from Ted. . .

JK Rowling:

...many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all...they chose to remain comfortably in the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to feel how it would be to be born someone other than who they are. they can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages, they can close their minds and hearts to people that don't touch them personally, they can refuse to know. i might be tempted to envy people who can live that way except I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. 

choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agrobphobia, and that brings its own terror. those that are willfully unimaginative see more terrors. Plutark said: what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. 

even your nationality sets you apart. [as americans] the great majority of you belong to the world's only superpower. the way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressures you put on your government has an impact way beyond your borders. that is your privilege and your burden. 

we do not need magic to change our realities. we have it all already inside of us. all we have to do is imagine something better. 

Dan Gilbert:

yes, somethings are better than others. we should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. but when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference of these futures, we are at risk.  when our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully, when our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value.  when our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. when our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless and we're cowardly.  the lesson i want to leave you with is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we chose experience.