Have you ever been laid low with flu or indeed any other disease or ailment? Yeah sure you have. It never feels very good and it certainly feels very limiting at the time. However it may surprise you to know that it is these exact situations where you are struggling that present to you a real opportunity to improve your life. Yes, really!

I remember during my school days studying psychology being told about an experiment with rats that a group of scientists conducted. They put about half a dozen of them in a fish tank with no way to get out. Some rats swam and swam and swam, even though they could see no escape route. Other rats gave up very quickly, accepted their own fate and drowned.

Eventually the scientists removed the rats that had kept swimming. Seemingly out of nowwhere their lives had been saved. The point is even if you can't see how you are ever going to escape from a particularly difficult situation be it financial, personal, business or whatever it is important to simply...never ever give in. It is simply impossible to tell when you are going to get your lucky break!

The power of this philosophy is proven many times over. There are countless stories of how people have risen from poor impoverished backgrounds to places that they would never have originally dreamed possible. Fomer bankrupts turned millionaires, former cancer patients turned marathon runners. In fact one of my favourite true stories is about Terry Fox who did just that, after losing a leg to cancer he subsequently went on to raise huge amounts of money for cancer by runnning across Canada!

Terry was born in British Columbia near Vancouver on Canada's west coast. He was an adventurous young man involved in many sports. Unfortunately at the age of 18 he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma (bone cancer) and forced to have his right leg amputated 15 centimetres (six inches) above the knee in 1977.

During his stay in hospital Terry saw first hand the suffering of other cancer patients. It touched him so much that he decided to run across canada to raise money for cancer research. He named his journey the Marathon of Hope.

To prepare for his undertaking he ran over 3,000 miles and eventually started his journey in Newfoundland on April 12 1980. After a difficult start news of his undertakings gradually spread and so did the amount of money being donated. He ran 42 kilometres (26 miles) a day through Canada's Atlantic provinces, Quebec and Ontario. His journey touched the hearts of many Canadians perfectly illustrating a never give in attitude.

Sadly, on September 1st, after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres (3,339 miles), Terry had to stop his marathon efforts outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario because cancer had been detected in his lungs. An entire nation was stunned and saddened. Terry eventually passed away on June 28, 1981 at the age of just 22.

The heroic Canadian had passed away, but his legacy had only just started.

To date, over $400 million has been raised internationally for cancer research in Terry's name through the annual Terry Fox Run, held across Canada and around the world.

What a mindset and what an achievement, surely something we can all learn from. Whatever situation you are in, you can achieve far more than you now realise or ever thought possible. So, keep trying and persevering and never ever give in. I'm not going to ask you to run across Canada but I am going to ask you to consider how you can apply this lesson in your life? I'll let you answer that in your own time.