Living in the moment is an excellent way of conducting your life. With practice, you can negate worry, and enjoy 'the moment' a great deal more. Now this is fine, until you suddenly decide you're going to design a car. Living in the moment then isn't going to do you a great deal of good.

You need your imagination to kick in so that you don't sit looking at a blank piece of drawing paper without having a clue what to draw on it. Sorry, but I'm old fashioned. I still use drawing paper! But all those millions of years ago, when mankind first developed imagination, he found he could look into a future which he'd like, and strive to bring that future to fruition.

You can imagine Og and Ug sitting there saying something like;

"You know, there must be a better way of bringing down an antelope than with a stick that's sharpened on one end."

The first thing that came along was a sling into which you could place a spear. It went farther and with more force, but once the spear was released, that was that. Oh, you probably had a few to hand, but they wouldn't last long.

We take so much for granted these days, but have you ever wondered at the brilliance of the mind or minds that first conceived the bow and arrow? How do I help my future? Come up with a better bow and arrow.

Actually, I think this weapon evolved. I don't think Ug suddenly leaped to his feet, yelled the equivalent of 'Eureka!' and made a bow and arrow. The problem is that so many people hinder, not help, their future.

Now, although we have this incredible tool called imagination, people still think that the future will be precisely the same as the past. All right, so you're designing your car and you draw out a sketch of what you think it would look like. The only trouble is that there's a piece of the body work which is very tricky to make with the tools that so far exist.

"Well," you say to your colleagues, "I don't see a way around it. We'll just have to make do."

Why? Why not develop a new tool to make this part a lot more efficiently than the one on the production line at the moment?

Let's have a look at Grug and Grog. (Grog's Og's brother in law on his sister's side!). They're sitting in the middle of Salisbury plain one day, and Grog says to Grug;

"Wouldn't it be great if we could build a whacking great stone circle out there out there. Break up the landscape a bit." So they sit there and sit there, but never start anything. So, no Stonehenge.

Another trap into which people fall is to see too many problems in a certain aspect of their work. So they concentrate on avoiding all these problems to the point where everything seems to be a problem.

A lot of people aren't all that good at predicting the future and planning for it. But there is a lot you can do at the psychological level which will help you no end. Let's have a fairly detailed look at just one of the mistakes people make when thinking about how the future will turn out. This is a 'shorty', albeit a tragic one.

After that terrible 9/11. more people died in the weeks that followed on the roads, because they chose to drive rather than fly. They overestimated the danger of more terrorist attacks, but gave no consideration that they might die on the roads.

I do hope this article has proved interesting.