Imaginable
A world-renowned future forecaster and game designer teaches us to envision the future before it arrives—and gives us the tools to help shape the world we want to live in.
The COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most disruptive events in human history, has made it more challenging than ever to feel prepared, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures.
In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she’s designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to:
- build our collective imagination so that we can dive into the future and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years from now
- develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively
- take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire
- access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable force within each of us that activates our sense of agency
Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine—until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book.
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Imaginable Book Club in 2033
Join us for the official Imaginable book club meet-up online, hosted by the author Jane McGonigal. This virtual event is free and open to all, and will be held at 12 PM Pacific Time on September 29, 2033. Yes, that's more than a decade away!
As Jane writes in Imaginable: "September 29, 2033 is the day you and I will meet again and say to each other, 'Well done. We made it through a decade of unthinkable change. And the change didn’t just happen to us. We were anticipating it, shaping it, influencing it, every step of the way.' When we meet again for the book club in 2033, I’ll ask you two questions. Maybe you can even start to imagine your answers to these questions now. What’s one “surprising” thing you saw coming, and felt ready for? What’s one important change you made, or helped make – in your life, or your community, or in the world? I can’t wait to hear your stories. I’ll try my best to have some good stories to tell you, too."
Expert Testimonials
"With Imaginable, Jane McGonigal has pulled off a rare and essential feat: she's written a book filled with inspiring ideas about how the future might play out, that also provides immediate, practical tools to help you think more creatively about how you can change that future yourself."
- Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Farsighted
"Jane McGonigal's Imaginable is a delightful and actionable antidote to apocalypse: an invitation to play with the future as if it were limited by nothing but our own imaginative capacity. An inspiring read.
- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Team Human.
"Imaginable is more than a book, it's a mindset upgrade. It teaches you to think more creatively and optimistically about what's next. Imaginable gets you excited about the future, rather than fearful of it. After you read this book, your brain will be on fire with new possibilities. And you'll never call anything "unimaginable" or "unthinkable" again."
- Peter H. Diamandis, MD, Founder, XPRIZE, Singularity University.
NYTimes Best Selling Author of Abundance, BOLD and Future is Faster Than You Think.
Author Biography
Jane McGonigal is a world-renowned future forecaster and designer of “alternate reality games” created to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully (Penguin Press, 2016), and her TED talks on how gaming can improve our lives have more than 15 million views. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California, where she also teaches the course “How to Think Like a Futurist” at Stanford University. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, O Magazine, Fast Company, The Economist, and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. She was named a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum; one of Fast Company’s “Top 100 Creative People in Business,” one of the “20 Most Inspiring Women in the World” by Oprah Winfrey in O Magazine; one of the “Top 35 innovators changing the world through technology” by MIT Technology Review, and has received many other honors. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
