“Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want” by Gretta Duleba, johnswentworth

When John told me (Gretta) his practice of “visioning,” I was skeptical at first. I gave it a try, a little bit out of spite, to show him I was capable of it.

It blew me away.

Here's what I told him about it a few days later, edited for brevity and clarity.

Something internal really felt different. Awake, alive, hungry, energetic. Selfish. A little angry. Do you know the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad? Ignore the specific words and politics and computer-adness of it all, and just feel the energy of the woman with the hammer. That energy.

Holy shit. What the fuck. What kind of drug did you give me?

I sat on it for a few hours, getting dinner ready, doing parenting things, trying to think what to do with it. I mean, obviously, the answer was "mainline that drug."

I don't really trust epiphanies. I don't really trust this. If there were a prediction market for "will Gretta think this was a breakthrough [in one month]" I would probably bet that market to about 15%. But... 15% is a lot.

I started visioning four months ago and I do still think it was a [...]

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Outline:

(01:47) What is visioning?

(02:44) What visioning does for us

(03:27) Some example John-visions

(04:39) Some example Gretta-visions

(07:20) John's history with visioning

(08:40) Gretta's history with visioning

(09:47) Finding your heart

(09:50) The "voice of god"

(10:53) How to do it / best practices

(10:57) Gretta's method

(12:45) John's method

(14:16) Best practices

(15:24) Does this work for people who are not us?

(17:32) Failure modes and drawbacks

(20:14) Related work / What visioning is not

(22:22) Open questions and future work

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First published:
July 6th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3Min7Kj5SDF7BEzM/visioning-concretely-imagining-what-you-want

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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