More than Mere New Year Wishes - Know How to Achieve Your Wishes

 New Year wishes are good. They encourage us and give us hope and optimism. We need such in these pandemic years. However, we need more than just wishes to realize our wishes. We need the know-how and the will to accomplish them.  

Here is my New Year's blessing for all in 2022:

Wishing all a tiger leap forward in health, peace, vitality, and prosperity.

Let's begin by taking out the bad food, 

combining aspiration with contentment,

dividing our time wisely, 

outsourcing our weaknesses, 

adopting healthy habits, 

multiplying our giving, 

relating to the neglected, 

irregularizing to break out from our routine & comfort zone, 

intensifying the good work, 

inverting harms to benefits, 

and dropping in our mind the wisdom of others.

I have applied my systematic innovating thinking method BVITS into how we can make for a better 2022.  For more details on the method, please see BVITS Overview.

May your wishes in 2022 come true.

Lim Liat (c) 28-1-2022

The Better Mindset than "Success is a lousy teacher. Failure teaches you more."

Learn the better mindset to handle both successes and failures.

Do a search on "Success is a lousy teacher. Failure teaches you more." can you will find a story about an Indian boy who made it to the best university in India, came to the US for further study in MBA, had a good job, bought houses, married a lovely wife, have children, but in a change of event, lost his job and unable to find new jobs, they all committed suicides. Why? 

The advice is: Programmed for success but he was not trained for handling failures.

 "Success is a lousy teacher. Failure teaches you more." 

So parents are encouraged to teach their children how to handle failures.

This is typical thinking of the "Ether-Or" mindset. If success could lead to suicides, then we need to study and learn from failures. We shifted from pursuing success to learning from failures. But should not we study success to learn from success so that we can repeat the success? Perhaps the key reason for the sad ending is that he did not study his success so that he could not repeat his earlier success. It is not just intelligence but also of the toughness of the heart. 

So we learn two things:

1. study both success and failures to learn from them so as to repeat the success and learn not to fail,

2. It is both, of the intelligence of the mind, and also of the toughness or resilience of the heart.

A Better mindset is the Ancient Chinese Philosophical Mindset of Yin-Yang. It gives point 3 and 4 for our learning.

3. For every crisis or failure, there lies within, the opportunity, AND

4. for every opportunity or success, there lies within the risks of failure.

So in failure, study to find the opportunity to transform and gain success.

In success, study the potential dangers lurking around so as to prevent the failures.

We can see why is success a lousy teacher?
Because it blinds us to the risks. It bloated our ego and we think we could do no wrong. 
How can we prevent success from growing our ego and pride?

The Ancient Chinese Wisdom i-Ching (The Book of Change) Hexagram#1 Heaven, teaches us to surround ourselves with a group of friends to keep us in check. See Learning from "I-Ching" Part 04 1-乾 Heaven - Creative Force.  It documents the stages of growth for a person or any innovation.
I reproduce the Quick Summary below:

A Quick summary: Be proactive. Be the innovator and the initiator – start a good project. Take the steps to make a better world.

1. Hidden Dragon: don’t show off – get ready – prepared well. Do it when time and opportunity are right.
2. Appearing Dragon: excel in your work and get mentors
3. Running Dragon: be diligent and watchful at the same time
4. Leaping Dragon: take a leap to higher ground
5. Flying Dragon: soar higher with a network of influential people to correct and guide you
6. Retiring Dragon: prepare for retirement or change of career
7. Parenting Dragon: self-management of virtuous leaders – developing others.

As a rookie (stage 2) we get mentors to help us to develop ourselves to grow quickly. As a successful person (Stage 5 Flying Dragon), our attitudes should be like a rookie, humble, and learning from others around us. This will prevent our success to become a failure.

So, about success and failures, please remember the four points written:

1. study both success and failures to learn from them so as to repeat the success and learn not to fail,

2. It is both, of the intelligence of the mind, and also of the toughness or resilience of the heart.

3. For every crisis or failure, there lies within, the opportunity, (find the opportunity to success) AND

4. for every opportunity or success, there lies within the risks of failure. (please be humble and learn from others)

Lim Liat(c) 17 Jan 2022

The Stupidity and Misleading Reports of Our Media for COVID-19 Death

Here is the report:

Vaccinated people accounted for 30% of COVID-19 deaths last year: Ong Ye Kung - CNA

Consider this: vaccinated accounted for 30% of the COVID-19 Deaths.

The fact is true. Of the 100% Death 70% unvaccinated, 30% vaccinated

But what does it mean?

A smart reporter should help readers understand the truth instead of leaving them to misinterpret the truth.

A direct interpretation is unvaccinated is 70/30 = 2.33 times more likely to die than the vaccinated.

But this is wrong.

But, one should know that Singapore's vaccination rate is 95%.

The population of the unvaccinated is P * 5%, where P is the population size,

and the population of vaccinated is P*95%

So the probability of deaths of unvaccinated over the vaccinated is actually:

(D*70%/P*5%) / (D*30%/P*95%) , (where D is total no of deaths)

= (70%*95%)/(5%*30%)

= 44.33!

i.e. The conclusion is shocking, the unvaccinated are 44 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the vaccinated in Singapore.

An improvement is needed:

Last year, the vaccination rate is not 95%. It started with 0 and ends with 85% fully vaccinated. (The report gave a higher figure of 90% The Ministry of Health (MOH) has managed to vaccinate "well over 90 percent" of every eligible age group over the past months,)

Most of the deaths come in the Oct to Dec peak.

During those time, the vaccination rate was about 80+%.

So, maybe a better fit is 80%.

(70%*80%)/(20%*30%) = 9.33

If we use 83%, the December fully Vaccination rate, we will get 11.39

A good estimate will be 10.

"the unvaccinated are 10 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the vaccinated in Singapore".

Lim Liat (c) 15 Jan 2022