3 Reasons Why If You Can Dream It, You Can Live It

Follow #OneDucksJourney on TikTok at SpeedOfBike

I can’t get this fact, learned in a series of futures thinking courses I took recently, out of my mind:

1. On a medical scan called a Functional MRI (fMRI), the brain lights up in the exact same space when thinking about something imagined as when thinking about something actually lived.

Add this to other facts I’ve known for years:

2. The feelings of pleasure about an experience are equally divided among the anticipation of it, the actual living of it, and the memory of it.

3. Time spent imagining something enables your brain to find paths forward and overcome barriers.

When you combine those three points, you can see why both visualizing and planning can help increase not only your pleasure relating to something already existing (or imagined) in your life but also its ongoing or future success.

And so it is that I’m spending the next six months or so creating not just the conditions but the mindset for success of my journey across the USA (see the working cover for One Duck’s Journey at the bottom of this post, plus the previous post titled Shake Your Tail Feathers, Mama!).

I’ve taken seven concrete actions so far:

1. I’ve joined WWOOF USA and Couchsurfing;