Daily Lessons from Life 11 June 2010 - World Cup and Others

Today is the opening ceremony and the 1st match of this most watched and most followed sports event in the world in South Africa. It represents a new dawn and coming out party for the Rainbow Nation though some quarters are still very concerned with the high crime rate situation. Already some journalists have been robbed while one of the South American team has their money stolen! I am sure there are other petty crimes against tourists and football fans from all the 31 countries as well.

Let the game begin and hopefully the spectacle will overwhelm these less desirable happening.

Next I turned to an old cleaning lady who earned less than S$800/month trying to return a lost lottery ticket that carried with it a payout of S$10k! She felt it is simply not right to take money that does not belonged to her!! She has enlisted the local newspapers to help get the owner(s) to approach her at the coffee shop where she cleaned and found the ticket.

Lessons for me are:

1. people sweat over different things. I am sure some football fans will be depressed if they lost their WC tickets that are worth a small sum that maybe higher than this old lady's monthly wage. Will they try to return a wining ticket of US$8k (S$10K) if they had found it?;

2. doing the right thing is not easy as some have chided this old lady for being so stupid as to not take the winning ticket and claimed it. The justification are: she is living such a hard life and poor and needed the money probably more than the careless winner(s) who lost the ticket! Or 'finder keeper'! Or who is to know that you did not buy the ticket!, etc. Yet, she is very clear about what is the right thing to do. That is to find the owner(s). Period!

3. She is an shining example in this day and age of 'greed is good' where many intelligent and highly educated people engaged in irresponsible acts like: selling without tell the fact as it is, taking own side and saving own skin when there is a conflict of interest with their paying clients!, providing credit rating without regards to the truth except to get paid by the clients who asked for the credit rating, spending without earning or on credit term or on future income, etc. Where there is NO PERSONAL INTEGRITY, things will fall apart, and fall apart quickly, as NO policing can be all at once - at all the places, at all the people. NOT possible!

May she find the peace that she seek and that the owner(s) be found and had the grace to recognize her honesty with a token of appreciation, which, I suspect, she may turn down too!