Why I Wrote The Imagination Age

People ask me some version of the same question all the time. How did you get from Montana to New York. How did you end up at the Gates Foundation. How do you and Kevin figure out how to live in Southeast Asia for months at a time. The question changes but what they're really asking doesn't: how do you keep doing this?

For a long time I didn't have a good answer. I'd say something about being open to opportunity, or following curiosity, which was true but not useful. It didn't explain the actual mechanism. And I wanted to understand the mechanism — not just for the people asking, but for myself.

So I started researching. I spent months in the neuroscience and behavioral science literature, trying to understand what imagination actually is and how it works. Not imagination as metaphor. Not the word on a motivational poster. Imagination as cognition — something with structure, something the brain does in specific ways. And alongside the research, I kept returning to what I'd seen over twenty years — in boardrooms and team offsites and long dinners with friends across three continents. People who were smart, accomplished, capable — stuck. A leadership team circling the same three options quarter after quarter. A person who built exactly the life they planned and can't explain why it feels hollow. Not because anything was wrong with them. Because something had happened to their thinking and they didn't have a name for it.

What I found is that imagination isn't a personality trait. It's a competence. One that operates in distinct modes, each serving a different function — and each one can be developed or lost. That was also my answer. Every leap I'd made, every unlikely room I'd walked into — it hadn't been courage or luck. It had been imagination doing a specific kind of work.

And then, mid-draft, I watched Demis Hassabis on 60 Minutes. Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind — and a neuroscientist whose doctoral research on memory and imagination was named one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year. He has spent his career at the intersection of how the human brain works and what artificial intelligence can do. And he said, plainly, that imagination is the last thing AI can't replicate. Here was someone who understands both sides of that equation — the neuroscience and the machine — confirming what I was already writing. Imagination is the thing. The human thing.

This is a book about what imagination actually is, how it works, and what happens when we stop using it. If you've been asking how — this is my answer.