One Question Friday: How Do You Keep Your Imagination Alive?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:02)
HubSpot allows all our teams to work together seamlessly, so no one's fallen overboard, unless we want them to.

**Shaan Puri** (1:16)
Okay, it's Shaan, and I'm here with One Question Friday, where we take one listener question, and we play the audio on air, and then we try to answer. We try to drop a knowledge bomb, right? I'm already imagining you listening to this, and your mind is blown, the brain is leaking out the air, and that's how you're gonna end this podcast. Okay, so let's go ahead and listen to this. Ben has sent me three audios. I can pick any one of the three. Haven't heard it yet.
I'm going to pick door number one. Let's go.

**Matthew** (1:43)
Hey guys, my name is Matthew.
And I have a question for Shaan. So he talks about not wanting to be in the imagination graveyard. What are some tips and tricks that you do to keep your imagination creativity alive, especially when you feel stuck or you don't know what to do?

**Shaan Puri** (2:02)
Oh, okay, perfect. This is right up my alley. And let me break this down for you in three parts. I'll first start by saying this.
I think this question touches on something, a tactic that is one of the most useful things that I do that I don't really hear anybody else talking about. Okay, so that's the teaser, which is what I'm about to talk about is one of the most useful things to me. And I rarely hear people talking about it. So let's break this into parts.
You're asking about imagination. You have this great little phrase, imagination graveyard. I don't think I said that, but I'm stealing it from you.
So the first thing is, if I said, all right, picture somebody who's got an amazing imagination, right? Who in the world has an amazing imagination? Often what people will think about is a child, right? So when we're kids, we get praise for our imagination, and we're always making up games and stories and magical creatures and imaginary friends and all this good stuff. So that's the first place we go. We think kids, imagination is for kids. The other place we go is maybe like a, I don't know, like somebody who works at Pixar. Like, oh, you're super creative. You create these movies and stories, so you need to be imaginative. And the rest of us, we don't really need that.
And I think that's totally wrong. So I actually will put this forward. I think that everybody is using their imagination every day, but you just don't recognize it because when you're a kid, your imagination is about fun and possibilities and magical fantasy lands. And when you're an adult, your imagination is actually manifest as stress, right? Okay, so what does that mean?
You wake up and you look through the alarm clock, you see the time and immediately you realize that, oh man, I'm gonna be stuck in traffic, right? So where's your brain gone? Your brain has imagined a situation that hasn't happened, that is not necessarily a fact or proven, but you're imagining that either the roads are gonna be clogged or the airport's gonna be busy or they're gonna lose my bag, or you imagine that, oh, I have this presentation and I'm gonna eff it up, right? I'm gonna stumble on my words or I'm gonna get nervous or people aren't gonna get it or people are gonna laugh at me, whatever. We are constantly imagining negative scenarios happening. This is very common in adults, right? And how do you feel when you imagine these things, right? You feel anxious, you feel stressed, you feel depressed. These are all code words for the same thing, fear. And fear only takes place in the imagination.