Beautiful tomorrows begin today

The world would be more awesome if ....

Thank you to Substack Reads for recommending The Enthusiast. Wow! We have a lot of new hopepunks here. Welcome. My name is Brad. I write books for children and former children. I speak about creativity and compassion. I’m really glad you’re here.

Breathe. Take a deep breath.

You’re here. You’re reading this and you’re here. How this found you … I do not know. But it did. I’m so glad it did.

The Enthusiast started as a way to collect things for myself. I needed reminders of things that give me hope. Things that bring me joy. Things that remind me how good life can be. Being a person is hard sometimes. I was tired. Lonely. And, honestly, I really just thought this would be a fun diversion from my usual social media shenanigans.

But something happened. You showed up. So many of you. You have donated. You have shared. You have encouraged me in ways I can never repay or explain. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me how much good there is in this world.

Years ago, I created a web series called Kid President. It was a weekly YouTube series that invited people to listen to kids, treat everybody like it’s their birthday, and dance. It was a total blast. Each episode was hosted by my young brother-in-law who lived just down the street from me. Working on this meant I got to spend time with him while also getting to write, direct, and release little blasts of joy to millions of people. Every week.

In an effort to make the comments section a little less ‘internet-y’, I started including questions or prompts at the end of each video. One question really struck a nerve and became the final ask of each guest on the show. Whether it was Steve Martin, Beyoncé, the Obamas or a small elementary school classroom in west Tennessee, people were asked to finish this sentence:

The world would be more awesome if ___________________.

This prompt grew out of a realization that in the Kid President scripts I’d continually used charges like “change the world!” and “make the world better!” Those are nice things to say, but challenging to apply in the everyday. So, I thought about what any child or adult watching anywhere could do:

imagine.

I know. It sounds small and silly and naive. Imagination is a powerful place for change to begin, though. How can life be better for everyone? How can everyone have what they need? What does this ‘more awesome’ world look like? How can we get there? How do we build it together?

Before we change the world, we must first imagine it.

Just last week I did a virtual gathering with thousands of classrooms from all over the world. (Thank you, Microsoft Flip for inviting me!) I got to read a story (my new book, The Fantastic Bureau of Imagination) and answer some student questions. I challenged the students to answer the ‘wonder questions’ (you can read about those in this post). And I closed with the fill in the blank prompt. Their responses poured in:

The world would be more awesome if . . . dogs could talk, I had lots of money, people had friends, everybody cared, nobody was ever mean, and on and on.

I really need to share this with you. It’s a response from a kindergarten class in Canada:

(Thank you, @mrsmacskinders!)

The students all agreed that the world would be more awesome if animals were taken care of. It’s a great thought, but they didn’t just *think* about it. They imagined happy animals with plenty of food and everything they needed, but the more they thought about it, the more it made them want to make it happen. So, they jumped into action.

We could learn alot from these little daring dreamers and doers.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus believes a key strategy for creating change is in the creation of social fiction. In the same way we have science fiction, he is a champion of the kinds of stories which detail how humans live and work together to solve problems. Hopepunk, but with a few more directions.

“My imagination is we want to create a world which will be absolutely free from poverty. Meaning, that there will be no poor person on this planet, anywhere in the world. And once you create that, we’ll create poverty museums. So that people who’d like to know what is it that used to be called poverty? How? So they’ll take their children to poverty museums. That’s the kind of world I would like to build. If we do not imagine, it will not be done. If we imagine, someday it will happen!” - Muhammad Yunus

Years before we actually had flip phones, we had to see them in action on Star Trek. Digital billboards are now in nearly every major city in the world, but they first caught our eyes in Blade Runner. Jules Verne described for us what a submarine might be like in Journey to the Center of the Earth and we just had to create them for ourselves. There are consequences to the things we imagine.

We live in a world full of challenges. Help us dream up solutions.

Our imaginations are cloudy. Refresh us.

Open our eyes to possibilities.

The world is not as it should be. Tell us a story of how it could be.

Tell us a story so good that we absolutely have to make it real. Beautiful tomorrows begin with what we imagine today.

So, breathe. You’re here. The world is already more awesome just because you’re in it. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being you.