What happens when you slow down?

If you feel like life is a relentless treadmill, this episode offers an alternative. You’ll get fresh perspectives about what can happen when you unhook from relentless busyness, and an invitation to explore what really matters when it comes to leading yourself and others.

Andrew Maffett is a lifelong adventurer and learner. He recently retired from a successful business life and now lives on his yacht with his wife Donna sailing around South East Asia. From the perspective of someone who has been a driven business leader, Andrew offers his insights and advice around:

• The cost of busyness in modern society 
• How creating space for stillness and empty times attracts new experiences and insights.
• What happens when you remove obligations, deadlines, and ‘having somewhere to be next’
• How honoring our inner pioneering spirit allows us to lead more authentically
• The power of curiosity to drive learning and growth, and how it has shaped his career and leadership style
• Why leadership is more than simply driving to achieve goals, and the importance of developing others

You can follow Andrew and Donna on Instagram at @chasing._.horizons

Check out my services and offerings https://www.digbyscott.com/

Subscribe to my newsletter (https://www.digbyscott.com/thoughts#subscribe)

Follow me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/digbyscott/

Do you ever wonder what your life would look like if you listened a little more often to that inner voice that urge you to go and have that crazy adventure? And how about taking that adventure and how it might impact you and showing up in normal life, including how you show up as a leader. We all have an inner pioneering spirit that deserves to be honored. And I reckon it's by honoring it that we can learn to lead more authentically. And today's guests can show us how. Hey, it's dig deeper with me, your host, Digby Scott.

And you've kayaked down the Grand Canyon. You completed and came second in one of the world's longest running multi -sports events, races, the iconic 243 kilometer coast to coast in New Zealand. But beyond being an adventurer, I reckon you're also a lifelong learner who's unafraid to reinvent yourself and have truly discovered your own way of leading in life.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Andrew for about 25 years and I've grown to admire him how he's continually asked and answered the question about how he wants to lead his life and make the most of his time on the planet. Being a good Aussie, we have to shorten his surname and either put an I or an O on the end of it. In this case, it's an O. So he's known to his friends as Maffo. Welcome to the show, Maffo.

Thanks, Duke V, great to be here.

Yeah, it's good. So just describe where you are right now.

I'm living a life on the sea. I'm living on my 14 .5 meter 50 foot sailing yacht. We're anchored off the north coast of an island called Berswanga in the Philippines. So we've got beautiful blue water all around us, coral reefs. There's actually quite a cute little resort on the beach just to the side of us. Yeah, so it's absolutely beautiful. This morning, my routine is I get up in the morning and go for a paddle. I've got a couple of kayaks on the boat.

And this morning I went for a paddle around our bay and went past a little village where there's probably 10 or 20 houses. And I heard these people calling out and saying, no, come here, come here. So I went over and said hello and pulled up on the beach. And anyway, soon as I get there, one of them shoots up this coconut palm and knocks down half a dozen coconuts. And there I am having coconuts on the beach with this family. And yeah, so.

That's my life at the moment is cruising from island to island through South East Asia, hanging out with the locals, going snorkeling, going spearfishing, going kayaking. It's a pretty good way to live my life.

So it's a pretty good way to live your life. I think that's the understatement of the day here. If there was a word to describe how your life is right now, what do you reckon that would be?

I think freedom, it's the freedom to go where we want, when we want, not have baggage or burdens. It's a 50 foot boat so it's a decent size but that's all we've got. We sold our houses on the mainland so we don't have to worry about houses and properties. We don't have to worry about other family members. It's just us. We don't have stuff that we're carrying around that burdens you down.

No, it's free. It's free to go where we want. We have free to spend as long as we want. If we see some locals on the beach, we can spend 10 minutes with them or a day. And that tends to bring some wonderful experiences into your life.

I really want to dig into this idea of freedom, right? Cause I think for the listeners, that something that would be a common aspiration is freedom. And I reckon the whole time I've known you, that would be a word that not necessarily that you've been free in time the whole time, but I think there's a free spiritedness that you bring. And I want to, I want to take us back a little bit actually to 1986 and you were in Victoria.

me.

I think you were my, if my understanding serves me correctly, just finishing uni and want to read a quote from a magazine called the Mountaineer and the article is called, you can't lead your life in a plastic bubble. Rumors were rife in the weeks preceding our trip to Shoalhaven River in the Southeast, New South Wales. Was it really harder than the Indy? Why was this section classed?

that was there then as I reckon is still grown and flourishing right now. What would you say that was about at the time? What was that seed that was coming to life then? What was all that about?

Well, you've dug back into the archives to find that story. That was actually a story about paddling the Shoalhaven River in southern New South Wales. This particular section had never been paddled before. And that article was written by a friend who's, still a mate of mine, Dave Walker. And yeah, so we went to see if it could actually, a national fatby paddle, which it turns out it could. So we're the first people to paddle that. But look, I think back then the sea was,

camaraderie with the people that we were sharing the adventure with. It was always good fun. You felt like people had your back. You could take some risks because there were some other very competent people there if you got in trouble to pick up the pieces. I think it was the excitement of doing something novel. It didn't have to be something that had never been done by anybody before, but it was generally about doing things that I hadn't done before or we hadn't done before. So the excitement of...

doing something new and seeing whether we can handle it. And not always massively demanding, not always death -defying. Oftentimes just a new experience to see what this part of the world looks like or how we respond to that. So I think, I mean, I was really fortunate that that club was actually the Melbourne University Mountaineering Club. And that was super formative for me in terms of my passion for outdoor pursuits.

And it was a sort of club where you'd come along and the people more senior in the club would teach them or junior people. There were no professional instructors. And we'd just get out there and learn on the river or on the mountains or on the rock face or wherever we would whatever we were doing on that occasion. And that gave me a real passion and taste for outdoor pursuits that didn't have to be overly structured. It didn't have to be bound up by rules. It could be something that was free and joyous and

a shared experience. And yeah, so I think that was really significant for me in my outdoor pursuits, but probably beyond that too, you know, and people talk about rock climbing as being a metaphor for life that, you know, there's typically, you know, if it's a challenging rock face, there's probably only one set of maneuvers to get up there. And you don't necessarily find that set of maneuvers initially. And sometimes you have to have many goes at it to get your sequence of moves right. And sometimes in the middle of it, the most...

challenging part you have to be the most creative because that's where you need to find a set of moves which you probably don't instinctively think is going to get you up the rock face. So yeah I think probably those outdoor pursuits have guided me outside of my life adventure as well.

I reckon I'm wondering about how that's showing up today. The version of you that's in in in the Philippines right now. Yeah. What what are the what the echoes of that in terms of how you make choices, how you choose to live every day or the next six months or whatever it might be?

Well, it's funny you should say that because, so there's only two of us on this boat. There's my wife, Donna and I, and Donna's not a very experienced sailor. She's very competent in her own right, but in a sort of fairly limited way. And she does get quite freaked out, you know, if the conditions get rough or if we end up in a tight anchorage. And so we have this saying on the boat, what would a conservative person do in this situation? Because...

My instinct is not always to do the most conservative thing. My instinct is often to do to do what looks the most exciting or the most novel. And when your life is on the boat, I mean, literally everything, our whole life is on here. Everything that we own and everything that we live for is here. This is our home. And Donna's my loving partner and she's, I don't want her to come to any harm and I don't want her to get freaked out because if she gets too freaked out, she probably won't want to sail with me anymore. So in actual fact,

Hahaha!

the life that we live now looks from the outside really adventurous and there are times that it is but actually we try and make conservative decisions so we go wider around a cape rather than cut it short around a cape and we try and find an anchorage that's a little bit further offshore so if the anchor drags we're not going to end up on the shore too quickly so yeah so look at it

It feels more like a life of freedom than it does of hardcore adventure. There are exceptions. A couple of days ago, we were at another place in the Philippines called Coron. And people who are divers will know Coron because it's very well known for its wreck diving on Japanese wrecks. And so there's this amazing limestone cast formations where cliffs come out of the water, maybe a couple hundred meters high and surrounded by reefs. And it was this tiny little anchorage that's maybe

well, I don't know, 100 meters by 100 meters, maybe not even that big, so it's around only a tiny little gap you can get into it. So I'd say, we want to go and anchor in there, that'll be pretty cute. And Donna's going, I don't want to go there, and it'll be fine, darling. So she drives the big boat around out in the water, I take the dinghy in and suss it out. We go in there, you got a tie and ropes bound stern so we don't run into the reef. And we just couldn't get the boat to set. It took us two or three hours, the boat was drifting towards the reef, and then I'd call it off and the wind would change direction and we'd be pushing onto the reef again. And I'm...

literally three or four meters away from the reef and pulling it away again. But you know, you go through that and then you get the boat settled and the wind calms down and you are just in this place of magic. The birds are calling from the cliffs and the sun set is reflecting off the water and it is just absolute magic. And I think lots of my pursuits, you go through these points of terror.

or of being freaked out and it takes very little to turn a corner where all of a sudden you're not terrified or you're not in peril or you're not feeling like you're in danger and you get around the corner and you go, oh jeez I feel fantastic. I mean, I've never had that at some point in some way, you know, and it's sometimes hard to remember in that moment of terror or when you really, there's a massive demand on you to resolve something and then you come around the corner, the wind changes direction, all of a sudden you're in a sheltered bay.

And it's not that you forget how hard it was. I don't think that's happened. People will say you forget it, but you don't. You're still jittery with it. But it's like, wow, this place looks even more beautiful because I've been through that drama to get here.

Yeah, it's like you've got to earn your Nirvana, right? That's kind of what I'm hearing. You know, there's there's no easy earning to get to the next level of freedom or whatever it might be. You.

Mm, mm, mm.

But it can also come really quickly. Like this is the thing. It's not something that you have to sit under a rock for half a life to find Nirvana. Sometimes you've just got to get through that storm, turn a corner, and minutes later you're in the sheltered lagoon. So it's something, yes, it feels brighter and more beautiful because you've been through that challenge. So you earn it in that sense. It would still be beautiful regardless, but it's more beautiful because you've been through the hardship.

There you go.

But you can also get to that very quickly. It's not like I've got to do a lifetime of this before I get to get a payback.

I love that. You know, it makes me think of a place you and I have both shared time in it, um, in the Northwest of Western Australia, where, you know, we go windsurfing and surfing and stuff. I've been going for 20, probably as long as I've known you actually, Maff, it's 25 odd years. And I've often thought, you know, it's not a comfortable place to be and you got to take everything with you.

And you've got to drive a thousand kilometers and, you know, then you've got to set up camp and you've got to make sure you got all your own water and all that sort of stuff. And then you've got to get into these waves that, you know, there's sharks and there's whales and there's coal reef and all of this. And I've often wondered, why do I love going back? And I think it's because of that. It's the willing to go through the discomfort to get to something that's incredibly special on the other side. And it makes me wonder about how do we all learn to do that?

You know, how do we, what, what do we need someone else to model it? Do we need to be in, you know, a mountaineering club or whatever it might be with our roots surround ourselves by other people? What's the, what's the thing that helps us move into that space of discomfort? Do you reckon?

Well, I think it's about, in many cases, not requiring comfort. So I think that our lives are very comfortable and then people will say, I don't want to go camping, I'll stay in a hotel because it's not very comfortable. Well, the truth is camping can be comfortable, but no, it's never going to be as comfortable as your bed at home, it's never going to be as comfortable as a hotel. And I think that you've got to, people talk about comfort zone, it's a cliche, but it's about...

going outside of what is actually comfortable and Nalu, which is where you're talking about in northwest Western Australia, is austere. It's harsh, it's dry, it's windy, there are flies. It's harsh, but on the edge of that is this immense beauty that you don't get to experience if you're not prepared to drive a thousand kilometres through pretty open country and then be in some sort of camping environment. So I think that...

Mm -hmm.

I think that's a big part of it. But I think that people also, and this is a theme I think about a lot these days, is people are too busy to give themselves a chance to go and find those places of peace and beauty because you can't do it in an afternoon. You can't do it in a couple of hour coffee catch up. It's actually something which takes more time than that. And I think a lot of people don't give themselves the time because their lives are so busy.

Yeah.

Yeah. Let's dig into that map because, you know, I've written a lot about and thought a lot about as you have this idea of unhurried. And I remember probably the last time we caught up in person was in Fremantle or just north of Fremantle in Perth. And I'm and you'd been away for maybe two years or 80 months or something from Perth. And it was one of the first times I think you'd come back to, I guess, you know,

in quotes, civilization. And I remember asking you the question, what do you notice about the difference between the life you're living and what you see around you here in Perth? Do you remember what you said to me?

Oh well, it's probably that people are so busy, their lives are so busy and it goes beyond that. There's an expectation that you're going to be busy. And when people say to each other, how are you going? People say, oh I'm busy. You might say, how are you going? Busy? Because this is expectation that you're going to be busy and if you're not busy, you're letting the team down. You're not pulling your weight and so people just.

Mmm.

fill their lives and I think that it's, I don't think it's healthy.

Yeah, well, let me remind you, I agree 100 percent. Let me remind you of what you said. You said it seems that everyone has got somewhere to be next. And I remember that hit me between the eyes. It was like, yes, you've just nailed it with that quote, that statement that like, you know, I scheduled my day and I've got this and then I got to be this and then I got there and I've got one hour for you, Mepho. And then I've got a

Yeah.

go and put my time somewhere else. Right. And I remember that stark observation and you know, it's we've talked a lot about the cost of that. Well, actually maybe we haven't, maybe we need to dig into that a little bit more. What is the cost? Because we must be missing something by driving for productivity every day, right. Making stuff happen. What do you reckon the cost is?

Well, I think that the immediate impact is people are not present. So, because in their mind, they know where they need to be next. They've always got to be somewhere else other than where they are. And there are some people that can still themselves and say, right, well, I've got an hour with this person, I'm going to be very present. But then you get distracted by phone ringing or social media or something like that. And again, you get hauled away from being present. But I think this thing about,

Mmm.

being busy and filling every moment doesn't allow you to bring in a range of experiences and insights which would otherwise be available to you. In my experience, having quiet, still or empty times creates a vacuum that brings in opportunity, attracts opportunities and attracts insights that you never get when you're busy because you're always focused on

what you've got to do right now, what you've got to do next. And if you can actually still things, it's hard to convince some of that who is caught up in this world of being busy, but the natural fact, you're going to get better ideas, you're going to get better experiences by stopping and doing nothing. And that's sort of counterintuitive to the current Western modern society, but that's absolutely been my experience.

Yeah.

Oh, 100%.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. I love the way you talk about new insights that you wouldn't see otherwise. I think of the metaphor of a snow globe, you know, those globes that you can shake up and there's, you can, all the snowflakes. And that if you stop it and then the snowflakes to settle. And I think that's a bit like our minds when we allow ourselves to stop. It's interesting. I, whenever I asked leaders, you know, in corporate environments, um, you know, I don't use the word empty times, but it's essentially that.

when you've got to, you know, when you stop and you're not doing anything, what's that like? And the word that comes up most often is boring. And it's it's a and that's seen as a negative thing. I remember listening to a podcast, I think it was with Tim Ferriss and a coach called Jerry Connola. And Jerry was talking about this idea of stirring the oatmeal that you need these times where.

Oh yeah.

You're not really doing much besides something really mundane, but that's those times when you can get the most profound insights from stirring the oatmeal. Yet what I'm hearing you say is we both observe this. That's a bad thing and we need to be achieving something else next quite quickly. Right. Whereas, you know, here you are 10 hours behind the wheel.

Yeah.

I think people in modern Western society have a social contract with the economy or with the society. And it says, look, I agree to be productive. And being productive means being busy. I'm going to be productive in my work. I'm going to be busy in my family life. I'm going to have a social life where I don't miss out on things. And the contract is that in return, the society will make you comfortable.

Yep.

give you enough income and enough to meet your needs and your kids will be busy and your kids will go on to have better lives than you've had. But I actually think that contract's breaking down. I think that that contract is, maybe some time ago it was a fair contract, but it's not a fair contract now. I think that what people give up, the beauty that could be in their lives and the creativity that could be in their lives from

being busy and seeking comfort, you know, rather than thinking seeking something, something out beyond that. I think, I think that contracts falling apart for a lot of people.

What do you notice in your current context, you know, sailing around Southeast Asia? Because I'm imagining that there's a different rhythm and a different contract that's in place. Right. How would you sum that up?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh look, this is crazy. We've spent the last two years sailing around Southeast Asia. We spent a year in Indonesia. We've just finished six months in Borneo. We're in the Philippines now. And in that time, we very rarely end up in large cities. Sometimes it might be 10, 20 ,000 people, but mostly it's way less than a thousand people. It might be villages we go to. Mostly are probably less than a hundred or around a hundred people. Like I was talking about the village this morning, it had 20 houses in it.

and that's their total life. And you go to these villages, and we do this every day. Every day we get off the boat and we go exploring and talk to these people, engage with them. And what we can give them is our time. We don't want to give them stuff. They don't really need stuff most of the time, but we give them our time and engage with them and with their kids. And you know, they are not busy, these people. They do enough fishing to catch enough fish to eat for dinner. They tend their gardens.

But most of the time what you observe is they're sitting around and they're in really basic houses, like literally thatch huts, like thatch walls, thatch roofs, often no walls, just raised sleeping platforms with a basic cooker or a little fire in the corner. And that's how they live. And are they happier or healthier than us in the Western society? I don't know. I don't spend enough time with them to make an assessment of that.

But what I do observe is there's a lot of people, a vast percentage of the world's population that are not caught up in being busy. And these people, they have time for doing art, they have time for making music, they have time for a community with their neighbors. And they're happy to see us, they're happy people. They're multi -generational, there's always an older person there as well as kids.

So they're living in multi -generational, if they're not in the same house, they're certainly in the same community living co -joined lives. So yeah, it really makes you question. And you look at kids now, kids are so busy. They're being run from dance lessons to birthday parties and backwards and forwards. And every moment is filled with some sort of activity that's going to help them have a happier, fuller lives is what we're told.

But do they, these kids we meet, they make their own musical instruments. They'll get an old bike tube with a bit of fencing wire and roll that down the street and that's their entertainment. And they are entertaining themselves. The kids who might be four or five or six are out in a baby canoe with a little fishing line catching fish. Just a couple of days ago, we went to this little island, Tara Island, and there were these six kids inside of a plastic tub.

It was a really hot day and someone had put a bit of water in this and they were having the time of their lives. So they were all just splashing around in this tiny tub that's less than a metre across. And we keep walking and then there's this girl who catches up with us and she's got to be, we reckon, three. So she was one of the kids playing around in this tub. Now she's walking from one side of the village completely to the other by herself, back to her family home. And we think, oh, she's just been to the pool at the friend's place.

But how many three -year -old kids would be allowed to wander from one side of the village to the other in absolute safety? So it's very much of a different way to live. And they mostly have education, these kids. There are schools there. And mostly they get health care, like there is some health care available. So they're given their basic needs met. They're typically, sometimes we get asked for food. If we get asked, we'll give food. But mostly we're not.

Yeah.

which means they're either too proud or they've actually got enough to get by. So I think these families are getting by, but they're comfortable to a degree, but they're definitely not busy.

Yeah, it makes me wonder, you know, we had the question, you know, what do they have that we don't mean? A simple answer might be time. But I think beyond that, it sounds like there's something about the depth of relationships, the depth of experiencing things you talked about earlier around not being present, something about the quality of experience that comes from being present that speaks comes to the top of mind for me with that.

Yeah, look, it's very hard to, as a visitor, you know, who comes and goes in their lives to know how much that is true. You can only guess at what their experience is. But from the outside, it looks boring, you know, to pick up the words you were saying. And from the outside, you'd say, man, what a boring life they've got. But you know, what is boring? Is boring, I mean, is boring. One guy was making his own fishing lures.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I go to a shop and I spend $35 buying a fishing lure and this guy was making one almost exactly the same. So how much satisfaction is there in making your own fishing lure, catching the fish to feed your family, rather than working hard, spending the money, going to the shop in a car to buy the lure, then go catch the fish. So it's a different way of experiencing the world that perhaps is richer, perhaps is more authentic than what we get to experience.

Hmm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, you know, to ground it in maybe more of a Western world context, I I'm a big proponent of an idea of having an unhurried project at all times. So for me, I build guitars and, you know, on average, every three to four months, I'm starting a new guitar project and it, and that takes that long to build a guitar. And yeah, I could go into the local music shop and buy one and I'll probably be better quality and probably sound better. Cost me a lot more money. Yet.

There's something about what you just said, the sense of satisfaction. I think that we all really yearn for beyond, you know, just buying something. There's something about again, earning your way into Nirvana. Maybe it's not as grandiose as that, right? But there's something about doing the work to get an outcome is more satisfying than just going and having a transactional experience. You know, it's, it's a bit like being a tourist, isn't it? Like you show up.

Um, and just pay to go and see, I know crocodiles being fed or whatever it is. Yeah. As an example versus going and finding your own way to get a sense of learning and satisfaction. There's some real parallels there. You know what I want to, can I, I want to take the conversation in a slightly different direction. Cause we've been talking about being unhurried and I want to just rewind back a bit, Maffo, because when we met, I would not have described you as unhurried.

Yeah.

So you were, it would have been about 1999 and you were running a outdoor adventure training company called Marybrook. And I remember meeting you and I was looking, I was at an inflection point in my own career and I was looking to do something completely different. And you hired me as a contract, kind of outdoor adventure trainer and you were

You were instrumental in shaping my direction. And I want to just acknowledge that on here now, right? There's, there was something about how you led, how you helped me find a voice that I was looking to express and some talents that I wanted to explore to see whether I was any good at this stuff, facilitation particularly. But you weren't unhurried.

You were, you seem to be at least on the surface, a very, very busy person. Can you just tell us a bit about your life back then? What was going on for you and particularly around how you were, how you thought about leadership.

Yeah, well, look, I had a hugely busy professional life. Like, I'm no guru around this, being unhurried. And when Donna and I started sailing three years ago, she also had her own business for 20 years and employed many, many people and was also extremely busy. And we actually had to consciously deprogram ourselves. We had to come up with practices that would slow us down, that would help us create space.

Nah.

Tell us about those. What are some of those? Cause that might be useful.

Well, so when you're sailing, you have a one -night anchorage, which is safe and secure enough, but not pretty, so you stop for the night. When you're sailing, you don't sail through the night. Typically, you sail through the day and find somewhere to stop for the evening or the afternoon, and you head off again the next morning. So you have one -night anchorages. And then you have two -night anchorages, which are pretty nice. They're good enough to spend a second night there, so there must be some good snorkeling, or maybe there's an interesting village, or there's a mountain to climb, or something like that. So it's a...

So we decided that if our anchorage is good enough for two nights, we're gonna stay for three. So we put a practice in there and we said, okay, we're gonna stay for a minimum of three. Because we've got time, we're not short on time. We don't have deadlines, we can go wherever we want, whenever we want. And what we started to experience was that if you stay that extra day, on that third day,

the weather might glass off and you'll get this incredible day for snorkeling that wasn't there on the first or the second day. Or on the third day, the villagers will now be confident enough that you're not just coming and going. They'll come out in their dugout dinghy to serve you coconuts. And you end up giving them some fishing barrulas and you go ashore and have a barbecue with them. So that wouldn't have happened in the second day. So you find that by creating extra space, you are attracting these experiences which you wouldn't have had if you were rushing through.

And coming out of our professional lives, we would have started out saying, well, we've got to get from here to there, that's 200 miles, and we're going to do 50 miles a day, that's four days, and we'll stop here, here, and here, and we'll keep going. And if the weather gets stronger, we'll reduce the sail, and that'll all be OK. Because you can do that. And that's the manager's way of doing it. When you've had a busy professional life, you're trying to squeeze as much in. That's how you do life. And so we had to really consciously stop ourselves from doing that.

we had an option to put Starlink on the boat. So that's, you know, this is the Elon Musk satellite internet system. So we made a conscious decision not to do that. It's actually not that expensive and it really works well up here. But we said, like, we actually don't want to be connected. And we can get phone reception frequently, pretty often really. But we actually, we went through the Kimberley in Northern Australia. We went 10 weeks from Broome to Darwin. 10 weeks, no shops, no roads, no towns, no internet, 10 weeks. You know.

Mm -hmm.

And it was hard. Donna really struggled with not having connection for 10 weeks. And I said to her, look, you'll never have this again. This is these parts of the world that in 10 years' time, they won't exist. You'll never get to have 10 weeks totally disconnected again in a place of raw beauty and a place of huge spiritual Aboriginal history there that just permeates out of the rock. You just feel it when you go ashore. And you get that by doing that disconnect. So.

That's a great reframe.

So we've had to, you know, but that wouldn't have been what we would have done as a professional. You would have paid the money, put Starlink on the boat, you know, high speed internet day and night, you know, connected to social media, connected to the, I need it because we need it for the weather. You know, like we've got to know what weather's coming. You know, no one can forecast weather up there. If the weather's coming, you just deal with it anyway. But you can find excuses and reasons to bring yourself back to that world. So, yeah, I mean, that's a long way around from saying, I looked busy.

Hahaha

back in those days of Marybrooke because I was busy and I was fried. And I couldn't sleep at night because my mind was buzzing with all the things I had to do and I was stressed about how every month I was going to pay the wages. And yeah, it was a busy, busy time and I tried to maintain my outdoor adventure pursuits but they largely fell away because I didn't have time because I was running this business. It was hugely rewarding. We did amazing work and...

Yeah.

I learned a lot, I work with some incredible people like yourself, Diggers. There are plenty of people from that era of my life I'm still mates with now and I'm so proud to see what those people have gone on to do in their lives. And so many of them are doing really amazing things. I'm really stoked that in some way I might have been a stepping stone to help people live rich and fulfilled lives. So it's not bad being busy. It actually achieved a lot of good things for me personally. I made a good bit of money out of it. I learned a lot. But...

you know, what was the cost, you know, from, from that. And that's, that's what I reflect upon it. Could I, could I have done that in a different way that, that would have, um,

Well, how would you answer that? What was the cost and could you have done it differently?

Well, so I was married at the time to Lady Jennifer, beautiful wife. And so she always said to me, why are you so busy? And I'd say, oh, because I've got to be busy. I've got to grow the business. I've got to pay the wages. And it's really important. The work we're doing, it's changing people's lives. It's really important. I've got to be busy. And she'd go, yeah, yeah, I know that. But you're missing out. There's other part of our lives that you're not experiencing. And she'd go off to see you.

shows, music shows that I couldn't go to, I couldn't commit because I wouldn't really know where I'd be next week whether I'd be busy with a client or not. And so she accepted that and she said, well, that's my journey. That's what Andrea needs to do for whatever reason. And she went to her thing and we had a very happy life together, but we also had different aspects to our lives. Anyway, so Jen fast forward a period from Marybrooke. So 13 years ago, Jen died of cancer.

And she had a really, she'd been unwell for some time, but the cancer came when within three months was diagnosed and then she was dead. And I tell you, that's a really good way of shaking up your reality around how important it is to be busy. And so, and I got it, you know, the day after she died, I actually got it. What she'd been telling me, we'd been together for 23 years and...

Of course I understood what she was saying intellectually, you know, by working too hard, by working so much you miss out on other stuff. You sort of understand that I'm a smart enough person to get that, but emotionally the day after she died it just hit me like a rock. It's a bit like, God, now I get what's really important. You know, it's actually relationships and the impact you have on other people that is the really important thing. And I don't have any regrets at all. I did all those things for the right reasons and I had a really wonderful time.

having a professional life as I did. But from that point on, I got, oh man, I don't need to be busy. And I consciously, again, I spent a year when I pretty much didn't work. I mean, I did bits and pieces of consulting, but not a lot. And then I'd sit at home, no television on, no radio on, not reading a book, just contemplating, allowing this grief to work its way through. And since then, I've been on a different.

Yeah.

different trajectory around how important it is to be busy.

I admire that.

Yeah, I have a question that came up as you were talking about that. The classic question might be, you know, what do you wish you'd done differently? But I don't know whether that's that useful, because it seems to be that you had to live through that to really savor the lesson and get the lesson at a beyond an intellectual level. So I'm wondering about. If you were to see someone who was your age,

Now, as you were back then, you know, early thirties or mid thirties, whatever it might have been, how, how might you guide them?

Oh wow, see that's such a hard question, isn't it? But I think that I would, my advice, if someone gave me this advice at the time, I wouldn't have heard it. But the advice that I needed to take account of was chill out a bit, everything's gonna be okay. So I had a sense that I needed to manage things towards an outcome that I wanted. And so,

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

Uh -huh.

That drove me to be busy, it drove me to be stressed, it drove me to worry, gave me anxiety. But don't worry so much, it's actually gonna work out. And there's a way of doing this that I've come to understand as I've got older, is to know when to make the big decisions. And in between the big decisions, just let it roll. Just let it roll, let it let, let, let, let, let, find a pattern, find a groove.

Yeah.

Do your work, do your family, do your life in a way that's stimulating but has a level of ease. And then when it comes time to make a big decision, that's when you need to be on your game and make your focus. I think that would be the advice that I would have most benefited from. But no one could have told me that. I wouldn't have heard it, which is a bit ironic.

Yeah.

That's great.

Yeah.

I see a lot of people like that now. I've got two brothers who are deeply involved in professional lives and young families and so busy. And Donna's families are the same. So I see a lot of people that don't have the ability to hear that.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting, right? It's I've often wondered about how do we accelerate wisdom? And, you know, it's because the wiser we are, the better choices we can make and the better we can serve the world potentially. Right. But there's so for me, you know, I had a similar age, 30 national manager here in New Zealand, you know, running two offices flying between two cities every week, burned out big time. Took me five years to recover from that. You know, my confidence.

Yeah.

Mm. Mm.

And all of that stuff, right. And there was something I remember giving a, my first ever toast master's speech after that. And it was all about define what success means to you. And the, you know, I hadn't really defined success, but at the same time, I had to live through it to get that lesson. And it was a horrible thing to have to live through, but again, earn your Nevada, right? There's, there's something about how do you, do you have to go through the big massive.

almost life -breaking thing to learn those lessons. And I love your advice. I love this idea of, you know, everything's going to be okay. And also let things roll, like just let things unfold a bit. And I try to do that more and more these days, you know, but at the same time, you know, before we came online, we were talking about the idea of inflection points, right? There's this idea that you need to be able to recognize.

When is the time to put the foot down or to move or to pivot or whatever? Tell us a bit about how you think about those moments.

Well, people look at my professional life and my personal life and they're like, wow, you've done so many amazing, interesting things. How did you do that? How did you end up? I mean, I worked in search and rescue, jumping out of aircraft deep into the ocean to save people. I ran an adventure training company. I ran a global company doing search and rescue training and counterterrorism. I've done some pretty, what people would say, wow, that's really interesting sort of work. And how did you do that? And I think...

for me it's actually understanding what's important to me in my work life. What are the things which that I get value from? So I want something to be interesting. It has to be intrinsically interesting. It has to be fun. I want it to be exciting. I want it to be... I don't want it to be predictable. I want it to be something that brings in novel and I want it to be fulfilling.

and have a sense of achievement or that I'm contributing in some way. These are some things which for me, and that's not just my professional life, it's in my personal life too, these are the things that are important to me. So if you've got these two or five different indicators, so when they're all in the red zone, or if the majority of them in the red zone, you go hang on, maybe what I'm doing right now is not what it was two years ago.

Mmm.

or however long ago it was when I last did a check -in and things were looking pretty good then. I had four out of five in the green, that's great. Now I've got four out of five in the red. So it's a time then to say, what else is out there? What else is actually going to give me these things that I want in my professional life? And the great thing about work, it's not so true in your family, but if you don't like your job, go and change it.

If you're running your own business and you don't like it, change the business or get rid of the business and start again. This is not that hard. You're not actually bolted onto what you're doing. If you've got family and kids, a bit harder to do that. If you've got elderly parents who need care, a bit harder to do that. But in your work life, you definitely can. The only person to blame if you're not enjoying and being fulfilled by what you're doing is you. So do something about it. And so this then comes back to that...

Yeah.

what we were talking about before about creating space. And I think this is the time is to like when you're seeing all this stuff is to back off, create space, find a way to slow down and to see what will come. And the business that you were you were previously talking about Marybrook when we were running the team building and leadership training. So I owned that for 10 years and then I knew it had come to an end. I was you know, I was three out of five in the red. It was time to move on and I'd always planned to sell the business. So.

put on the market. So.

Can I just pause you there, because I want to know, and I reckon our listeners want to know, how do you know when to check your indicators? Like, because it's good, you know, it's easy enough to say I value novelty and I value, you know, something where I'm fine. I'm fascinated with it, et cetera. But you can just be head down, going barreling along focused on goal achievement, you know, hitting revenue targets or KPIs or whatever, and not.

remembering to look at, am I actually enjoying this? Right. And, and I'm wondering what should pull up mechanism, you know, to go, hang on, is this the right track? How do you, how do you know when to stop or at least to check?

I don't know. I guess for me, these are things that I'm continually and intuitively aware of. They're not things that I need to stop and make a check of. I guess I've always had high expectations of what I was going to achieve and experience in my life. And if I'm not achieving those, that feedback loop comes back to me pretty quickly. So for me, it's never required a conscious.

Hahaha

Mmm. Mmm.

Yeah, from.

conscious stop. But there are other myths. Health, health, health are great markers. I was in one role and I've always exercised and I looked at myself, I'm fat. How do I get fat? I never had a car tire around my tummy. What happened? And I realized I'd started this new job that was hugely stressful and demanding and difficult and six months in, I thought, bloody hell, this isn't going right. So that was, for me, was a wake up. Like, hang on, I've got to start doing some things differently here.

Okay.

I think you, what I see in you is someone who's, there's this paradoxical thing going on, right? If you look at your CV, there's a, there's, it's not linear in any way, right? Um, there's a, you could say there's always going to be a narrative and a thread running through it. There's this almost opportunistic, here's when I'm going to go next. I'm going to go Africa now. I'm going to be connected to Africa for nine years. You know, there's this, there's all of these different.

kind of almost spontaneous sort of decisions, which I don't think they were yet at the same time, the other side of that paradox is there's a methodology that you're very methodical around learning to step back and go, huh, all right, I need to reassess and reinvent now. And I really admire that. And I think that's what I'm curious about is this kind of deliberateness.

to go, hang on, where am I going next? Is this the right track? And, and how you tune into that? Cause I know for me personally, I reckon if I had that built in as a deliberate approach to life and did it a bit more often, I reckon I would have pulled up and change course sooner. Um, there's I've lost count of the amount of times I've gone. I wish I'd made that call a bit sooner, you know, and, and change tack.

Hmm, yeah.

I think it comes back to deliberately creating that space. And when I sold Marybrook, I was so busy. I knew intuitively what I was going to do next was not going to be apparent until I'd actually got rid of what I was doing. So I just knew that was not going to happen. So I sold the business and it actually took a year that I didn't work. And I really believed that something was going to show up in that year.

Mmm.

There you go.

Mm -hmm.

But you've got to be on the lookout. It doesn't come always knocking on your door. It wafts around you. And it's people you talk to and ideas that come to your head. And for me, that's vacuum. That vacuum, that space. And I was lucky I could spend a year doing that. But you can do the same thing in a month just by slowing down and not planning a frantic family holiday where you jump from here to there to there. It's something that's not staying at home mowing the lawns and...

Yeah.

fixing up the back shed. It's actually deliberately going to a place that's quiet and unbusied and unhurried and moving around and spending time with others in a non -time limited way and seeing what comes to you. And it looks from the outside, it looks like I come up with these spontaneous crazy things, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like it's a progression professionally, challenge wise, remuneration wise.

That's it.

And it just keeps me interested because the last stop doing the last thing because it wasn't ticking all the boxes. So and I have this I have this theory that I took thousands of people abseiling and abseiling, which is lowering yourself backwards over a cliff that is senseless, meaningless thing to do. Why would you do that? There's no reason to do it. But back when you and I were working together, it was a thing, you know, and and that's what you did. If you're a good boss, you took your people out abseiling and.

I remember I went forwards down a cliff. I got a photo of that.

Yeah, well that's even more difficult because you're looking at your impending doom, you're looking at where you go backwards. But you get people who come and they say, oh, I could never do it. And I say, well, how do you know you could never do it? You haven't done it before. I just know I couldn't do it. Well, you can't know you can't do it if you haven't done it before. So why don't we have a practice? We'll put a harness on you, we'll clip you onto the rope, and we'll give you a go at practicing on the level surface, many meters away from the cliff edge. Do you reckon you could do that? And they go, oh.

impending death.

I suppose I could do that. So you clip them onto the rope and they lean back in the harness. You say, look, you're already absolutely like, you're just on a flat surface at the moment. How does it feel? The harness is biting into your bum and you can feel the rope slipping through your hands. And there's why don't we just ease our way back towards the edge of the cliff. And okay, okay. And if you're a good instructor, you can encourage people, they get right to the edge and everybody knows there's a point of no return. And you're leaning your bum over the edge and you know, if I go another centimeter, I'm not gonna be able to come back. And so.

this is the point to make your decision. Because right now, you have the most information about whether you can abseil or not. And if you get to that point, you're going to can't do it. Absolutely fantastic. You have now experienced abseiling at that point of final commitment you've pulled back. And it's like, hey, well done. You've made a decision with all the information available. If you made a decision two meters up back on the rope, you wouldn't have even known that you could have got.

I think that making life decisions is a bit similar. Try it on for size. Go as close to you can as you can. It might seem ridiculous and crazy and I could never do it and even if I could do it, it wouldn't be any fun and I wouldn't be any good at it. Well, maybe you would be. You've never done it before so you don't know that. So is there a way you can try it before you buy it? Get in there, have an experience of it and then...

and you enter into it as if you're going to do it. That's the key thing. You've got to start as if you intended to complete it. Not that I'm gonna taste it, I'm intending to do this, but I know I can pull out at this final point. And then, so I've done this, I've tried, so I've tried consulting, and I did consulting for six or eight months, and that's a great way to use my accumulated experience, and lots of things, there's an established path here.

Yeah.

And I also tried to be a public speaker. I mean, I love public speaking. And I won this adventure award and great photos of me with penguins. And I went down that path. And it didn't quite fit. So I thought, OK. And then I got invited into another company as a consultant and ended up being the chief commercial officer for a tech company for a while, which felt great at that point in my career. But I think the point is that if you want to create

and bring something interesting and different into your life. Know what are the bigger pictures that you want and create some space. I did a lot of skydiving and I've done like 300 odd skydive jumps and it's incredibly thrilling and rewarding and fun but only because you're confident your parachute is going to come out. Like if you jump out of the plane and you're thinking, geez I really don't know how well I packed that parachute or that other bloke that packed it looked like you know he was having a bad day.

Hmm.

you're not going to enjoy the freefall. You only enjoy the freefall if you're really confident that when you're tired to pull out of the freefall, you can pull your ripcord and the parachute will come out. When you're looking to make change in your life, you can only enjoy the freefall, you know, have been committed to nothing and being in that in -between space if you're confident something is going to show up or you're entering into this next phase as if it's going to be what you're going to do next, wholeheartedly and with full commitment. And then that freefall, that space where...

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's every opportunity like that. All the whole world could come to me right now is exciting. It's it's it's it's it's uplifting. You know, when you think about I could do anything like there's there's there's there's no limits to what I can do out here. I'm just going to wait until the right opportunity shows up.

I love this frame. I love you said, I have a theory. I think it's, it's, it's born out in my life. It's born out a lot of the work I do as well. I'm a, I'm a huge fan of encouraging leaders, people generally to not frame things as binary fail or succeed, but as an experiment, you know, it's like, how do you, let's just treat this as an experiment. You said, try it on for size. Right? I mean, that's another way of saying experiment with it. Try it out. See how what happens.

Mm -hmm.

when you give this a go and it doesn't have to be a bank, the farm sort of experiment. It can be a let's just try it for a week and see what happens. And I remember actually, um, I, you know, I, my first job was a chartered accountant and you remember that, right? Well, you don't remember you went around at the time, but, um, I, I remember you couldn't believe I was chartered accountant. It was funny when I, I knew I wasn't born to be a chartered accountant either, but I did it. And then I kept paying once I finished.

my chart accounting, I went traveling around the world and did all sorts of other things, but I kept paying my fees to the Chartered Accountant Institute for five years. I think it was about 900 bucks a year or something. I spent all this money, nearly $5 ,000 as a backstop because just in case I wanted to go back and I also wanted to say I'm a Chartered Accountant because I had this kind of credibility sort of air about it. And at some point I realized,

Yes.

And I think I've moved on from that. I'm not going back there trying other things for size for five years. That was long enough. But then also I realized, I can just say I'm a former chartered accountant and save 900 bucks a year. But yeah, the whole idea of we hold onto stories, don't we? About what's possible and what's not and what's safe and what's not. And I think this idea of trying stuff on for size and being willing to let's loop right back to earlier in the conversation.

being OK with not being comfortable, right? That it's not always going to just be nice and easy and all mapped out for you, that we actually have to be willing to step into a space of not knowing. And let's see what will happen. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I bet the year or that you decided not to pay your chartered accounting fees was the year that all these other stuff came to you. That's the way the universe works. If you're holding onto stuff, it doesn't give you what's coming next, because you're still holding onto what comes from the past. And I don't know what law of the world that is, but it's certainly been true for me that you don't really get the new exciting chapter.

That was a release.

Exactly.

until you've actually really closed the last chapter and said goodbye to it. It just won't. It won't come to you. And I made a pact with myself. I remember this when I was at university. So I wasn't even 20. And I said, I'm never going to make a decision in my life based upon what is more secure. So I refuse to be that person. I refuse to be someone who says that I'll make this decision because it's got more security attached to it.

because I looked around and I saw the people that actually have that as the primary driver for their decision making don't live rich and full lives and I want to have a rich rich and full life and so I think that this this concept of um you know letting go of what you did in the past you know if you're still enjoying it and it's ticking all your boxes wonderful but but if it's not um you know I think you've got to be prepared to let go of what you had and make a decision which is not based upon

known parameters or known income or known needs.

I love that. I love it. Is it a willingness to keep upgrading your identity? Yeah. Now. There's another question that I reckon we want to explore. Tell us about religion, Mepho.

Hmm. Hmm.

We're getting a dangerous ground here, Digby. I'm happy to go there if your listeners are happy to go with us on this.

Well, we've also always got the edit button right, so let's see where it goes.

Alright, well, so I've always thought of myself as an atheist. I went to a Christian school, a really good school, private school, and I had a wonderful education and my parents paid a lot of money for me to get all this fine education to make me a rational thinker and an intelligent thinker and knowledgeable. And then I'd go into chapel three or four times a week and people would stand in front of me and tell me things which I felt were clearly fairy tales.

They just weren't true. So how is this that I was expected to suspend my rational scientific mind for the period that I went into this place called the chapel? So to me, very early on, it helped me not have a belief in the Christian religion, what the Christian religion had to offer. So I've done all my life like this. And then a couple of years ago, when we started this sailing journey, we ended up in Indonesia.

and Indonesia is a deeply religious country, majority Muslim, although there are Hindu in Bali, of course people in Bali will know that, there are significant Christian areas as well, so it's not only Islamic. But when Indonesia was founded by Sukarno, he came up with this principle called the Pankachela, which is we will build this country on five principles. And one of those principles was that we will accept all religions. So...

a lot of people don't know that in Indonesia, that it's part of their constitution effectively that we accept all religions. But you must have a religion. So we don't accept that you won't have a religion. So if you're an atheist, you have to keep that quiet because actually against the constitution not to be signed up to one of the faiths. So that's pretty interesting when you go there and that underpins all these small villages, the lives that people lead and even if they're not fundamental or...

fundamental followers of any particular faith, they have a faith and you talk to them and you say, when you go there, the first thing you ask somebody when you see them is you say, what's your religion? And they say, oh, I'm a Muslim or I'm a Christian. And in Australia, of course, in New Zealand, you don't do that. It's the last question you ask. It's very personal and could lead to judgment. So you don't, it's not politically correct to do that. But in Indonesia, it's very different. And so it underpins every conversation you have. That's how you start out. And they'll say, oh, what's your religion?

And they typically assume because we're white foreigners that we're Christian. So if I then start to say, oh, look, I'm atheist. They don't really know what atheist is. Also, I don't believe there's a greater God out there. But if you communicate in that in some way, they sort of go, really? You look at all this beautiful world out there and you think there's nothing beyond the physical, there must be something wrong with you. So that was a really interesting experience because what I came to realize is that,

I do believe there's something beyond the absolute physical and that there is something that ties together all the beauty. And we talked about my university career, I got an Honours degree in Agricultural Science. You don't get any more fundamental in understanding evolution and natural selection than having a career in microbiology, biochemistry, genetics and breeding. I mean, this is the sort of stuff we study for four years. So.

Mmmmm

I'm signed on scientist. I understand the world through a scientist's eyes. But what I have come to believe is that there is something beyond the physical that connects all of us. So it connects all people, all animals, all plants, and some it connects us. But what I've also come to know is that for me, that is not what other people call God.

because God in the religious sense is a supernatural being, some entity that controls what we do and what we experience and created this universe and now controls it. I definitely don't believe that. But I do believe there's an energy there. And I think probably that makes me a pantheist, actually. So that's something that I'm exploring around my own personal faith. But...

Hmm.

Okay.

So I might like, I distinguish faith and religion as two separate things. And because religion is actually about control, religion is actually about rules. And religion is a tribal thing. So it's about community and people that have created an identity around a tribal grouping that have a similar set of beliefs and customs. And there are some people that get a lot of comfort from that.

Uh huh, yeah.

and a lot of identity from that. But I believe that it really limits your life experience and limits your curiosity. I think there was a time in history when science was not advanced enough that we were able to understand the world around us. Whereas now, a lot of the world, natural world, is understood and explained by science. Whereas, maybe three, four hundred years ago, it wasn't. So you needed someone to explain to you why these things happened in the natural world.

And that was, it was mystical and I was controlled by another being. So, yeah, so I don't sign up to a religion. And that's interesting also up in this part of the world because that makes you very different to everybody else.

Yeah.

It it's fascinating. There's a couple of things that come up to reflect on here. One is religion equals rules are written down. Faith equals wonder. And there's something about Julia Baird, the Australian journalist wrote a lovely book called Phosphorescence. And it was about I'll hash the subtitle, but something about things that sustain it when the world the things that sustain us when the world goes dark. And it was.

Concerts she wrote, um, I think one chapter on or just having or like being out in nature, looking up at the night sky, like we would do in, you know, you'd probably do this every night now from the, on the yacht. When I'm in Nalu, you know, there's a sense of awe and the smallness that I feel. And, you know, it's that wonder that comes with that. It's like, how does this all work? And that's the thing you talk about curiosity.

Right. That there's, we need that in our lives. Whereas if we're just limited by here are the rules and here are the stories we have to believe, including the ones we tell ourselves. Life isn't as well lived. That's one thing that comes up. And the other one is interesting that people start a conversation, not with what do you do, but what's your religion. And, and you know, the, what, yeah. And, and the kind of the parallel question you talked about before is.

Yes, yes.

So, hey, going you're busy. It's like that doesn't really fit. So it opens up a whole new way into understanding a person, doesn't it? What's your religion? And it sounds like it helped you understand yourself more through.

Mm, mm, mm. Yeah.

Oh yeah, well it did. I've always understood that I didn't fit inside a religious framework, so that wasn't a particular insight. But this conversation around the faith side of it definitely provided an insight to me. We're going through a really beautiful part of the world. Rajar Ampat in East Indonesia is probably one of the world's last paradises. Side tip.

which is where you eloped, by the way, just listeners, right? Got married on a sandbar at low tide, but very high rising, fast rising tide. It was a quick wedding.

Yeah, we did. It was a quick wedding. And there's an interesting tie in here that my wife, Donna, she is quite religious. She is brought up as a fundamental Christian. And so she was very keen that we get married by a pastor. And so under the eyes of God. So I said, well, I can do this. It doesn't mean anything to me. But if it's important to you, we can do this. But.

So it took us a long time to find a pastor because they don't do this. They don't marry people that just rock up and say, we want to get married. They've got to know them for a year and know the families are compatible and all of this sort of thing. But we found this guy, Rudolph, and he was prepared to do it. And he'd never married foreigners before. And so he anyway spoke to Donna and Donna talked about her faith and, pull out your Bible, and I don't have my Bible.

And he said, oh, well, you must have it on your phone. I said, oh, I don't have it on my phone. So they talked about Donna's faith and the fact she's a bit of a backslider. And then he looked at me and said, Andrew, what is your faith? And Donna and I had anticipated this question. And so I said, well, Rudolph, I'm a pantheist. And he said, what does that mean? And I said, well, I sort of believe there's a God all around us and I believe in all religions. And Donna's kicking me under the table saying, oh, this is not the right thing to say.

Ha ha ha.

Love it.

Anyway, full credit to Rudolph that he actually did agree to marry us because he said, Andrew, I think you can be a better, I said, I can be a better man. And then he said, well, I think you could be saved. So he was happy to marry us. And it took him two days to get out in the speedboat to where we were getting married. And he came out in his shiny shoes and his suit. And I said, oh, you must have missed the memo, Rudolph. We're on a sand spit, mate. He was very good. And the reason why we all got wet trouser legs,

is because he went off script and ended up going on a bit longer than we thought he would. And the tide did come up by the time we left the sand spit there was no sand there.

Uh, gold, uh, that's good. So religion does have its uses math, you know, he got married. It was a beautiful ceremony. It's all the photos. Look, I reckon we might want to look back into this, this, this podcast is called dig deeper. And we've gone deep in so many ways in this conversation. Like we always do when we talk, you know, um, our, our campfire conversations that Nalu long drives, all sorts of stuff. Right. The question I love to finish with is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just to invite you to reflect on what have you learned through this conversation about digging deep? What's come up for you that maybe wasn't apparent before?

Um, okay, well, look, I think that it's maybe, maybe it's rather than a new insight, maybe it's a it's a reinforcing of something which I know deep down. And for me, curiosity is everything. So curiosity throws a light on the world. And without curiosity, you can't learn and grow. You can't learn from the experience of others.

And I think that this podcast is perhaps about fertilizing curiosity or sharing experience. I think if you are curious, if you are happy to stop, be quiet and listen to others or listen to the world or listen to your faith or whatever it might be, if you still yourself enough to receive.

Then you can grow, you can become a better person, you can achieve transitions in your life by being open -minded. And I think that if you have this, I have a real need to understand how things work. So, right next to me on this boat, I've got a diesel engine that sometimes is a mystery to me. But the more I can understand how it works,

Hmm.

Ha ha.

the more able I am to maintain it. Because there's no one else up here that's going to maintain it. And I'm not a mechanic, I'm an agricultural scientist, I'm a farmer's son. But I need to be able to fix that thing. So I need to be curious about how it works. If you understand something that you're required to manage, you can manipulate your own approach to get the outcome you want. If you're a farmer, you need to understand how the natural systems of the world work so you know when to plant your crops.

you know, when you know to put the ram out with the sheep, you need to understand that natural system. If you're a people manager, you need to understand human behavior, you know, so, and you need to be deeply interested in human behavior because, and beyond what people's work behavior is, because then you can understand how to get the best out of those people and how to support them and help them achieve their own life goals, because then they'll become better people and that's what leadership is about. So I think that...

Curiosity is everything. And I think that by sharing our experiences and by listening openly to how someone who might have had a different career roles, but might have had similar experiences, we can learn from. And we can adapt that experience to be more fulfilled ourselves and to be a better leader and manager for the people who rely upon us.

because the thing about my busy work life is that, yes, it's goal driven around KPIs and targets and revenues and things like that, but I always told my managers, I said the most important thing here is how we manage our people and providing an opportunity for those people to go on and do bigger and better things, either under our own tutelage or in some other role or some other organization or another career direction. Because when we're finished our professional work lives,

We won't look back and remember the revenue targets we achieved, but what we will remember is the people who worked for us and where they went to after they worked for us and what they stepped onto. That's the really important thing and I reflect on that. It's just hugely enriching diggers to be sitting here.

On other sides of the world, we were talking to each other about our life lessons. When you and I met in that exact environment, you came and worked with me for a short period, a year or two, and then used that as a springboard to go on and work in different directions. And I won't take responsibility for the fact that you've been really successful in what you've done. But if I gave you some experiences or that...

If I didn't give them to you in your time with me, you got some of those experiences that helped you move on to live a fulfilling life. That's the most rewarding thing that you'll ever have as a people manager.

Matthew, you've certainly been a major catalyst in my life coming out of that burnout period that I mentioned. You were someone who pulled me out of quite a dark hole without you even knowing it. And the way in which you, your values that are becoming really apparent now in this conversation around wanting to contribute to someone else's trajectory, that's what happened for me. So yeah, publicly thank you, mate. And.

your talk about accelerating wisdom, curiosity of everything, the way in which you describe the power of curiosity. I reckon that's something for all of us to sit with and reflect on and the allowing the space and having the courage to create the space to not know and to listen and to see what's there that we hadn't seen before. You know, you're in the perfect environment to do it, but I think it's something that.

We can, we can do that in any environment. We find structures, people encouraged to help us do it. So, awesome. So thank you. You have a fascinating life and some of us online, where can people find you? They want it just to follow you and learn a bit more about what you're doing these days.

Well, I love photos. So I love taking photos. I love looking at photos. I love editing photos. I just think they're wonderful. Not just holiday snaps, which are lovely memories, but I love the artistry of photos. So I try and take photos most days. And if I get good photos, I post them on Instagram. So it's not a day -to -day account of what we do, but it's regular images of some of the beautiful places and people we see. So.

It's beautiful stuff.

Yeah, so Digby, you're very welcome to share that. I think you know what that Instagram handle is. So, chasing horizons, chasing dot underscore dot horizons. But yeah, have a look at some of the beautiful places we go to because the world is a seriously beautiful place. And yeah, and not just the natural beauty, but the people as well. And I'll try and capture some of that as well.

Hmm.

I reckon that's a perfect place to win. The world is a beautiful place. Maffo, thanks so much. It's been so rich, so fascinating to connect with you again, mate. We'll see you again soon.

It's been a pleasure, Diggs. Cheers.