Today is my new boss's first day.
How do I feel about this? Not quite sure yet.

I'm amazed at how, before he even started, people were upset, worried, etc. about this.
Some people seem excited, and I can understand that, it's something new, there's a lot of possibility here. But getting upset and worried? Why? In order to do that, you would need to be imagining worst-case scenarios. You would have to be putting effort into imagining that things that haven't happen WILL happen, and they will be bad.

When I imagine the future, I try to imagine things going well, but realize that I can't be completely complacent, that I'll still need be ready to react in case something goes wrong.

There's an interesting disconnect between the brain and the nervous system. While the brain can understand that a thought is just a thought, the nervous system will react like it's actually happening. If you imagine something stressful, your body will react like it's actually encountering stress.

If we compare a positive person, and a person imagining a negative situation in 2 scenarios, the results are pretty clear.

Negative future outcome:
Positive person is just chilling, waiting to see what happens. Negative person is being stressed out by how they imagine the stressful situation will play out. Then something stressful happens and both the positive and negative person are stressed out by it.

Positive future outcome:
Positive person is just chilling, waiting to see what happens. Negative person is stressed by imaginary situation. Nothing bad happens. No further stress.

In the negative outcome, the positive person gets stress out, that's natural… but the negative person gets stressed out TWICE!

In the positive outcome, nothing bad occurs… but the negative person still had to experience stress! They chose to make their life less awesome.

Another interesting thing about imaginary stress is the imagination itself. I don't know about you, but I know my imagination can come up with outcomes that are more horrible than anything that would ever actually happen to me.

Perhaps your experiences differ from mine, but as I went through school, creativity and imagination lost focus. From games and activities in early years, to almost entirely fact based 'by-the-rules' type projects in the later years. It almost felt as if moving away from creativity was being pushed as being a part of "growing up".

I think this can be seen in the attitudes of students as they go through the years. If you ask a class full of 6 year olds and a class full of 16 year olds if they want to be there, the 16 year olds will undoubtedly have a larger percentage that would rather be somewhere else – anywhere else. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of the biggest is that it's not fun.

What do you get when you focus a bit more on nurturing creativity? Stories. Art. Science. Technology.

Without creativity, there is no progress.