The Shape of the Sapling

What a farm boy who walked away taught me about becoming

In March I visited the All Blacks Experience in Auckland. Squeezing it in after speaking at adviser conferences following the launch of MLC Retirement Boost.

The All Blacks have a motto I first heard at INSEAD: through difficulty, to greatness. It’s painted on walls, stitched into culture, passed between generations.

But what struck me most wasn’t the Haka (although spine tingling). It was the Māori proverbs I kept seeing - on walls, in businesses, in hospitals, everywhere:

Whakataukī are what they’re called. Traditional proverbs from authors unknown. What I realised is that self-help culture is largely ancient wisdom repackaged for modern consumers. Encountering these sayings in te reo Māori, carved into the walls of a country that lives them, makes you realise how easily organisations can drift from the basics.

“Ko te piko o te māhuri, tērā te tupu o te rākau.”

The shape of the sapling determines the growth of the tree.

This sapling proverb stayed with me. I read it as I wandered down the players tunnel, closing my eyes as I savoured the simulated roar of the crowd. Remembering the smell of cut grass from my teenage years playing rugby back home.

It’s not about planting the right seed, it’s about how the soil, the weather and the hardship shapes what the tree will become. Action comes first. Identity follows.

That’s exactly what this edition’s guest has been living - from a sheep farm in central New South Wales to the infrastructure underneath your superannuation.

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Become By Doing with Mat Keeley

(Co-founder & Former CEO, Grow)

The full episode is available now on Spotify and Apple

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Mat Keeley co-founded Grow, one of Australia’s most well-known wealth management startups - and then did something most founders never do. He handed over the keys and walked away.

We first connected when the company was still scrappy enough to have beer taps in the garage. When we sat down for this episode, I expected a story about building.

What I got was a story about ending and why knowing when to close a chapter might be the most underrated skill in a career.

The forward in the ruck

When I asked Mat what sport taught him about leadership, he took me back to my own rugby days (I’m an absolute sucker for sporting analogies)

His team was running a video session. A winger scored in the corner and did a big celebration (good-looking guy, always gets the glory). The coach said nothing. Then he wound the tape back.

There was a forward - no frills, no glamour - who’d won a fast play-the-ball and shifted a whole line of defenders with perfect technique. Because of that, thirty seconds later, the winger scored.

The coach’s point had nothing to do with the celebration itself:

“Never celebrate like that unless you go back and thank the person who’s the real reason you scored.”

What stuck with Mat wasn’t the rebuke - it was the principle under it: respect what every person on a team actually brings, especially the ones whose work never shows up on the highlight reel.

“A small team of A-plus players,” as he put it, “can do incredible things.”

The $55,000 leap

Mat’s a fifth-generation farm boy from Lake Cargelligo, out past Griffith - sheep and wheat for as far as the eye can see. He didn’t finish his school exams and wanted to be a footballer or a farmer, full stop.

He carried a fixed mindset about his own intelligence until university quietly dismantled it. From 51% in intro economics, Dean’s Awards by graduation.

“I learned that I could just learn. There’s nothing I couldn’t learn.”

A teammate at his Canberra football club talked him into financial planning. He left a well-paid tech job to earn $55,000 a year as a paraplanner and spent a decade in advice before he built anything.

But advice was the vantage point, not the destination. A decade across the table from people and their savings showed Mat the opportunity to make the back-end of wealth management just as slick as the apps that run on top of it. Before you can nudge people toward a better retirement, you have to clear the sludge underneath.

Pitching the giant

Early in Mat’s founder journey, he had a wild idea: that Vanguard should buy his start-up. He found the right person, pitched him over a coffee in Melbourne, and got a flat no - Vanguard would never be a super fund.

That lasted about four months before his phone rang and Vanguard told him they were entering Australia’s 4 trillion dollar super sector and wanted his thirty-person company to tender…against global players worth billions.

“I thought we were obviously red hot favourites,” he laughs.

They won. What a giant couldn’t do from inside its own scale, a small team could do from first principles. And the lesson that stuck with Mat wasn’t about winning, it was watching a large organisation get the very best out of a small one without crushing it.

Reading backwards from seventy

After all of it, Mat took his family to New Zealand for five months. No technology, no agenda. Just thinking. He recalled a story an American businessman had handed him back in his footy days:

“Imagine you’re seventy, reading a book. You get to chapter four, it’s good. Do you keep reading - or do you go, this book just keeps telling the same story?”

Little did Mat know the gentleman’s name was actually on the back of his footy jersey. So Mat started thinking in chapters. The thing he’d built, remarkable as it was, was one chapter. In New Zealand, he started reading backwards from seventy.

“I’ve never felt so free. And I’ve never felt as ambitious. It’s like I’ve been given a second chance.”

He describes the shift as moving from an achievement-based identity to a systems-based one - not chasing outcomes, but trusting the process to deliver them.

Four things to stay honest about: family, friends, fitness, community. Nobody’s the best at all four. The systems just stop you lying to yourself about which one you’re neglecting.

Become by doing

At the end of the day, Mat didn’t plan his way to who he became. He acted his way there. Left tech for $55k, coached football through Canberra winters, pitched a giant from a garage, then walked away at the peak to start a new chapter.

“Through action you get motivated. Through motivation you become inspired. And inspiration drives more action. It’s a beautiful flywheel.”

That’s Become By Doing. You don’t wait for the map - you move, and the map appears. You don’t wait for inspiration - you act, and it follows. You don’t plan your way to a new identity - you start ugly, and the doing makes you who you become.

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Mat learned to read his life in chapters. I’m still writing mine (literally).

What chapter are you in - and is it time to turn the page?

- AJ