If you were going by Matthew Tukaki’s school achievements, you wouldn’t have put much money on his being the most likely kid to succeed. As he tells Dale in this interview, his education story was nothing if not consistent: he didn’t pass anything, but he had a good time.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of his story. He went to Australia, like so many New Zealanders, and made his mark in a number of high profile roles, including as head of Drake International, as a broadcaster and entrepreneur, and more recently as the chair of Suicide Prevention Australia, which he joined after his best friend took his own life.
He’s still based across the ditch, but we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of him in Aotearoa as well — he chairs both the Maori Council (Auckland district) and the National Maori Authority. Here he tells Dale about the path he’s been on.
[…] I had this business studies teacher by the name of Paul Ellis, and he said something really interesting to me one day. He said: “Teaching is an art. It’s something we make up every day. Whatever you choose to do in life, you’re going to be making it up every day.”
And here I am, still making it up every day. You often walk into things and you don’t necessarily know what you’re doing, but you try to figure out the right way of doing things by not being boxed into conventional thinking.[…]
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