Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before
ML Cavanaugh
Dec 2025 · Simon and Schuster
Ebook
256
Pages
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infoThis book will become available on December 2, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
Award-winning Army Strategist, top West Point professor, and living kidney donor Matt Cavanaugh shares the lessons from his 25-year military career that enabled him to turn pain to power, scars to strength, and become great by doing good.
For Matt Cavanaugh, nothing worked. He couldn’t help the ones he loved the most, his marriage was on the rocks. Inspired by a near-death combat experience, Cavanaugh transformed himself from failure to fit with an act of radical generosity. He donated a kidney to a stranger, an act that also helped save the lives of seven others dying of kidney failure. Then, just months after surgery, Cavanaugh became the only living kidney donor and fastest American ever to run the toughest self-supported ultramarathon series in the world—RacingThePlanet’s 4 Deserts Grand Slam—twice counted among the world’s greatest endurance races by Time.
Best Scar Wins follows Cavanaugh as he uses every lesson and experience, slogan and saying he picked up from his military career to navigate the world’s worst deserts across four continents—from scorpions to penguins—on a mission to save lives. The eleven lessons in this astonishing adventure story—including how to expand your endurability—illuminate a path that anyone can follow to become more than they were before.
In a call to live generously in support of others, Best Scar Wins shows you how to embrace your scars as triumphs—not as experiences that hold you back but as lessons that empower you to achieve more than you ever thought possible.
For Matt Cavanaugh, nothing worked. He couldn’t help the ones he loved the most, his marriage was on the rocks. Inspired by a near-death combat experience, Cavanaugh transformed himself from failure to fit with an act of radical generosity. He donated a kidney to a stranger, an act that also helped save the lives of seven others dying of kidney failure. Then, just months after surgery, Cavanaugh became the only living kidney donor and fastest American ever to run the toughest self-supported ultramarathon series in the world—RacingThePlanet’s 4 Deserts Grand Slam—twice counted among the world’s greatest endurance races by Time.
Best Scar Wins follows Cavanaugh as he uses every lesson and experience, slogan and saying he picked up from his military career to navigate the world’s worst deserts across four continents—from scorpions to penguins—on a mission to save lives. The eleven lessons in this astonishing adventure story—including how to expand your endurability—illuminate a path that anyone can follow to become more than they were before.
In a call to live generously in support of others, Best Scar Wins shows you how to embrace your scars as triumphs—not as experiences that hold you back but as lessons that empower you to achieve more than you ever thought possible.
About the author
ML (Matt) Cavanaugh, PhD, is a retired lieutenant colonel and US Army Strategist who earned two Bronze Star Medals and the Combat Action Badge for his time in the Iraq War. A proud living kidney donor, he most recently served as president and chief executive officer of the National Kidney Donation Organization. Matt, 2002 West Point graduate, co-founded the Modern War Institute at West Point, has been the youngest recipient of the Army Strategist Association’s professional award—the Order of Saint Gabriel the Archangel, earned acclaim as the top professor at West Point, and was once named the US Army Athlete of the Year. A contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Matt’s writing has also been featured in outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Sydney Morning Herald. As a much sought after public and motivational speaker based in Colorado, Matt has shared insights with large and small companies, medical and healthcare organizations, sports teams and students across the country.
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