June 30, 2026
Live by your standards, not your excuses with Matt Formston
<p class="isSelectedEnd"><strong>Summary</strong></p> <p class="isSelectedEnd"><strong>What does it really take to stop making excuses and become someone you can trust?</strong></p> <p class="isSelectedEnd">This conversation isn't just about blindness, sport or breaking records. Matt Formston AM joins Amy to explore identity, trust, accountability and what it really takes to stop making excuses and become someone you can trust.</p> <p class="isSelectedEnd"><strong>Guest</strong><br /> Matt Formston AM is a world champion surfer, world champion cyclist, Paralympian, Guinness World Record holder, business leader, keynote speaker, husband and father of three.</p> <p class="isSelectedEnd"><strong>Overview</strong><br /> Matt Formston AM has built an extraordinary life across elite sport, business and leadership. Diagnosed with macular dystrophy at the age of five, Matt was told he would lose most of his sight and face a life of limitation. Instead, he went on to become a world champion athlete, business leader and author.</p> <p class="isSelectedEnd">In this conversation, Amy and Matt explore why blindness was never his biggest fight, how bullying and anger shaped his early years, and what it took to rebuild himself through trust, accountability and what Matt calls his hard standards.</p> <p class="isSelectedEnd">They discuss the difference between genuine limitations and inherited excuses, why "standards without consequences are just wishes", and how self-trust is built one small promise at a time.</p> <p class="isSelectedEnd"><strong>Key outtakes</strong></p> <ul data-spread="false"> <li>Why blindness can be deeply isolating, and what people often misunderstand about it</li> <li>The difference between genuine limitations and inherited excuses</li> <li>How Matt's parents helped shape his "Why Not?" mindset</li> <li>Why standards, consistency and time are essential to building trust</li> <li>How one small non-negotiable helped Matt rebuild self-trust</li> </ul> <p> </p> <p>For more information: </p> <p>Matt Formston <a href= "https://www.mattformston.com/">https://www.mattformston.com/</a></p> <p>Pre-order the book 'Why not?' <a href= "https://www.mattformston.com/books/why-not-pre-sale">https://www.mattformston.com/books/why-not-pre-sale</a></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Transcript </strong></p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> Welcome to the Really Good Conversations Podcast. Today I am joined by Matt Formston.</p> <p>Matt is a world champion surfer, world champion cyclist, Paralympian, Guinness World Record holder, business leader, keynote speaker, husband and father of three.</p> <p>At the age of five, Matt was diagnosed with macular dystrophy and told he would lose most of his sight. He now has less than three per cent peripheral vision and no central vision, but has gone on to build an extraordinary life across elite sport, business and leadership.</p> <p>His story is featured in the Netflix documentary The Blind Sea, and his new book Why Not? explores what he calls his eight Hard Standards: the principles that helped him rebuild his life from the inside out.</p> <p>This conversation isn't just about blindness, sport or breaking records. It's about identity, trust, accountability and what it really takes to stop making excuses and become someone you can trust.</p> <p>Welcome to the podcast, Matt.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Thank you, Amy. That was a bit of a mouthful, so I appreciate you getting through all that.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> There is certainly a lot to include in your bio, across life, work and sport, so thank you for joining me.</p> <p>People hear about your achievements, the Guinness World Record and the Netflix documentary, but in your book Why Not? you have the opening line: "Blindness was never my biggest fight." So we'll start there. What was?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> People often assume that because I'm blind, that is my biggest challenge in life. And there can be an excuse for that.</p> <p>But actually, I went through school and got bullied a lot. Kids would say, "How many fingers am I holding up?" I was one of the first kids in Australia to have a laptop, and I'd write stuff on my laptop, walk away, come back, and they'd highlight everything and delete all my work.</p> <p>It was endless bullying. It escalated to the point where, if I was running after someone, they'd run under a tree branch and duck, and I wouldn't see it, so I'd run straight into it. It was full on.</p> <p>Because of all that, I found that the way to resolve bullying was through physical altercation. If someone bullied me, I would end up fighting them. I learnt that if I hurt someone, they would not bully me again. So I had this learned behaviour that if you fight someone, you get an outcome.</p> <p>Talking never got an outcome. The teachers would say, "It's okay, Matt, they only just did this," because they didn't see the mountain of little things that built up to the absolute destruction of my psychology.</p> <p>I took that behaviour out of school and into early adulthood. I would get into pub fights. I played elite sport through school: representative rugby league, ice hockey, full-contact sports. Against all the odds as a blind kid, I played these sports, but then I lost sport and I basically lost my identity.</p> <p>I went into this spiral. I had bad relationships with women. I had bad behaviour. So my biggest challenge was getting out of that learned behaviour and thinking the whole world was out to get me.</p> <p>That was my biggest challenge: getting my way out of that bad behaviour and getting back to being the kid who was able to be selected in rugby league, rugby union and ice hockey over sighted kids because he put the hard work in.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> Gosh. So many of us listening cannot even relate to that experience. School can be hard enough, never mind with a disability and the bullying as well.</p> <p>What do you think most people misunderstand about blindness?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> There are so many things, but one thing I would say is that blindness is a very isolating disability.</p> <p>For example, if you go into a pub environment and it's loud, most sighted people start lip-reading without realising they're doing it. If you go into a loud environment one day, put your hand over your mouth and try to communicate with your friends. You'll realise how much you're using your eyes to lip-read.</p> <p>I'm not able to use that skill, so I go into a pub environment and I'm isolated. I'm there by myself.</p> <p>At school, if my mates left the classroom and the teacher said, "Matt, can you just stay back for a bit to make sure you understood the lesson?", they were actually isolating me. I would never find my friends at lunch and I'd spend lunch by myself.</p> <p>Blindness creates a lot of isolation. Obviously, you can't drive, so you're not able to get to places. It really creates a lot of isolation.</p> <p>The other thing I'd say is to do with any sensory disability. People say, "When you lose one sense, your others get stronger." I'm sure you've heard that phrase.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I have, yes.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Because of the amount of times I've told my story now, in interviews and media, I've worked out my take on it. I've spoken to doctors about this and I believe it's accurate.</p> <p>It's not that the sense gets better; it's that your ability to capture the data gets better.</p> <p>You live in a visual world where most of the data you trust, you see with your eyes. That data is supported by things you hear, smell and sense in other ways.</p> <p>I'm not able to trust my eyes, so I don't trust that data. I use data from my ears, for example. I can hear in a courtyard, or I can hear things that will tell me where a certain type of food is. Then I can use my nose to smell and verify that that's what it is. I can smell a chemist.</p> <p>The reason I know my hearing definitely isn't better is because I'm a husband, and I'll always not hear my wife when she asks me to unpack the dishwasher.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I think that's a common husband trait.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Exactly. But it's not about the hearing. It's more about the data not being captured.</p> <p>So the misconception is that when you lose one sense, the others get better. I don't think they do. You just get better at capturing data from those other senses.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> That makes a lot of sense. You're tuning into it more and verifying if that's a trustworthy source or not.</p> <p>You were told from a young age that there were things you wouldn't be able to do. How did you learn the difference between a genuine limitation and an inherited excuse?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> This is where I have to give credit to my parents.</p> <p>At the age of five, my parents were told at Sydney Eye Hospital by a professor, one of the heads of ophthalmology in Australia, that I was going to go blind. I had full vision until I was five, we believe.</p> <p>They were basically told that the son they had all these aspirations for — getting married, having a job, playing sport — that was all gone. He won't be able to play sport. He won't really get an education. He'll never get a good job. He won't have many friends in life.</p> <p>That was the prognosis.</p> <p>My parents believed the diagnosis: yes, he is going to go blind. But they didn't believe the prognosis.</p> <p>They never told me all that. They protected me from that information. When discrimination happened behind the scenes with my parents, they didn't tell me, "We've been told you can't do this." They just said, "Get on with it. Go and do this."</p> <p>They would deal with the "you're not welcome" conversation until they got to, "Okay, we'll let him have a crack."</p> <p>In the first rugby league team I played on, parents were saying, "You're bad parents for putting your child with a disability in harm's way," rather than, "You're great parents for giving him an opportunity."</p> <p>The other part is that we were brought up in a household where we weren't allowed to use the word "can't". That's where the name of my book, Why Not?, comes from.</p> <p>A lot of people say, "My dad said that too — there's no such thing as can't." But my dad didn't stop there. He would say, "Why not?"</p> <p>It was the worst idea you could ever have to say, "I can't do my homework," or "I can't do something," to my dad, because he would say, "Why not?" And he would keep asking. "Explain more. Explain more."</p> <p>As you start explaining your "can't", you actually start explaining the solution.</p> <p>Then he'd say, "Right, so it's not a 'can't' problem. It's an 'I'm not able to do this yet' problem, or 'I don't have this capacity yet', or 'I need X to help me get to this.'"</p> <p>Then he'd say, "Okay, you've now found what you need to do, so go and do it."</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> That is amazing. Credit to your parents, because what the medical professionals were saying was a limiting prognosis. That can be such a big problem for people who go through some sort of diagnosis in their lives: the mindset can limit people immediately.</p> <p>Whereas what your father said gave you a different foundation.</p> <p>I remember being told, "There's no such thing as can't," but I don't know how much I was probed beyond that. It probably stopped there, and you were still left thinking, "I can't."</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Exactly. How do you get from there to doing it? I think it's the "why not?" part that gets you to the conversation and to the point of saying, "This is my plan now."</p> <p>You've got a plan of how to get there, as opposed to being told you need a miracle to go from "I can't" to "I can."</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I love that. I know we touched on this before — you've got three children and I've got a four-and-a-half-year-old as well. I'm trying to instil that mindset in him when I ask him to do something and he says no or that he can't help. I'm trying to get him involved and ask, "What can we do to help you do the thing? Have a go first, and then we'll help you."</p> <p>You share in the book about standards. What were the private standards behind all these public achievements?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> There are eight standards, so to reel them all off is a bit tricky. But one thing I'll say is that one of the standards is literally standards.</p> <p>If you talk about a business, for example, you've got values on the wall. Everyone's got their three values or five values. People would probably call them their standards as well. I would challenge that.</p> <p>My definition of a standard is something that actually has a consequence. If it doesn't have a consequence when you don't adhere to it, then it's not a standard. It's a wish.</p> <p>My challenge to businesses is: if it's really a cultural standard, if that's what you say your values are, then if people don't adhere to those, there needs to be a consequence. Otherwise, you're telling the market something that you're not being consistent about.</p> <p>That builds into one of my other standards: trust.</p> <p>I believe everything I've done in sport and business comes back to trust. Especially in an era of AI, where we don't trust our AIs because it always feels like they're just going to tell us what we want to hear.</p> <p>It comes back to this formula that I've built, which is:</p> <p>Standards × Consistency × Time.</p> <p>The standard has to be something that has a consequence. Then you need to do it consistently, showing people and showing yourself that you do it consistently. Then, over time, that builds trust.</p> <p>You can have self-trust, team trust, leadership trust, customer trust. They all apply to the same formula.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> What do you think breaks trust faster than people realise?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Not adhering to that formula.</p> <p>If you don't have the standards, or people don't actually know what the standard is, then people don't know what you stand for.</p> <p>Think about global politics at the moment. No one knows what these people stand for because they change their mind every two minutes.</p> <p>Then that comes back to consistency. You might have a standard, but if you're not consistent with it, or if you change it with different people, that will build distrust. In leadership, if you're not treating your team the same way and people are treated differently, that will build distrust.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I guess you can come at the concept of trust from business, family and sport, because in your sporting career you are often relying on other people to be your eyesight. How do you get to a space of giving that total trust to somebody?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> It comes back to that formula every time.</p> <p>They've shown me they're going to hit a standard, and they're going to do it consistently over a certain amount of time. Then I know I can trust them.</p> <p>At a sporting level, I got towed into a 51-foot wave. It's a five-storey building of water, and I can't see the wave.</p> <p>Most people who go to Nazaré in Portugal, where the biggest waves in the world are and the records are set, have all these gates before they go. They can look at YouTube and say, "I don't want any part of that." If they get through that gate, they fly to Portugal and stand on the headland, look at the wave and hear the power of the waves smashing against the cliff. That's another gate.</p> <p>If they go through that gate, they go out on the jet ski and can see it from the water. They can still say yes or no. There are all these gates for sighted people.</p> <p>I don't have those gates.</p> <p>I have to use trust with my team. I can't trust my eyes. I can't use that data. The data has to come through my team telling me what it is.</p> <p>Then I get towed into the wave, and my team blows a whistle. I have to trust that when they blow that whistle, they have put me in the right spot, and I drop down a five-storey wall of water.</p> <p>If you're talking about trust, I don't know that there are many things in the world that require much more trust.</p> <p>People die there. Three weeks after I was there, someone died surfing a 30-foot wave. I was on 50-foot waves and I'm blind.</p> <p>There are consequences. But I believe if you build capability and trust in your team, anything is achievable. But you need to build it with the right people, and you need clear standards and consistency.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> Communication must be a huge part of this too. If a whistle gets blown, that has to hit at exactly the right moment. It must be a lot of pressure on the other people as well.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> It is. And the pressure goes both ways.</p> <p>If I haven't done the training and I die, the guys towing me are the best big wave surfers in the world. We're talking about Dylan Longbottom and Lucas Chumbo. They're literally the best guys in the world.</p> <p>If they kill the blind guy, the world media had already said I was going to die. It's the same narrative, the same voice that told my parents when I was five that he can't do life, he's not going to get a job, he won't play sport, he won't have many friends.</p> <p>The world media said, "He will die at Nazaré. Blind guy can't do this." When I was trying to play rugby league, the mothers were saying my mum was a bad mother because she let me play sport.</p> <p>It's the same voice all the time saying, "He can't. He can't. He can't."</p> <p>But I've built enough trust in myself because I've shown myself that if I have the right standards and I do it consistently, I'll execute. So when the world says I can't now, I just laugh and go, "Well, you're not the expert. I'm the expert in what I'm doing."</p> <p>The other flip side is, if I die there and I haven't built the capacity to do it, then that affects my team. It required me doing a lot of work. I can hold my breath for six minutes. It takes a lot of physical capacity to do that.</p> <p>If my team didn't think I had the capability to do it, they wouldn't do it, because if I die there, they lose their livelihood. They're getting paid by Red Bull and other big brands to do their job. They're not going to get re-signed next year if they kill the blind guy.</p> <p>It was the same with my cycling career. I was on a tandem. If I lean the wrong way, we both die.</p> <p>So the trust is not just about me trusting my team. It's about them trusting me to have the capability to do the things we're doing as well.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> With everything you have set out to achieve in life, both in your corporate career and your sporting careers, has a lot of it been driven by a desire to prove people wrong?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Yes, for sure.</p> <p>There's a pivotal part in the book where I talk about how the main thing that changed my life, when I was on that bad path, was that I really wanted to get married.</p> <p>I was having all these failed relationships and I was blaming the other person. "She did this, she did that." You can always blame somebody else.</p> <p>I had just had a failed relationship. On paper, everything looked good. I was a sales director, I had property in Sydney, and on paper everything looked lovely. But I wasn't happy. I didn't think I was thriving.</p> <p>So I wrote down a list of 12 things I wanted in a wife. Even though I can't see it, I just wrote these things on a piece of paper.</p> <p>Then I realised that, out of the 12 things, I wasn't six of them. So it was unreasonable for me to want someone to have all those things if I didn't have them.</p> <p>Then I rebuilt myself with the standards that are in the book. From that point on, I stopped trying to prove to the world that I could do things. It wasn't about them anymore. It became about me and what I wanted to achieve.</p> <p>Since I changed that mindset, now I do things to contribute. I've rewired everything from having to prove people wrong to saying, "This is something I want to do."</p> <p>Now I get to do all these things. I'm on boards, I'm on federal government advisory committees, I'm an executive, and I do all these different things at the same time because I've built that capacity.</p> <p>The key thing for me now is that I get to add value, because I love being part of a team. Whatever team I'm in, I know how I add value and what I don't do so well. I know what I do really well, and I make sure I add value before moving on to the next thing.</p> <p>It's the same as when I was playing rugby league or ice hockey. What's my position in this team? How does that add value? Then I do that well.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> When you had that realisation and started doing that self-reflection work, did you have external mentors or coaches, or was it something you had to do alone?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> It was just me. It was all me.</p> <p>I was so independent and so scared of being seen as a failure that I wouldn't let anyone else give me guidance up until that point.</p> <p>A lot of blind people are fiercely independent, almost independent despite themselves. I still am now. I have found some amazing mentors after that point, but up until then, it was just me.</p> <p>The way it started was with the standards piece. The first standard I held was that I put a chin-up bar in my doorway. I wasn't allowed to walk in or out of that door in my bedroom without doing 10 chin-ups.</p> <p>If I'd gone out to work in the morning and left my keys in my bedroom, I would do 10 chin-ups on the way in, get the keys, and do 10 chin-ups on the way out.</p> <p>That was the first standard. I started getting out of bed at the same time and having these black-and-white standards that I wasn't allowed to budge on.</p> <p>That was how I built trust in myself. Once I built trust in myself, I started building it with teammates. Then with leadership. It kept expanding.</p> <p>Now I've got this really fulfilled life where I get to be a dad, a leader and an athlete. We haven't talked about freediving yet, but my current goal is to set a world record in freediving either later this year or early next year.</p> <p>Once you implement these standards in your life, even though it's hard work, it becomes easy.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> The reward must feel amazing when you achieve those goals and challenges you set yourself.</p> <p>We touched on this before: I know I'm great with external accountability. If I've had a PT or worked with coaches, when I know that appointment is coming up, I will do the work. Last year I was learning to play golf, and I knew at the next lesson the coach would ask who had practised, so I was at the driving range the night before.</p> <p>I can identify in myself that I'm good with accountability to others, but how do you build that personal accountability within yourself?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> In business, you would have a strategy. A one-year strategy or a five-year strategy. I would say it's very important to have a five-year strategy.</p> <p>Across all the strategies you have, you probably don't go back to your personal five-year plan and ask how that plugs into the strategy — whether that's a fitness goal, business goal or whatever it is.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> Yes. I'm great at writing them, and then they stay in Google Drive and I forget to look at them because I get too busy.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> So flip it. Write a five-year strategy for you as a person. Then, instead of looking at the business first, look at how what you're doing externally plugs into that.</p> <p>You still need to do those things, but ask: is this allocating an appropriate amount of time to each piece?</p> <p>That might sound selfish, but it's not really. If you do well in everything you do, then you're being selfless because you're helping your teams achieve.</p> <p>For me, it's about priorities. The thing that is the biggest priority gets the biggest chunk of time. If at the moment that is to get physically fit, that's the priority.</p> <p>Everyone will have challenges in life. We've all got system issues with work and different problems. But as soon as you have a health problem, you have no other problem. That is your problem.</p> <p>If being healthy and happy needs to happen for me to be more successful in other areas and contribute better to my team, then that should become the priority. You allocate the appropriate amount of time to it and you don't negotiate on it.</p> <p>It becomes one of those standards that is not negotiable. That will help you achieve better, be happier and healthier, and have more energy in other areas. Then you'll be more productive, and you won't have to spend as much time in those areas because you're more productive.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> For those listening who feel like they are making excuses, or know that their standards have slipped, what would you say is the first honest step to take?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Pick one standard.</p> <p>For me, it was the chin-up bar. Pick one thing you know you are letting slip and don't let that slip again. Just pick one thing.</p> <p>If you try to do all of them at once, it's too hard. Pick one thing, do that for a couple of weeks, and show yourself you can do it. That's building self-trust.</p> <p>If you know you've let your standards slip, they are your personal standards. If you're not even holding your own personal standards, how can you expect others to hold theirs? How can you hold standards as a team? How can you hold standards as a leader?</p> <p>It's showing yourself that you can trust yourself because you're going to hold your standards. Once you can do that, you can do everything else better.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I love that. I can be guilty of going from zero to hero and trying to do all the things at once. It might last a few weeks or a couple of months, then things get in the way.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Just do one thing at a time.</p> <p>In the movie I've got on Netflix, one of the things I say at the end of the film is: just do one thing and do that well.</p> <p>That's what I think I've become very good at: doing one thing at a time and doing that really well. That's how I'm able to wear so many different hats.</p> <p>The other thing I'd say is that we talk a lot about identity being a fixed thing. We think that to be authentic, you have to have one identity. I think that's a flawed concept.</p> <p>I think you have to have one set of values and one set of standards, but how they come out in your different identities will look different.</p> <p>Me as an executive looks different to me as a dad. If I'm with my mates in a pub and we're mucking around, that personality in the boardroom is not going to add value to that environment.</p> <p>We are all different people. So why not identify how we turn up differently in different environments and lean into that? Work out how you turn up differently and amplify that, rather than dulling it down and trying to be the same person everywhere.</p> <p>Don't change your values. Don't change your standards. Just change how you present.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> That's brilliant. Before we go on to some of our Really Good Conversations questions, I wanted to ask: as you revisited your story to write this book, how did that feel?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> It was hard. There was crying. There were tears.</p> <p>One of the first things in the book, in the first chapter, is called "Rock Hard, Marshmallow Soft".</p> <p>I've surfed 50-foot waves, broken world records in cycling, and I'm a blind guy who used to fight in pubs. I don't think anyone can say I'm physically soft. I'm probably as hard as a man can get physically.</p> <p>But emotionally, I used to be really hard too. One of the things I learnt was to become emotionally soft. I can be rock hard, but I can also be emotionally soft. I think that's a trait more men should have.</p> <p>But I think teaching all men to be soft across the board is not helping society. We need more hard men, but men who can also be soft when they need to be.</p> <p>That's one of the things I learnt going through the book: how I've become the man who is comfortable being as hard as you can be in a physical environment, but also really soft with my children and soft with my teams when I need to be.</p> <p>It was a journey. From my test readers, I know the first eight chapters are hard reading. My life was hard. There were a lot of really hard things I went through.</p> <p>Readers have said to me, "It's really hard." And I was like, "Yeah, but you're only reading about it. I had to live through it."</p> <p>So yes, it was a journey.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> Thank you for sharing that journey and for putting the book together. So many of us cannot relate to the journey you've been on, from the disability to the record-breaking achievements, the corporate job and family life. It's fascinating to learn from people like yourself.</p> <p>One question I've been asking people this year is: can you recall a conversation that has profoundly changed the direction of your life?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> I don't know if it changed the direction of my life, but it definitely would have changed the direction of my life.</p> <p>It was a conversation I had early in my career. I was on an escalation with a customer and I lost my patience a bit with them. Afterwards, a senior leader who had overheard the conversation pulled me aside and said, "The way you treated that person then — was it okay?"</p> <p>I said, "Well, I followed the process."</p> <p>He said, "That's fine. You followed the process. But did you treat them in the way that you should have?"</p> <p>I was all about what she did and what she said. I was making it about them, not about me. Standard excuse behaviour.</p> <p>He said, "Next time you're in a situation like that, I want you to think about that person as your mother or your sister."</p> <p>At the time, I didn't have children, but he said if I had children, think about them.</p> <p>That really reframed things for me. Every time I had a heated discussion with somebody from that point on, I reflected back on that. I thought, "Is this the way I would want someone to treat my mother, my sister or someone I care about?"</p> <p>It changed the trajectory of my career and the way I treated people. I moved away from the perspective of thinking, "They should be doing this because I expect them to," and it allowed me to be more patient and empathetic.</p> <p>One of the standards in my book is that empathy is a superpower in leadership. That is something I do really well now. I have empathy for my teams and understand where they're coming from. I spend time finding out what they do.</p> <p>That superpower I have as a leader came from that conversation almost 20 years ago.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> That is such a good reminder. So much of what we see in the world, whether it's comments on social media or how people speak to each other, makes you wonder: would you speak to a relative like that? They'd probably say no.</p> <p>I'm going to ask you three questions from our Really Good Conversations cards.</p> <p>Question number one: if you had a warning label, what would it say?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Warning: gives very direct, strong feedback.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I love that.</p> <p>Question number two: what is the biggest misconception people have about you?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> That blindness is my biggest challenge. We've already gone over it, but I think it can't be understated.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> Question number three: what is one piece of wisdom you want to pass on to future generations?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> You can achieve so much more than you think.</p> <p>It's such a cliché statement, but you really can. My life proves that we are all pretty lazy. We think we have big goals, but they're pretty small. So set bigger goals than what you think is possible.</p> <p>I say to my kids that my parents brought me up with "no such thing as can't", and obviously I do the same thing with them.</p> <p>My son is 12 now. When he was 10, he came into the room and was trying to learn how to do a Rubik's Cube. He was frustrated and said, "Dad, there is such a thing as can't."</p> <p>He didn't say it about the Rubik's Cube. He said, "I can't fly to the moon with my arms."</p> <p>I said, "Mate, I think you can. If you're 10 years old and you really think that's your life purpose, to fly to the moon with your arms, and you're myopic about it, nothing else gets in the way, and you work hard every day, you'll build relationships, build technology, find ways of getting revenue, and do all the things someone with a really strong goal does.</p> <p>You'll either learn to fly to the moon with your arms by the time you end your career, or you'll have created so much value in the wake of that goal that it will have been a worthwhile life."</p> <p>He didn't like the answer to that question, but I really think we need to set bigger goals.</p> <p>And I think if he really wanted to fly to the moon with his arms, he could probably do it with technology.</p> <p>He did end up learning to do the Rubik's Cube, by the way. He got down to about 18 seconds, then gave up and moved on to something else.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> I love that. Maybe he had the dopamine hit of finally achieving it, and then the exhaustion of thinking, "Thank goodness that's over." He probably kept going just to show you he could do it because you said it was possible.</p> <p>I don't know if I've ever completed a Rubik's Cube myself. I think back in the day, we just peeled the stickers off and put them on the other side.</p> <p>The last question I love to ask all of our guests is: if you could ask someone a question, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you ask them?</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> I thought about this before I came on, and this is going to be a very controversial answer, I think.</p> <p>I would go back to someone like Genghis Khan and ask him what standards he believed helped him manage and lead an army of that size, and keep everything together.</p> <p>We can take the values aside and all the bad things that happened aside. From a leader's perspective, if you could ask, "What are the top standards that helped you manage that army?", I think we could bring that back into modern society.</p> <p>I think we've lost our way from a standards perspective. To take lessons from great leaders who were able to do things that are hard to even imagine — the amount of cultural leadership, physical dominance and emotional leadership required to do something of that nature — would be fascinating.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> That is a fascinating answer. Thank you so much.</p> <p>Thank you for everything you have shared in this conversation today. We could have gone in so many directions and covered so many topics, but I was really keen to explore more of your journey and the "Why Not?" philosophy. I think that is a good reminder to leave everybody with.</p> <p>Before we finish, tell our listeners where they can find out more about you, the book, and what's on the horizon for you. You touched on freediving earlier, so give us a little more information for people who would like to find out more.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> You can follow me everywhere at Matt Formston. LinkedIn, Instagram, all the different socials, and mattformston.com.</p> <p>The book, Why Not?, should be out on 1 August, and on audiobook as well.</p> <p>There are things like the freediving in there too. I didn't think it was possible for me to ever dive through a shipwreck because I can't see it. There's a story in the book about cycling, big-wave surfing and my four world titles in surfing.</p> <p>One of the last stories is me diving through a World War II shipwreck. My dive coach is holding the front of my blind cane, which I use on land, and I'm holding the back. We swim down 60 feet underwater on a single breath through a shipwreck.</p> <p>There are lots of stories and lots of goals.</p> <p>By the end of this year or early next year, I want to set a world record in freediving for depth.</p> <p>My biggest goal, though, and the thing that will make me feel my life has been worthwhile, is if my children become good people.</p> <p>I have lots of different clients I coach, businesses I talk to and keynote stages I stand on, but there's no more important client that I have than my three children.</p> <p>I hope they become good people one day. That will mean all the lessons and standards I've built are worthwhile.</p> <p><strong>Amy:</strong><br /> That's beautiful. Thank you so much for everything today. Thank you for your time, and best of luck with that next challenging goal later this year.</p> <p><strong>Matt:</strong><br /> Thank you so much.</p>
