Dr. Maya Shankar

And so one of the things that I talk about in the book is

how we can, at these moments of inflection, crack open our imagination and actually generate new, more positive possible selves in the face of these inflection points.

So let me give you a couple of my favorite evidence-based strategies for unlocking our

potential future selves that are maybe less constrained than the ones our brains naturally come up with.

So one of my favorites is to seek out moments of moral elevation.

So what's moral elevation?

It's that warm, fuzzy feeling we get in our chest when we witness someone else's extraordinary actions.

So that might be their kindness or self-sacrifice or their courage or their resilience or their ability to forgive.

And what's so interesting about moral elevation when we witness someone else's moral beauty is that it doesn't just feel good.

It actually changes our brains.

In seeing someone else violate our assumptions about what humans are capable of in the most beautiful way, it actually cracks open our own imagination about what is possible for us.

One of the people that I profile in the book was sentenced to nine years in adult prison for a carjacking he committed when he was 16 years old.

And he had had such a promising future, Hala.

It's such a tragic story of someone making a really, really terrible mistake just to try to prove something to the boys in his neighborhood.

It just completely derailed his life.

And he, I remember this guy's name is Dwayne.

He told me,

Maya, it wasn't just my mourning all the futures I'd once imagined for myself.

It was fearing who all I might become behind bars because he had an image of what it meant to be a prisoner.

He was worried, am I going to develop a gambling habit?