High 5 – 5 August 2016 by Mr Chan Hoong Leong

Habit of mind: Creating Imagining Innovating

Good morning Mdm Tan, Mr Lee, fellow colleagues and Gessians. Before I start off this week Hi 5, could all of you take out your GESS Life book and jot down pointers as the message is delivered.

Let me read a story.
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: “I am blind, please help.” There were only a few coins in the hat.
A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The blind boy recognized his footsteps and asked, “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?”

The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.”
What he had written was: “Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.”
Do you think the first sign and the second sign were saying the same thing?
Of course both signs told people the boy was blind.

But the first sign simply told people to help by putting some money in the hat. The second sign told people that they were able to enjoy the beauty of the day, but the boy could not enjoy it because he was blind.
The first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

Lesson from the story
1 Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively
On 26 July 2016, Solar Impulse 2, a solar powered plane has completed the first round-the-world flight by a solar-powered aeroplane, after touching down in Abu Dhabi. The plane carries more than 17,000 solar cells on its wings, began the flight in March 2015 in Abu Dhabi. It has since crossed both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans using no fossil fuel and has spent more than 23 days in the air. This was definitely unimaginable for the Wright brothers whom started flying world’s first successful airplane on December 17, 1903,

In addition, most of us would have heard of Pokemon Go and it was downloaded by more than 75 million people worldwide since it was launched. It was credited with popularizing location-based and augmented reality gaming, as well as for promoting physical activity. But it also attracted controversy for contributing to accidents and becoming a public nuisance at some locations. However, those whom have phones for long would recall that we were once all playing Tetris, Snake, Angry Bird, Candy Crush and now the use of our camera phone and bring us around just to catch the pokemon.

In addition, we may have heard enough of selfie, wefie ……..but guess in the near future we would all be saying, “let’s take drone-fie”, a photo taken in the same fashion as a wefie, except that it is with the help of a drone.

All these would not have been possible without the power of creating, imagining and innovation.

By having the idea of creating, imagining and innovating it can really help us to change the world.

Humans and robots are different because humans have brains and can create robots but robots cannot create human. It may be risky to be original however if it will improve the world and make it a better place to live in, then why not?

So from today, try a different way, and think outside the box!

As steve jobs said “innovative distinguish a leader and a follower’

Onward, Gessians !