Phil's Personal Finance Tip of the
Day:
Accomplishing the (seemingly) impossible
By Harvey Mackay
A college student arrived a few minutes late for his final exam in mathematics. The room was quiet, with everyone working hard, and the professor silently handed him the test. It consisted of five math problems on the first page and two on the second. The student sat down and began to work. He solved the first five problems in half the time, but the two on the second page were tougher. Everyone else finished the exam and left, so the student was alone by the end of the time period. He finished the final problem at the last second.
The next day he got a phone call in his dorm room from the professor. “I don’t believe it! You solved the final two problems?”
“Uh, yeah,” the student said. “What’s the big deal?”
“Those were brain teasers,” the prof explained. “I announced before the exam that they wouldn’t count toward your final grade, but you missed that because you were late. But hardly anyone solves those problems in so short a time! You must be a genius!”
“Genius” is sometimes just not realizing that something is impossible.
Truly, some feats are impossible. I don’t expect to ever see a person fly without some mechanical help. I’m not betting on anyone outrunning a high-speed locomotive. But then, I probably wouldn’t have put money on Antonio Albertondo, who swam the English Channel in 1961.
The Channel waters are cold and unpredictable. Only a tiny percentage of those who have attempted to swim across have reached the other side. But Antonio, who was 42 years old at the time, swam from England to France, where his waiting friends congratulated him for accomplishing what they thought was impossible for a man his age.
Antonio stopped long enough for a hot drink, and told his friends they hadn’t seen the impossible yet. Then he dove back into the water, swam 22 more hours and made it back to England. Did he accomplish the impossible? I vote yes.
I do believe that there are limits to our physical abilities. But I absolutely accept that our minds have capabilities that we cannot begin to comprehend. Antonio’s physical accomplishment also had a major mental component. He put his mind to accomplishing the seemingly impossible.
“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable,” said the late actor Christopher Reeve. Reeve’s dream of walking after a catastrophic horseback riding accident was never realized, but because of his activism and fund-raising activities, major research breakthroughs for spinal injuries have given hope to many.
To read the entire article from Harvey Mackay.com:
http://www.harveymackay.com/accomplishing-the-seemingly-impossible/
Mackay’s Moral: What could you accomplish if no one told you it was impossible?
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