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  • Year of the Fighter

  • Lessons from my Midlife Crisis Adventure
  • By: Matt Deaton
  • Narrated by: Matt Deaton
  • Length: 3 hrs and 14 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (2 ratings)
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Year of the Fighter

By: Matt Deaton
Narrated by: Matt Deaton
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Summary

My childhood had been cool enough. Horses and four-wheelers to ride, farmland to explore, good friends. The one blemish: a school bus bully.

A year older and always bigger, this guy we'll call "Larry" started picking on me around kindergarten - flipping my ear, frogging my leg, reminding me how much of a wimp I was - and I let him get away with it. With literally hundreds of chances (every miserable ride to and from school), I never fought back. And while I’d done a stint in the military, earned a fancy degree, and started a family, I was always haunted by the lingering shame.

Then, one day in 2015, 20 years removed from school, I snapped. I was at a college football game, and my team had just lost to their rival for the 10th year in row. Irrationally irate, I elbowed my way through pockets of the opposing team’s fans and found myself threatening to shove their band’s drummer’s drumsticks up his ass. Cooler heads prevailed. But walking away, I couldn’t believe what I’d done. How could I be so angry about a game I wasn’t even playing? How could a guy with a life as good as mine get that wrapped up in a sports fan’s vicarious fantasy?

The answer: childhood bully shame was eating at me more than I could admit, and time was running out to do something about it. A suppressed idea I hadn’t told a soul: I could box or kickbox, or even do a mixed martial arts fight. Fighting would redeem the little boy who’d wussed out all those years on the bus. And it would give my 85-year-old self something to smile about, big time.

Pushing 40, while I was still in decent shape, whipping myself into fighting shape would soon be impossible. For many things, being a little older was an advantage. But for combat sports, Father Time was a second opponent. I made two decisions that day - one, to stop living through a team of athletic strangers and to start living my own adventures, directly, not vicariously. And two, regardless of the outcome, to pursue my fight dream.

©2018 Justin Matthew Deaton (P)2021 Justin Matthew Deaton

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inspiring & Achievable

You're never too old to pursue your dreams! Matt Deaton has lived it and achieved it. While the first part of his book is interesting and enjoyable, he has some real gold nuggets on how to develop the right mindset in the second half. He is also one of the few authors for this kind of book that explains you can get expert knowledge for the price of 2 pints of beer, through reading. INVALUABLE!

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