Dance with Uncertainty

This is my last post in 2020, a really magic year for all of us. If someone asks me about my greatest gains this year, I will definitely answer with “dance with uncertainty”. This year is filled with uncertainties. And at first, I was really mad at that, mad at most things around me. I witnessed how this COVID 19 destroyed each one’s plans and how most countries suffered from this disaster. All the failures once again evoked my strong willingness to make this world better and to solve some problems that already exist. All these things, these unprecedented things really ruined my plans as well as my moods. But later I just found out that only adaptability is the solution. Since COVID 19, I have paid more attention to uncertainty in everyday life. It lies everywhere actually, like you will never know whether a stock will rise or fall, or who will be the next president. Although you can try your best to find out which is most likely to come out. However, each choice you make, each bet you have, just involves uncertainty. From a scientific point of view, this is due to “the error bar”. Such errors, or uncertainty, may come from biases in the way you are thinking, like systematic errors or just random things which cannot be controlled and predicted. In a word, such uncertainty can either rise from your mistakes in making plans or just randomly distributed accidents. In reality, when someone predicts that Trump has 51% of possibility to win, he/she omits the uncertainty value. Maybe he/she should go this way, “Trump has 49% to win and the error bar might be 5%”. He/she neglects the uncertainty by accident or just overlook it on purpose to achieve his/her goals.
Right now, when I’m going to make plans, choices, or bets, I would tell myself there must be uncertainties. I cannot make perfect plans. I cannot know everything in advance. Therefore, when some unexpected things show up, I won’t be that crazy. Besides, I make myself consider that if something not in my plan happens, what I am going to do. Although I couldn’t come up with all the plans B for every accident, these plans B still help a lot when accidents really appear. At last, if some huge accidents which are also hard to predict come out, like COVID 19, the ultimate solution is just to adapt to it, roll with it, and have upbeat moods to make changes happen.