Seven P.M. Half an hour to go until we started the laborious task of getting kitted up again. It would take us at least an hour. By the end no part o… - Bear Grylls

Stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.

At the end of the ridge we leaned on our ice axes and looked up.
Above us was the legendary Hillary Step, the forty-foot ice wall that formed one of the mountain’s most formidable hurdles.
Cowering from the wind, I tried to make out a route up it.
This ice face was to be our final and hardest test. The outcome would determine whether we would join those few who have touched that hallowed ground above.
If so, I would become only the thirty-first British climber ever to have done this.
The ranks were small.
I started up cautiously. It was a long way to come to fall here.
Points in. Ice axe in. Test them. Then move.
It was slow progress, but it was progress. And steadily I moved up the ice.
I had climbed steep pitches like this so many times before, but never twenty-nine thousand feet up in the sky. At this height, in this rarefied thin air, and with 40 mph of wind trying to blow us off the ice, I was struggling. Again.
I stopped and tried to steady myself.
Then I made that old familiar mistake — I looked down.
Beneath me, either side of the ridge, the mountain dropped away into abysses.
Idiot, Bear.
I tried to refocus on only what was in front of me and above.
Up. Keep moving up.
So I kept climbing.
It was the climb of my life, and nothing was going to stop me.

Look at the stories of people who have changed the world - they have so often started with little, but they distinguished themselves by how they approached life, opportunity, relationships and struggle. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi. You name them. The list is huge but the common qualities are small.

Resourcefulness and a determination to survive the ‘lemons’ are invariably at the heart of these successes.

The secret to a life well lived is taking the resources around us - the people we know, the possessions we own, the skills we’ve acquired - and combining them in such a way that they add up to something greater than their constituent parts.

That’s the lemonade bit.

So often in the wild I have felt totally beaten, but I have kept going, kept trying to think smart, be resourceful, positive, energetic - despite the fatigue - and it has always made a critical difference.

We can’t always choose our circumstances but we can choose how we respond to what life throws at us, and there is power when we realize our ability to alter our destiny.

A life in the wild has taught me not to fear the unexpected, but to embrace it. In fact, I have learnt that those curve balls from left-field are very often the making of us.