than anything else I’m a writer.
It’s astonishing to me that my dream came true.
If you had told me when I was a little girl that I’d actually be writing books and writing and being a journalist and doing all the things that I do to make a living, I wouldn’t have believed you.
It was like a dream that lots of us had.
There are entire worlds that get created out of imagination.
It’s not just my life but the entire world around us.
We have Elon Musk actually sending off rockets into space.
We have the device that I’m filming this on. It’s a tiny little thing, even smaller than a shoe. When Get Smart used a shoe as a telephone, that seemed like magic. We’ve gone beyond magic.
It gets even more amazing.
\When he was a kid, Barack Obama couldn’t imagine being president, nor could Jimmy Carter.
If anyone would have told him when he was a kid that that would have been possible, he wouldn’t have believed it.
When Justin Trudeau worked as a teacher in British Columbia, I’m sure he didn’t think he would ever be Prime Minister of Canada. He dreamed it and eventually, it came true.
It’s so amazing what imagination can do.
You can create entire worlds with imagination
Just look at what J.K. Rowling has done with the Harry Potter series. All of us, all of a sudden, can imagine flying broomsticks and playing quidditch.
We can imagine two different worlds where some people are magical and the rest of us are just muggles.
She created all that with imagination.
It works in nonfiction too
That’s what I really want to talk about today.
I want to encourage you to create the life that you want with your imagination.
What you imagine isn’t necessarily exactly what’s going to take place. If you imagine something big, you’ll create something even bigger. Try imagining something great.
That’s what I help you do when you work with me to profile an ancestor, a business or a life. You create a new identity that’s more you than you are right now.
Books can help trigger imagination
All sorts of books help make this really clear.
Have you read the Blue Ocean Strategy?
Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne created an entire new way of thinking about business with this one idea.
Do what’s unexpected.
There’s another book by Norman Doidge called The Brain That Changes Itself. This is something that people never imagined was true. Doidge wanted it to be true to help heal his father and he discovered it is true.
Look at black holes.
Look at Steven Pinker’s world. His ideas is that we live in a kinder more gentler world.
These were all initially moments of imagination
Then the person who imagined something went out in the world and went to see if they could find evidence for their idea.
And they did.
And then the idea got stronger and then we all imagined it.
The United Nations has just announced that they want the Zero Hunger by 2030. They’ve created a campaign.
They want saner agriculture practices. This is something that I think all of us can imagine. What if everyone woke up with enough food to eat and it was so nutritious that none of us ever get sick.
This is an extraordinary moment of imagination that I hope we can all get behind.
What else can you imagine?
What moments can you think up would be something that we can all get behind?
Every community is based on a vision people imagine
Each person imagines something they share their ideas with others and then you create a joint vision which is just a joint imagination.
There is Dan Sullivan and Peter Diamandis from Exponential Wisdom who talk a lot about extending human lifespan. Peter Diamandis wants to live for seven hundred years. Dan’s a little bit less optimistic; he’s only aiming to live for 156 years.
Dan describes how you can use imagination to create an awesome life in a book called “The Laws of Lifetime Growth
These are imaginary moments but they’re working on actually making this happen.
Peter Diamandis has created an organization, Fountain Life, that lets people discover their genetic history to help prevent getting sick. Basically it’s like a health organization to work on where you are at now so you can treat anything that might be found before it actually gets worse.
Obviously if you find and treat an illness really you have a better chance of survival.
So I mean this is just the way you look at basic medical treatment. The past looks barbaric now because people imagined better.
Antibiotics didn’t exist. A simple piece of mould had no value until somebody imagined more. Then they did the work.
All good ideas start with imagination and then they take work to accomplish. And that’s the hard part. But you have to begin by actually imagining something that’s amazing.
I think that the world of nonfiction is built on proving that what we imagine is true.
I’d love to hear how your using your imagination to create a better life for yourself. Please let me know in the comments.
