Teachable Spirit

Yesterday Rev Col Stringer preached at New Creation Church as Pastor Prince was away with his family for a holiday and one of the main theme that he touched on was the topic of having a "teachable spirit"

You know, as we all grow older, many of us will be saddled with this thought that we have learned everything that needs to be learnt and therefore there is nothing more to teach us. How wrong can we all get! In fact we should continue to adopt this attitude of continuous learning as we can never possibly learnt everything there is in life. There will always be things that we can pick up every day and add onto our database of life-skills which will stand us through the daily tests of living.

Now I know that I am beginning to sound like a Singapore government propaganda machine dishing out slogans after slogans. But hang on a minute - when we were much younger and hungry to pick up life-skills and we kept asking questions, did we not appear to be likeable to whoever we were trying to learn from?

I should know because I was a lean and mean trader back in the late eighties/ early nineties. I recalled one of the money brokering houses was trying to assign me a very senior manager to handle the hotline between the house and the bank and this gentleman had this attitude of 'I know the market and therefore can give you the best deal in town'. How wrong he was because there is no way a broker can know what a bank's position and perception was; only the bank knows what sort of risk aptitude it wants to carry. And so I ended up literally banning him from entering my line - not even in the absence of the other broker who was finally appointed to service the bank line.

I recalled telling the director of the brokering company that I wanted someone who is hungry to learn and who has a teachable spirit and I remembered the director telling me in a very apologetic tone that he could not find anyone of a certain calibre except a very junior broker (you might even call him a rookie). And so I accepted the challenge and after a day or two I actually found this bloke a likeble person as his hunger for knowledge did not seem to be satiable and that pleased me so much that I resolved to show him more of the ropes of the market.

To cut the story short, after eighteen months, he was so well trained that he became my eyes and ears especially when I wanted to trade in the US markets from home and I simply did not have the infrastructure set up at home. After each important piece of economic or political news, he could even read my mind just by listening to my breathing and he was able to crystallize what I eventually wanted to do in reaction to the news.

And so when I was listening to what Rev Col was saying, I began to reflect on my own experiences and told myself, "Andrew, you are never too old to learn new things; maintain that teachable spirit for that is very pleasing to Abba Daddy!"