Two Matts, One Conference, and the Assumptions Worth Questioning

This week the company flew us to Sydney for a two-day conference. I say "break from work" – it was actually two full days of keynote speakers, a cocktail dinner, and the kind of award ceremony that makes you simultaneously proud of your colleagues and quietly competitive about next year. A working break. The best kind.

I came home with a lot of notes and two names.

Both happened to be Matt.

The first was Matthew Formston. He was diagnosed with Macular Dystrophy at age five and has less than 3% vision. He is, by any reasonable external measure, legally blind. He is also a world champion cyclist, a world champion surfer, and the kind of person who makes an auditorium full of reasonably accomplished professionals go very quiet.

I kept thinking of Daredevil – the Marvel character who loses his sight and then develops extraordinary compensating abilities. Matthew Formston is that, except real, and he doesn't seem particularly interested in the comparison.

What he talked about was risk. Not the motivational-poster version of risk – the analytical version.

He described the difference between perceived risk and real risk. The thing you're scared of and the thing that can actually hurt you. His example was Nazaré – the Portuguese break where the waves regularly reach 20 to 30 metres, the largest surfable waves on earth. The perceived risk is enormous. It looks, from the shore or a photograph, completely unsurvivable.

The real risk, once calculated, was different. And calculation was how he approached it.

Before attempting Nazaré, he spent months on breathwork. Not a little breathwork – serious, structured, obsessive breathwork. His coach gave him no target. Deliberately. Because a target would have been a ceiling. Left to find his own limit, Matthew worked up to holding his breath for five minutes and fifty-something seconds.

The average professional big-wave surfer at Nazaré can hold their breath for two to three minutes. The average time a surfer needs to survive being held under at Nazaré? Twenty-three seconds.

He had built a margin that made the unsurvivable survivable. Then he paddled out.

The lesson he drew – and the one that landed hardest in the room – was about the assumptions we accept without testing them. His father was in sales, and had taught him to push back on "it can't be done" with a simple question: why not?

Not recklessly. Not in defiance of real risk. But after calculation. After preparation. After the honest work of separating the story you've been told about what's possible from what is actually, demonstrably true.

I found myself thinking about the version of this question that applies to the people who read this newsletter.

"I'm too old to fix my fitness." Why not?

"It's too late to start saving seriously." Why not?

These are not rhetorical questions. They deserve the same treatment Matthew gives to a wave: what is the perceived risk here, what is the real risk, and what preparation would actually change the outcome?

The second Matt was Matt Church, who spoke about leading in moments of rapid change. He quoted Alvin Toffler – the futurist who wrote Future Shock in 1970, when the pace of change was already alarming people, and who managed to be right about almost everything that followed.

The quote: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."

Toffler wrote that 55 years ago. Matt Church was using it to talk about artificial intelligence in 2026. The quote hasn't aged. If anything it's more apt than ever.

There's something in the pairing of these two men that feels right for where many of us are in life. One is talking about physical limitation and how to work through it. The other is talking about mental limitation – the beliefs and frameworks we've accumulated over decades of working life that may now be exactly the wrong tools for where we're headed.

Matthew Formston over-prepared until a wave that kills people became something he could survive. Matt Church's argument, at its core, is that the same discipline applies to learning. You don't just add new knowledge on top of old assumptions. You go back. You test what you think you know. You ask why not.

The cocktail dinner was excellent. The awards were well deserved. But I came home from Sydney thinking about a blind man in Nazaré with five minutes and fifty seconds of breath in his lungs, and a futurist from 1970 who seemed to know what 2026 would feel like.

Both of them, in their own way, were pointing at the same thing: the limitations that matter most are the ones you never got around to questioning.

What's the assumption in your own life that you've been treating as settled, that might deserve a "why not?"

👉 Hit reply and share your thoughts – I’d love to hear what’s resonating with you.

☕ If these Sunday reflections are worth something to you, consider buying L-Plate Retiree a coffee on Ko-fi.

Your First Investment – Making the Leap!

Alright, L-Plate Retirees! We've researched our providers and opened our accounts. Now comes the exciting part of Getting Started with Investing: making your very first investment! It might feel like jumping off a cliff, but with a little knowledge, it's more like a gentle step onto a moving walkway.

Remember our discussions on Investment Vehicles? This is where you'll choose what to invest in. But before you click 'buy', let's talk about how you buy.

When placing an investment order, you'll encounter a few key types:

• Market Order: This tells your broker to buy or sell immediately at the best available current price. It guarantees execution but not a specific price. Think of it as saying, "I want this now, whatever the cost!"

• Limit Order: This allows you to set a maximum price you're willing to pay (for buying) or a minimum price you're willing to accept (for selling). It gives you price control but doesn't guarantee your order will be filled if the market doesn't hit your price. This is a smart move for managing Risk.

• Stop Orders & Stop-Limit Orders: These are advanced tools to limit potential losses or lock in profits. We'll dive deeper into these in later lessons, but it's good to know they exist for more sophisticated Portfolio Management.

To find what you want to buy, you'll need to understand ticker symbols. These are unique abbreviations (like AAPL for Apple or SPY for an S&P 500 ETF) that identify publicly traded stocks or funds. Your provider's platform will have a search function for these.

Now, the golden rule for your first investments, and indeed all investments, is diversification. As we learned in Portfolio Construction, don't put all your eggs in one basket! Spreading your investments across different assets, industries, or geographies helps manage Risk and smooth out returns. For a beginner, this often means starting with broad-market index funds or ETFs.

Finally, a word of caution: avoid common pitfalls. Don't make emotional decisions, don't chase hot returns (remember, past performance is no guarantee of future results!), and avoid over-concentrating your portfolio in just a few investments. Stick to your Investment Policy Statement if you have one, and remember the lessons from Behavioral Finance about keeping your emotions in check.

L-Plate Takeaways:

• Order Up!: Understand market and limit orders for buying and selling. Limit orders give you more price control.

• Ticker Talk: Learn to use ticker symbols to find the investments you want.

• Diversify Early: Spread your investments to manage risk, perhaps starting with broad index funds.

• Stay Calm: Avoid emotional decisions and chasing quick gains. Patience is a virtue in investing.