Why Not?: Breaking Limits in Sport, Business and Life

This is not just an inspiring story. It's a blueprint for performing at your best when the stakes are highest. Matt Formston AM is a multi-sport World Champion, Guinness World Record holder and Paralympian. Parallel to his elite sporting achievements, he has built a career as a senior corporate executive, board chair and executive coach. He is also blind. None of Matt's successes happened by accident. They were won through a system - the eight Hard Standards -that Matt forged at the intersection of professional sport and corporate leadership. He tested them over decades, inside fifty-foot Nazaré waves, on championship cycling tracks, freediving blind through shipwrecks and in boardrooms where the same principles had to hold. Why Not? weaves those standards through every chapter. In Matt's story, you'll discover practical, immediately applicable principles for building clarity, discipline and accountability in your own performance. - Know when to plan, when to pull the trigger and how to tell the difference. - Audit yourself with brutal honesty before the world does it for you. - Build capacity now so your future self can perform under pressure. - Declare the goal before you've earned it, and do the work to deserve it. - Lead with empathy and understand what motivates others beyond the KPIs.
Why Not? is for anyone who wants to perform more consistently when it counts. If you suspect you're capable of more, but keep finding reasons not to prove it, it's time to stop saying, 'I can't.' You need to start asking, 'Why not?'

MATT FORMSTON AM is a four-time Surfing World Champion, a Para Track Cycling World Champion and a Rio Paralympian. He holds a Guinness World Record for surfing a 51-foot wave at Nazaré, and in 2023 became the first para athlete in history to win Surfing Australia's open Heavy Water Award. He has spent fifteen years in senior corporate leadership and now speaks globally on performance, leadership and trust. His story is told in The Blind Sea, now streaming on Netflix.

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Rock Hard, Marshmallow Soft xi 1 Different, Not Over 1 2 Turn the Wound into the Weapon 17 3 Find the Room Where Effort Counts 29 4 The Lineup Doesn't Negotiate 41 5 When Your Only Thing Disappears 53 6 The Collapse 67 7 The Reset 79 8 The War on Shame 89 9 Busy Going Nowhere 99 10 So What, Loser 109 11 Time Well Invested 121 12 Many Hats 135 13 The Weight of Access 149 14 Own the Delusion 161 15 From Wheels to Waves 179 16 No Worries, I'll Take Him Out 193 17 Diversity as Value 205 18 Reports, Not Commands 217 19 The Generational Gift 229 20 No Gates 241 21 The Cane 257 22 The Eighth Standard 273 Afterword: From Rebecca Formston 287
References 293