How is your imagination your preview of life’s coming attractions?

People talk a lot about innovation these days, but what about imagination? Imagination is truly the power behind innovation. In order to create new things, we must first imagine them in our minds and our consciousness. I think back to being a kid and imagining EVERYTHING; I imagined how to dress up my poor cat to make him look cool, I imagined that I was the CEO of a company and ran an “office”, I dressed up like Disney characters and imagined what it would be like to be them for a day. My favorite example is how I imagined a summer camp for the kids in the neighborhood in my mind and drew pictures on paper of how I would set it up in our garage and front yard. Then I actually did it and even made money! Who else had that entrepreneurial spirit as a kid??

At some point, we stopped imagining every day and it seems we have to “carve out time” or force ourselves to be creative and imagine. Meanwhile, companies are aching for their employees to be more “innovative” to help drive disruptive change that will take them on their next competitive and profitable venture. But we forget that in order for our people to truly innovate, they need space and time to imagine, reimagine, and dream. It is in those truly right-brain, lack of logic, creative, outside of any construct box or otherwise, that the real magic happens.

As Albert Einstein so poignantly put it, “imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” I love this visual of a preview of coming attractions. So, let’s start imagining what those coming attractions are, like Disney did with theme parks, like Albert Einstein did with relativity so that now Elon Musk can imagine with Space and the Universe. Let’s take a tip from our childhood days and find ways to imagine as part of our everyday lives. Let it not just help us imagine new ways of being and new offerings for our companies but let it reawaken the magic that lies within us and remind us of the gift of our imaginations.