So the sappy answer is my late wife, but I tell enough stories about her. Instead, I'll take a second to focus on a good friend of mine who I've known for ~7 years. Dude is covered in tattoos and scars, and he's in his mid 20's now.
He grew up in a bad part of Houston, and further he was a white kid in the bad part of Houston. He learned to scrap quick. He's a hell of a fighter, fighting with him was like playing chess. He makes it look easy. To this very day, he's the only person who has ever beaten me in a fight, and I have a solid half a foot on him in height.
His family moved to Colorado, specifically the wilderness. I think the closest town was about 50 miles away. He learned all the quintessential things to do in the wilderness; whittling, firemaking, fighting off predatory animals, how to shoot a gun, how to use a knife, and how to drive. He was 8 at the time.
He moved back to Texas after a few years, and during his teen years he got addicted to hard drugs. This dude pushed his parent's car out of the driveway while his parents were sitting in it, horrified. He got cleaned up real quick after that, and decided to learn an instrument. He learned the bass first, then the keyboard, then the ukulele.
He survived viral meningitis in his late teens, and somehow the only residual damage he had from it was some relatively minor nerve damage in the form of numbness on part of his right hand.
I actually met him because he started dating a friend of mine. A whole other story, but staying with her for as long as he did is a feat of willpower in and of itself. He and I drank together, and we had an understanding that we would always be the ones still up after we had 20+ drinks down and everyone else was unconscious. We never did do a proper toe-to-toe, though.
He left his girlfriend (good for him) to go to school to become an EMT. He was a damn good one too, he worked at one of the worst ERs in the state once he graduated. By that, I mean it was the only trauma center for a considerable distance, and the town had astronomical numbers of drug addicts and there were no psychiatric services, so the ER staff were faced with the brunt of the load in dealing with mentally ill.
After he survived a car crash, he decided to change things up in his life and came to couch surf with me for a bit. While he was staying with me, we were out drinking one night (surprise) and went to go meet up with a friend of ours and one of her friends that we hadn't met yet. We get up to them, and there's these two creepy dudes chatting them up and clearly not taking no for an answer. As soon as they noticed us, I asked them if they were lost (because this is Texas and that's a polite way to say "Get the fuck out of here"), and apparently he and I were enough to make them turn around and walk away in silence. Our mutual friend and her friend were very appreciative, and he went on to actually marry that girl. It's always been a trip that I literally witnessed their relationship from their first meeting until now.
He's working at a small dock right now, but he tells me that he's looking into moving on to being a game warden or an appraiser.
I've got a lot of stories about the guy. Just the stuff I have personally been there for has been almost unbelievable (or so Reddit tells me). The thing is, to talk to him, you would never know he's a badass. He's one of the most humble people you'll ever meet, and also the most genuine.