In a One Question Friday episode, Shaan responds to a listener question about keeping imagination alive. He argues that adults use their imagination constantly — just negatively, as stress — and explains his practice of imagining “movie scenes” instead of making lists to set goals, make decisions, and stay in a peak mental state.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host)
One Question Friday: Keeping Imagination Alive [00:00:00]
Shaan: Okay, it’s Shaan. I’m here with One Question Friday, where we take one listener question, play the audio on air, and then try to drop a knowledge bomb.
I’m already imagining you listening to this with your mind blown and your brain leaking out your ear. That’s how you’re going to end this podcast.
Let’s go ahead and listen. Ben has sent me three audio questions — I’m going to pick door number one.
[Listener question: “Hey guys, my name is Matthew and I have a question for Shaan. He talks about not wanting to be in the ‘imagination graveyard.’ What are some tips and tricks you do to keep your imagination and creativity alive, especially when you feel stuck or you don’t know what to do?”]
Shaan: Perfect. This is right up my alley. Let me break this down in three parts.
I’ll start by saying this: I think this question touches on a tactic that is one of the most useful things I do — and I rarely hear anyone else talking about it. So that’s the teaser.
Adults Use Imagination Every Day — They Just Call It Stress [00:03:00]
Shaan: If I said, “Picture somebody who’s got an amazing imagination,” people think: a child. When we’re kids, we get praised for our imagination. We’re always making up games, stories, magical creatures, imaginary friends.
The other place we go is maybe someone who works at Pixar — oh, you’re super creative, you create these movies. And the rest of us? We don’t really need that. We don’t think imagination is for adults.
I think that’s totally wrong.
Here’s what I’ll put forward: I think everybody uses their imagination every day. You just don’t recognize it. Because when you’re a kid, your imagination is about fun and possibilities and magical fantasy lands. When you’re an adult, your imagination manifests as stress.
What does that mean? You wake up, look at the alarm clock, see the time, and immediately your brain has imagined a situation that hasn’t happened: “I’m going to be stuck in traffic.” Where has your brain gone? It’s imagined the roads are going to be clogged, the airport’s going to be busy, they’re going to lose my bag. You imagine the presentation — “I’m going to stumble on my words, get nervous, people aren’t going to get it, people are going to laugh at me.”
We are constantly imagining negative scenarios. This is very common in adults. And how do you feel when you imagine these things? Anxious. Stressed. Depressed. These are all code words for the same thing: fear. And fear only takes place in the imagination.
So the first thing to recognize: imagination is not just something kids do. Adults do it all the time. They just code name it stress, because they’re imagining bad scenarios that haven’t happened yet.
This happens as a parent — instead of marveling at how your kid is playing, you’re imagining “they might hit their head on that thing.” How often do we do that?
How Imagination Drives Your Mood and Decisions [00:10:00]
Shaan: What’s the implication? What’s the result of this imagination?
First, it changes how you feel. When you imagine something going poorly, you feel stressed, anxious, sad. But it also changes your decisions. If you imagine you’re going to be stuck in traffic, maybe you’ll leave earlier, take a different route, or maybe you won’t go at all. If you imagine the presentation is going to be a disaster, maybe you’ll ask somebody else to do it, or avoid the situation altogether.
So imagination drives not just your mood but your decisions.
If I’d said at the beginning, “How important is your imagination?” you’d say, “Oh, it’s important to have an imagination.” But your mood and your decisions are the two most important things you have in life. And what I’m telling you is they’re driven by your imagination — by what you’re imagining the future to be like.
Imagination becomes this pretty important thing.
And the problem is, imagination is a muscle we haven’t used consciously since we were kids. We’re always doing it in the background, but how often are we actually intentionally trying to improve our imagination? It’s a muscle that’s just been weakening and atrophying since we were about five years old.
Making Scenes Instead of Lists [00:18:00]
Shaan: Now here’s how I do it. That’s the importance. Now, what do you actually do?
The way most people in my peer group think is extremely rational, analytical, logical. And they love lists. Nobody loves lists like a business person, a doer, an achiever. You write it down, knock it off. Those work to a certain extent — they get a pretty good result, but they get you there in the toughest, most stressful way possible.
I’m not really interested in that. I want to win and I want to enjoy it. To me, those are two non-negotiables — not willing to lose and not willing to have a rough, tough-it-out experience. I want an enjoyable, awesome experience while I’m doing it.
So what I do differently instead of making a list — which is a text format — I use the brain the way the brain actually works, which is visual and auditory. When I think about what I want to do, my tasks, my goals, I don’t make lists. I make scenes. Like scenes in a movie.
Notice I literally said at the beginning of this podcast: “I’m imagining you listening to this with your mind blown and your brain leaking.” I literally said that. That is how I approach anything.
People ask, “You do a lot of public speaking — what’s a tip to get better?” I say: don’t think about what you need to say first. Start by imagining the reaction at the end. How are people going to feel and react at the end?
When I teach my class on Zoom — people pay $1,000 per person to get in — I need to make this thing lit. It can’t feel like a boring meeting. I don’t worry about what words I’m going to say. I think about: how do I want this to feel at the end?
What I always do is imagine the Zoom chat flooding with comments. People going: “This was a 12 out of 10.” “Oh my god, so many nuggets of gold.” “Dude, so glad I came.” I’m imagining these almost congratulatory conversations happening at the end. I imagine the volume of chat flying through the screen with positive feedback. That gets me in a certain type of mood — gives me confidence — and then I can just go and operate naturally. The right words just happen to come out of my mouth because I’m operating from the right state of mind.
Practical Tips for Scene-Making [00:28:00]
Shaan: So I make scenes for my goals.
Instead of saying “I want to lose 10 pounds,” I will imagine looking at myself in the mirror and seeing what I see. Or even better — forget looking in the mirror. I imagine I just posted my before and after on Twitter and I’m seeing the replies flooding in. I’m using my own psychology to my advantage. My psychology wants to get a bunch of likes and comments on social media, so I use that to my advantage.
I have a scene for all the different things that matter to me in life. Family, for example — I don’t usually share this, but family is super important to me. So I imagine this scene of me walking into my house: one kid on one leg, another kid on the other leg, one kid wrapping around my arm like a little koala, and me leaning over to kiss my wife. That’s the scene that implies a house full of love. That’s the happy ending I’ve already imagined.
That scene puts me in a certain mood. It gives me clarity of what I want. And once I have great mood and great clarity, I tend to make the right decisions. I’m operating from a place of abundance instead of scarcity. You never want to make decisions from panic, fear, or desperation — you’re going to make bad decisions. I want to make decisions from feeling good, feeling confident, imagining all the possibilities.
Here are a couple of tips if you want to actually do this:
Take your goal that you’ve written down — instead, imagine it as a movie scene. It’s not just what you see. It’s what you hear. It’s all your senses. What do you see? What do you hear? How does it smell? How does it feel to be wearing those clothes, sitting in that car, sleeping in that bed? Engage all five senses. It makes it more vivid.
The other thing: make it comical. A movie can be a horror movie, a drama. For me, I choose comedy. When I imagine something, I imagine the most extreme version of it, because it makes me laugh. It takes the weight off my shoulders. Things feel really important and tight when you’re afraid of them. But once you play with the idea in your head, play with that scene — it becomes lightweight. I like to operate from something being lightweight.
That’s how I use my imagination on a daily basis. It becomes a practice. I want to practice my imagination more than I did as a kid — when I used to make up little stories with my figurines, draw and sketch. I worked that muscle out a lot back then.
What I realized is: you’ve got to do that as an adult too. Because your imagination is always running — and on autopilot by default, it’s going to imagine stressful, negative outcomes. That’s where adults go.
The uncommon path is to actually train that muscle. Practice imagining things the way you want them to go. That puts you in the right mood, and lets you make decisions from a place of winning rather than a fear of losing.
All right, that’s it. Hope that answers your question. I’ll see you guys next Friday.