This episode includes discussion of suicide and voluntary assisted dying. If anything in it brings something up for you, Lifeline is 13 11 14.

Matt Formston lost most of his vision at five years old, and the doctors told his parents his life was effectively over. He has since won world titles on a bike, been named Australia's best big wave surfer, picked up an Order of Australia medal, run sustainability at Optus and written a book called Why Not. This is his second time on the show. He came back in the same year he lost his dad, and I'm grateful he sat down and went as far into it as he did.

In this episode Matt and I discuss why a kid with five per cent vision would tackle anyone on a footy field, and what he was really trying to prove. We get into the cycling coach who told him no, his formula for trust, standards times consistency times time, the diagnosis at five that his parents accepted and the prognosis they refused, losing one of his best mates at seventeen and the ten years off the rails that followed, the list of twelve things he wrote down in a dark apartment that turned his life around, the two weeks he spent with his dad before his voluntary assisted death in March, the I ams his three kids say out loud before they go to sleep, and the fishing hook that gave his book its name.

If you want to listen to the first episode we did with Matt:

#99 Matt Formston: Blind Surfing. Big Waves. Bigger Vision: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

For more just like this:

#124 Mark Mathews: Recreate the Fear: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

#164 Jai Arrow: Fatherhood and What Really Matters: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

#105 Jake Baker-Daish: Addiction, Identity & Finding Purpose: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

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