Ollie Ollerton — SAS: Who Dares Wins, Special Boat Service, Sunday Times #1 Bestseller | Self Growth Videos

Matthew Ollerton — Ollie to anyone who has ever served with him — was born in 1971 in Burton-upon-Trent, England. His childhood was the kind that ends up in a memoir: a violent home, a step-parent who beat him, a freak attack as a boy that left visible scars, run-ins with the law as a rebellious teenager, and a father he eventually had to walk away from to save himself.

At eighteen he enlisted in the Royal Marine Commandos and discovered, almost by accident, that he was extraordinary at the thing the Marines were trying to teach. He toured operationally in Northern Ireland and served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. After six years he passed selection for the Special Boat Service — the Royal Navy’s tier-one Special Forces unit, the maritime equivalent of the SAS — where he served as an operator and rose to team leader over six more years. The story of his SBS selection is the moment in his memoir most readers cannot put down: he completed the entire process on a busted ankle, with the Directing Staff openly telling him to quit, and finished anyway.

After leaving the military he worked in Iraq as a private security contractor protecting journalists in Baghdad, then transitioned to humanitarian work — an anti-child-trafficking operation in Southeast Asia, training local police in Thailand to identify and rescue children from sex traffickers. By his own account this is the work he is proudest of.

And then it all caught up with him. The combination of combat exposure, his violent childhood, and what he now publicly calls a complete inability to live in peacetime hit him at once — alcohol abuse, drug abuse, a failed marriage, depression so severe he describes himself as having had a reckless disregard for his own life. The memoir is unflinching about that period because, he says, the people who need the book most are the ones who are currently in it and will not believe anyone else has been there.

His turnaround came through the unlikely vehicle of television. In 2015 Channel 4 launched SAS: Who Dares Wins — a reality show that put civilians through a near-authentic version of SAS selection — and Ollie became one of the founding Directing Staff alongside Ant Middleton, Jason Fox, and Mark Billingham. The show became a UK phenomenon. SAS Australia followed. Ollie’s segments — often the ones where he sits down with a contestant who has just hit a wall and walks them through how to keep going — are the most-watched moments in the franchise.

In 2019 he published Break Point: SAS: Who Dares Wins Host’s Incredible True Story. It went straight to #1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Battle Ready followed in 2020, focused specifically on building daily resilience for civilians who do not have the luxury of selection courses to test themselves on. Two thrillers — Scar Tissue (2020) and All Or Nothing (2022) — followed under the same publisher.

His three companies — Break Point (live experiential events), Battle Ready 360 (online mindset and training programs), and Double O Global (private security and consulting) — extend the same teaching into different formats. He is an ambassador for the Royal Marines Charity, a director of the men’s mental health charity StrongMen, and one of the most public voices in the UK on PTSD, addiction, and the post-service mental health crisis.

What makes Ollie’s voice distinctive in the warrior-mindset space is the addiction-and-mental-health honesty. Most operators write the war story and stop. Ollie writes the war story, the post-war collapse, the addiction, the suicidal ideation, and the slow climb back — and then teaches the climb as the actual product. That structure is what made Break Point a #1 bestseller and what makes him pair so naturally on this site with David Goggins and Tim Kennedy, both of whom are working the same territory from American angles.