David Letele aka Brown Butabean addresses the audience at the Ōtorohanga District Development Board's first post Covid Incite event
There’s nothing like a brain tumor to knock a family around, Young Farmer of the Year Emma Poole told diners that the Ōtorohanga District Development Board’s first post-Covid Incite event.
A middle child and the middle speaker in the line-up, Emma said she was about 10 years old when her dad’s diagnosis changed the dynamic of everything they knew.
He was sick for a long time and the tumor was said to be inoperable – apart from one surgeon who offered to fix him.
But her dad wanted to see the All Blacks win a rugby world cup final before he went under the knife.
“Nothing to do with his family. He didn’t care about us, he just had to see those All Blacks win,” she joked.
So, they went half-way round the world to France and were sitting in a pub watching as the French side completely rolled the All Blacks.
“He decided at that point that he was just going to have to live,” Emma said.
“He couldn’t die with this operation. He would come back to New Zealand and live, and wait till the next world cup – and that’s just what he did.”
Emma said for the seven children, there were some key lessons.
“We learned to be kind to one another.
“We learned to be grateful, but most of all, we learned to recognise happiness and to nurture it, and to look after it.
“I think these days we spend a lot of time talking about mental health, and not to take anything away from that conversation, it’s really important to talk about that – but I don’t think we spend enough time in the balance of that conversation talking about what happiness looks like.
“How to recognise it and what to do with it when we do have it, because happiness is quite an unusual thing, it can be given to anyone and taken away at any moment.
“It’s definitely not a right; it’s not a right to be happy and even sometimes when you have earned the right to be happy, it doesn’t come to you.
“So, what we learned from a young age was when we had happiness, we learned to nurture it, and setting ourselves up for when the next opportunity to be happy was just around the corner so we could maintain that continuum.
“And that really started my quest for happiness.”
Emma was never in a sad place, but she was always where she could see the future and that happiness was just around the corner.
For David Letele, aka Brown Buttabean, there was a lot of struggle involved in finding happiness.
His weight ballooned following his league and boxing careers.
Regaining fitness and happiness as the weight came off became part of a toolkit that is now a mainstay of the Brown Buttabean Motivation gyms that have been spreading across Auckland since 2014.
David once weighed 210 kilograms, and now weighs less than half his peak weight.
He says it’s simple: stop eating shit, stop drinking shit and take a walk.
Born into a life of crime with a mobster bank-robbing father, and an uncle who was also a bank robber but who specialised in armoured trucks, David said he used where he was from, to push himself to do better.
He recounted what he said to four children he found living in emergency housing. Their father had asked David for help.
“These places are licenses to print money.
“We as taxpayers are paying $2500 a week for them stay at a place you wouldn’t have your dog stay at.
“And it broke my heart. The four kids hadn’t been to school since March, you could see the cycle going round and round.”
The Ministry of Social Development acted on his phone call when he promised to go to the news media.
“I turned to the kids, and I said ‘look I know this is hard, I know this is tough; it sucks – but I want you to use this adversity and this struggle as fuel for you.
“As fuel to drive you to be successful, to drive you to study hard, to drive you to be better and never forget how the system has failed you, so you will not rely on it’.”
Adversity was the fuel to use to be better, he said.
When he returned to New Zealand from Australia, he hated being poor, and said it was no accident that where there was a massive increase in crime, there was a massive increase in poor people.
“There is a direct correlation there.”
Sacha Coburn, founder of Coffee Culture franchise and leadership training The Company You Keep, was the first speaker of the night and humorously illustrated her discussion of resilience in business and life from personal experience.
“Ever try to get something imported from overseas even now, and there’s shortages in the supermarket – it just blows my mind,” she said.
“If you want to import a new Audi out of Germany at the moment, you can get one, but it won’t have electric windows.
“It will have wind down windows, and you know why? Because of the microprocessing chip.
“There’s all these knock-on effects of the pandemic and I know you will have found that in your business as well.
“In hospitality, businesses kept getting new plans about opening. They could be open, but only if people came to the door to pick up their coffee. Then they could go inside, but they couldn’t be near each other.
“Most of the guys that come to our coffee shop, come in because they want to be near to our staff.
“How’s this going to work? Because coffee shops are pick-up joints. Did you not know that?”
In the post-Covid world, they could not control what was going to happen, but they could control their response to it.
“And we are going to be the friendliest, warmest, no moaning zone coffee shop that you will ever visit during this time,” Sacha said.
“If they come in with their complaints, yes they will bring them – but we are going to give love back because that’s what our community needs now.”
