How to Win the Battle Raging Between Your Memory and Imagination

“We are much more in tune with our experiences than we are with our future. This is due to the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. The brain goes to what it can most easily comprehend.”

– Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert

Your memory is more powerful than your imagination.

One can find endless ramifications and applications of that statement.

Personally, I apply it to my own life by asking this question:

Is my memory of small achievements thwarting my capacity to imagine even bigger (and different!) achievements for myself?

When people talk about “dreaming big” they typically speak in ambiguous and conceptual terms. The truth is, we are likely “thinking big” only through the lens of our past.

And, because our memories are more powerful than our imagination, we make our plans accordingly.

Which makes me wonder if we’re all selling ourselves short. To win the mental battle of memory vs. imagination, we need to practice imagining independently of our memories.

When writing sales goals, writing a business plan, or trying to figure out where to go next, we must ask, “Did I develop this plan out of my memory or out of my imagination?”

Over and over again when goal setting, we repeat the tendency to think within the confining parameters of our memory.

It winds up sounding like this, “Well, I went over here before…so, let’s go over there now.”

But great achievers think creatively out of their imagination, not out of their memory.

When we create goals and design a vision out of our imagination, we lift the artificial history-based limitation on our capabilities.

And it typically begins with two simple words, “What if…?”

When you start thinking out of your imagination, it won’t change the cosmos or align the planets.

But it will change you.

What if…life is willing to give you more than you have been willing to ask for?

What if…?

What if…?

Think about it. Imagine it. Change the world.