About Andy Matthews

I was in the Nu Prime class and finished the program in 2012.  I think the trajectory, when I started, I was a finance guy and wanted to transition to some OD. Everyday life didn't change that much, but in 2016 I had a stroke. So a medical earthquake. Without the support of [Kathy] , who's here today, my wife and family, I wouldn't have recovered as well. When you go through something like a stroke, it's an earthquake in your world. So what MSOD changed for me is do you see it problems or do you see possibility? And I think that if you're lucky enough to survive the stroke, seeing possibilities is a great measure to have in the way you look at things.

My legacy, my mother came from a dairy farming country in Australia and I look at the community there and the legacy and I often think about the quote, "Farmers don't grow crops. Farmers create the conditions for growth to occur." So I think the legacy that I would like to leave is that for my children, my workmates, my colleagues, people I work with, is that I helped create the conditions in which growth can occur. And if I do that and help myself and other people blossom and create the conditions for blossoming, that's awesome.

My long term goals, I tossed and turned thinking about that, I was a bit restless. It's about combining ... I talked about being a finance ... doing OD in the cloak of a finance guy, and since recovering from a stroke, it's like being ... one of the things that you do is learn new things. And the learn new things I did was some acting courses. So it's really transitioning now from being an OD guy in the cloak of finance to being an actor in the cloak of an OD finance guy. And what that means to me is combining business, which I work in, education, and not for profit. So I've joined the board of the Stroke Foundation. So I really like the thread of joining those three things. I don't quite know how I'm going to do it, but it's about bringing those things together to impact both the health of the world and the education in the world.

I think in that first piece, the whole getting out of seeing a problem to seeing a possibility, out of seeing this is a real problem to what's the opportunity here. If I hadn't had that, recovering from a stroke might have been quite different.

I think because of the program and the time in Costa Rica and in the ... we visited the slums and it was one of the questions that we were confronted with was do you see problems or do you see possibilities. And it's easy in a slum to see lots of problems. There's, as one person said, danger everywhere, but equally, there's a lot of creativity, a lot of innovation. Someone climbed up and tapped a power line. I mean, that's ... how do you do that? I mean, I'd die, I'd get electrocuted. So there's a possibility there of what people can create and for me post-stroke, it was like, well, how do I create an opportunity from this? How do I get possibilities? If I hadn't spent that time in the program, and especially in Costa Rica, maybe I never would have seen that.