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It is often very difficult to think of the best piece of advice you have ever been given. Most of us are given advice on an every day basis, in one aspect or another of our lives. More often than not it is minor advice and relates to a very specific circumstance or event and will not apply again in future. Occasionally, however, we are given a piece of advice which is so profound, so enlightening, thought-provoking and relevant, that both the advice itself and the principles which apply to it remain with us for the rest of our lives. I was extremely fortunate to be given such a piece of advice more than thirty years ago, which I have not only never forgotten, but continue to quote to others on a regular basis to this very day.

I was extremely unfortunate in that I never truly knew the pleasures of having a grandfather. My maternal grandfather died four years before I was born and I was four years old when my paternal grandfather died. In the latter instance, I have but vague yet happy memories of an old man sitting me on his knee and delighting me with magic tricks. I was fortunate, however, to have an elderly gentleman who lived over the fence from me when I was a child who, it cannot be disputed, I thought the world of and came to look upon as what we would probably refer to today as a surrogate grandfather.

I vividly recall one summers' day when I must have been about seven or eight years old. The memory is so profound, all these years later, that I can actually recall the precise location in the garden where my surrogate grandfather and I were sitting at the time of the advice being given. I can not recall specifically to what I was referring at the time but I do remember telling this elderly gentleman that something was, "Impossible." I remember his almost rueful smile and the exact words which he then spoke to me.

He looked at me and told me that he was about to tell me something which I should always remember in life. He said, "Son, there is no such thing as impossible. There are only varying degrees of difficulty." He did expand on this but these are the only specific words which I can recall. I have never forgotten them and pray that I never will. I have no idea whether the advice was of his own creation or he had previously been given it himself - it makes no difference to me, whatsoever. It is still the best piece of advice I have ever been given.

There are many who will dispute the wisdom of this advice. To those people, I in turn say, "It is impossible that the world is round and that man can ever sail around it," and, "It is impossible that man can ever walk on the moon." Would anyone care to guess how many times those sentences were stated as, "Fact?"

I was in my last year in High School when my old friend passed on to a better place. I recall coming home from school that day for my mother to break to me the tearful news. I had lost a true friend - my, "Third Grandfather" - but in many ways, he lives on within me, particularly in the sense of the best piece of advice I have ever been given.

Learn more about this author, Gordon Hamilton.
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