THE STANDARDS, ON THE PAGE.
Two books from Matt Formston AM. Why Not? is the eight Hard Standards Matt has built across fifteen years of parallel careers in elite sport and senior corporate leadership — distilled into one book, published by Wiley. Surfing in the Dark is the children's book that introduces the same idea — that limits set by other people are not the same as limits that are real — to the next generation of readers.
WHY NOT?
Breaking Limits in Sport, Business and Life
The eight Hard Standards. The fuel that drives them. The full account of how Matt built two world-classcareers in parallel — blind.
Why Not? is for readers who are tired of motivational frameworks that don't survive contact with reality.The Hard Standards survived Nazaré. They will survive your Monday morning.
The book is written without softening. It opens with the line "Blindness was never my biggest fight" andmeans it. The fight Matt is describing is the internal one — the years he spent chasing other people'svalidation, the rock bottom that nearly cost him everything, and the standards he built in the aftermaththat produced the world records, the world titles, the AM, and the corporate career.
Why Not? is Matt Formston's first business book. It distils four decades of work — in elite sport, insenior corporate leadership, and in the hard internal recovery that made both careers possible — intoeight non-negotiable standards Matt has lived by. Trust is the eighth, and the one that holds the otherseven together.
SURFING IN THE DARK
The first book in the Big Visions series
The first book ever published in Australia — and one of the first in the world — to combine braille, textand illustrations in a single edition.
Surfing in the Dark is the children's book that tells Matt's story for young readers — the diagnosis at five,the years of being told what he wouldn't be able to do, and the world titles that followed. Written by JohnDickson and illustrated by Phillip Bunting, the book opens the Big Visions series — a publishing projectbuilt to put blind and low-vision Australians on the page as the heroes of their own stories.
The book is also a publishing first. It is the first book ever published in Australia, and one of the first inthe world, to combine braille, text and illustrations in a single edition. The braille-printing technology wasdeveloped specifically for this book — so a blind child can read it alongside a sighted parent, a sightedchild can read it alongside a blind sibling, and the book itself does the work of inclusion before anyonesays a word about it.
Available in print, audio, and digital. Schools, libraries, and organisations supporting blind andlow-vision communities can order in bulk through the contact page.
BUYING FOR YOUR TEAM OR SCHOOL?
Surfing in the Dark sits on Premier's Reading List in every state of Australia. It is widely used in primary school libraries as a child's first exposure to braille — most children, including sighted children, havenever run their fingers across the page and felt language as texture before. Schools, libraries, andcorporate teams can order in bulk.