Imaginable Audiobook By Jane McGonigal cover art

Imaginable

How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything - Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

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Imaginable

By: Jane McGonigal
Narrated by: Jane McGonigal
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World-renowned future forecaster, game designer, and NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Jane McGonigal gives us the tools to imagine the future without fear.

“An accessible, optimistic field guide to the future.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Reading this book is like sitting down with a creative, optimistic friend—and getting up as a new version of yourself.”—Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When

The COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, a new war—events we might have called “unimaginable” or “unthinkable” in the past are now reality. Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems 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:

  1. 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
  2. Develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively
  3. Take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire
  4. 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.

©2022 Jane McGonigal (P)2022 Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks Education Future Studies Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Psychology & Interactions Social Sciences Thought-Provoking Health Future Technology

Critic reviews

“Jane McGonigal is unusually adept at anticipating events that most of us can’t even fathom. In this eye-opening, actionable book, she teaches you how to widen your peripheral vision, extend your imagination farther into the future, and conceive of the inconceivable.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

“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, New York Times bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Farsighted

“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

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This book is a fascinating dive into futures thinking, using imagination and scenario planning to help readers prepare for uncertainties, all rooted in her game design expertise. Rather than pushing a heavy ideological agenda, it offers practical tools like thought experiments to foster resilience and mental flexibility, with an “urgent optimism” that feels empowering. The book does touch on real-world issues like climate change, pandemics, and racial injustice, but these are framed as neutral scenarios for creative problem-solving, not as soapboxes for activism. If you’re wary of “woke” narratives heavy on identity politics or virtue-signaling, this mostly avoids that trap, though subtle nods to progressive concerns might irk the ultra-sensitive. Overall, it’s a solid, forward-thinking read that equips you for tomorrow without the preachiness—4 stars!

Interesting and a little woke

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This is such a a great book by an amazing author. All her books are great, this just adds to the collection. It's worth watching her TED talk and jumping on the Urgent Optimists group if you like future thinking, planning for the unexpected and similar themes.

Well researched, highly practical imagination engineering book.

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! Brilliant, interesting, challenging, ideas in "future thinking" and how it can change your path starting... very soon! Highly recommend reading the book (I would if I could) or listening to her on podcasts (which I have been searching out and listening to since this was released ).

The fatal flaw of this audiobook is the TOTALLY ANNOYING VOICE-BOT deployed to "read" it. Be assured it is definitely Ms. McGonigal's voice. Unfortunately she did not read the whole book, nor even a decent portion of it, for this recording. Clearly, a software program was employed here to smack one. slow. word. after. word. interspersed with the relief of actually flowing phrases. If you need proof, just listen to the BOT repeatedy pronouncing the World Health Organization's universal acronym "W.H.O." as just "who" ... like "Horton hears a..." [eye roll] There is no way the author knowing recorded that bit. And how embarrassing for her! 🥺

I've been playing it at x1.5 speed and the unnatural cadence is even more distracting but less protracted than the painful "normal: playback speed.

LOVE the concepts! PLEASE RE-RECORD!

Fantastic content! HORRIBLE voice bot

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Fun book I recommend 1.5x listening though to get through it. Liked the ideas and tools. Its one weakness was not adding many non government controlled future scenarios to pursue. Would love to have more on that front but overall a insightful read to expand your ideas of the future and actions you can take now.

Great tools and ideas for imagining and creating the future

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Listen to the book at 1.5 times speed and you won’t have any problems.
The authors techniques are valuable and I’m glad I learned them.
Her naïveté is annoying but her heart is in the right place

Excellent book

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Loved this book. The author's creativity is boundless. Her future scenarios are vivid and help to train the reader in thinking about the future and options that may be required for us to survive and thrive in the future.

Future Thinking is required to survive

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I love Jane. Superbetter was wonderful.
And this is good information too. Honestly I can’t downplay the science of what she is saying and why it’s good for you.
It makes sense and I hope this helps so many people :)

I just wasn’t hooked like superbetter. Information was repetitive and redundant. I found myself skipping the scenarios as they were introduced. And I wasn’t compelled to finish the scenarios. Perhaps this would be better in true book fashion vs audiobook.

Good information

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I'd like to start this Audible review by saying that I respectfully disagree with the reviewer here who thought that a voice bot was employed to read the book. For one thing, Audible's policies require that all audiobooks sold here are read by human beings. Secondly, to my knowledge, as sophisticated as digital voice software may be, it's still not quite sophisticated enough to be able to replicate the nuanced inflections that the author of this book consistently bring to many words, phrases, and sentences all throughout. In fact, it's kind of funny because the author's beautiful reading of this audiobook (in my opinion, obviously) is exactly the reason that I wanted to make a point of leaving a separate Audible review even though I've already reviewed the book itself on Amazon, which owns Audible. I guess it just goes to show the subjectivity of personal taste, which is fair enough.

There are some books for which I buy the audiobook version even if I already own the paper or Kindle version. The reasons for this may range from an excellent performance by the narrator/author to a desire on my part to refer to the material in the book frequently at every available opportunity so that I can assimilate and digest its contents fully, whether I'm cooking in the kitchen (audiobook), driving in my car (audiobook), or reading in bed (paper or Kindle). A few books that I’ve read and listened to simultaneously in this way over the past few years include Haven Scott McVarish’s ‘Last Chance to Save American Democracy,’ John Michael Greer’s ‘Dark Age America,’ and former president Barack Obama’s ‘A Promised Land.’ To this list I now add Jane McGonigal’s ‘Imaginable.’

As mentioned, I've already written a review on Amazon for the actual book itself so I won’t repeat here what I wrote over there. But the reason the audiobook version warrants its own separate review is the author’s soulful reading of it. Upon listening to the “Introduction” that opens the book, I was immediately struck by what was, at least to me, McGonigal’s noticeably different approach to reading this book from the way she read the audiobook version of her last book, ‘SuperBetter.’ It’s a subtle difference because her voice is obviously the same, but there’s a more hushed and subdued quality to her reading this time around. By “hushed” I don’t mean that it’s quiet or hard to hear. On the contrary, the audio production is immaculate and McGonigal’s reading is crystal clear. You won’t miss a single word. What I mean by “hushed” is that the author brings a certain austerity to the reading this time around, almost as if in a tacit acknowledgement of the gravity of many of the topics she discusses such as the Covid-19 pandemic and all the many traumas that the entire world has experienced over the course of the last two to three years as a result of it (not to mention all the other stuff that also happened during this time). The delivery fits the content perfectly and results in an intimate listening experience that can stand on its own, if this is your sole copy of the book, or as an auditory complement to the paper version of the book.

-PopMythology.com

An important book beautifully read by the author

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Was hoping for more thought exercises and walkthroughs of unimaginable scenarios to help train my brain. Instead, 80% of the content is basically "boy, COVID-19 sure was pretty crazy, huh?" Also the narrator speaks like her audio is cut and pasted from different sentences. So. Sentences. Will often sound. Like this. Not something I can stand for a book this long, sorry.

only made it halfway through

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The left wing political bias is hard to ignore. Leftist bias is a major problem in strategic foresight so I expected it, but it was so intense that the book loses credibility.

A good futurist has to leave their biases at the door. They have every right to hold political views, as does everyone, but you have to be able to set those biases aside to critically think about the future.

The author’s comically simplistic characterizations of conservatives was offensive and serves as a major impediment to clear futures thinking.

If you’re looking for a clear framework for thinking about the future, this is not it. There are some decent nuggets in there but they’re hard to find due to all the unnecessary political commentary and self aggrandizing fluff.

If you still want to get this book, I highly recommend getting a print or kindle version. The author’s delivery is oddly stilted and very strange. It’s not too bad at first but eventually it becomes very distracting and quite frankly, hard to listen to. I made it through the entire book, but it was painful. In hindsight, I should have just abandoned the book, but I have a bad habit of sticking it out when I shouldn’t.

I recommend Andy Hines’ book instead of you want to learn about strategic foresight.

Politically Biased and Terrible Delivery

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