Confidence Classic: Why Plan B Is Holding You Back with Matt Higgins

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When you're lobbying for the approval of others or lobbying to bring others along, we always

have to ask yourself, why am I doing that?

Am I doing that because their buy-in is necessary to advance my insight?

Am I doing that to assuage me that I might be wrong because I'm nervous?

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Hi, and welcome back.

I'm so excited for you to meet our guest today.

Matt Higgins is co-founder and CEO of Private Investment firm RSE Ventures and an executive

fellow at Harvard Business School, where he co-teaches the course Moving Beyond DTC.

A guest shark on ABC's Shark Tank, seasons 10 and 11, he will soon star in a new spinoff

business hunters, also executive produced by Mark Burnett.

Matt, thanks so much for being here with us today.

Thank you for having me.

All right.

So, one of the things I love about your story, met the more that I researched you and was

reading your new book, Burn the Boats, was the level of success that you've created in

your life is incredible.

However, most people would be shocked and they definitely wouldn't imagine that you grew

up the way that you did, and I'm just hoping you can share a little glimpse into what

it was like growing up in your situation with a single mom and some of the bold moves

and decisions you made at a very young age.

Yeah.

I'm glad we're starting there because I always say I want to be known more from where I began

rather than where I end up, and I always have to pull forward my origin story in order

to do that.

Shark Tank, all these shiny objects, it's easy to see me a certain way, whereas what

I really want to be seen is a 16 year old kid who dropped at a high school.

So I grew up in Queens, New York, shout out to anybody out there from Queens or New York

City, and I was raised by a single mom who was amazing.

My earliest memories are watching her deal with a lot of health issues.

She just had, she ended up being very obese and had all sorts of comorbid issues that went

along with it, but she also was really desperate to make something out of her life, the product

of abuse.

She left my dad when I was about nine years old, and she had been a high school dropout,

and she was always insecure and ashamed about that fact.

And I watched her go to Queensborough Community College, get her GD, and then a role in

Queens College.

And so my earliest memories were the time before and the time after.

The time after was filled with a sense of dignity and hope for becoming a college student.

And she would take this little boy with her to classes on Saturday, and I'd sit in the

back of the room and watch my mother, my head on the desk thinking, like, why are we here?

What is she doing?

And I remember her reporting back to me, like, I got this, you know, an A in history and

Dr. Factor told me that I'm smart, you know, for the first time.

So, you know, one view is education, the power of transcendence.

And the other view was desperation, right?

Like, little kid, why do we have nothing to eat?

Why are we taking a bus for an hour and a half in order to go to a food pantry?

I don't think I have food pantries where we live, you know, shame.

And I always say that, you know, gourmet meal in my house was this block of government

cheese from the, which I keep on my desk, by the way, as a reminder.

So just poverty and selling flowers on street corners.

I was that little kid on Mother's Day, who knocked on your windows.

They say, excuse me, sir, would you like to buy for your wife?

Like, just every kind of thing.

These things are colliding.

And as time went on, you know, you get more desperate as a kid, and you, and any kid

who's a product of a single parent could relate to this out there, is like, you wish there

would be a white night that would come along.

In my case, I wish there was a hero, man, male figure, who would take care of my mom,

because I was tired of taking care of her.

And so as desperation grew, I was like, I got to do something radical to change my circumstances.

And I came up with this crazy idea that I was going to drop out of high school at 16

years old.

Well, yes, it does sound crazy as a mother of 15 year old.

If he ever came home one day and told me he was dropping out of school, I would literally

bond ground.

And you took away the most salient points for this interview, don't you know, right?

It sounds really aggressive.

However, looking back now, this is the beginning of your own, burn the boats, life and path

to such ultimate success.

However, everyone in the world was second guessing you when you announced this, correct?

Yeah.

Let me explain my takeaways, because I, grad, don't want your 15 year old son to, you

know, take away the wrong lesson.

Yeah, I always say this when you are concealing what's really going on your life, the people

who you get feedback from don't have full context because you're hiding it, right?

So in my case, when I was hiding, I was hiding poverty.

I was wearing my George S jeans back then dating myself.

But, you know, I had, I looked, I looked typical, right?

Nobody knew I was going home and sleeping on a dogwarn mattress on the floor.

My mother would literally wail through the night and pain, you know, just, I was bathing

her like all sorts of things.

When you're a kid, like, you don't want any of that, like, I don't want to pretend

that I was just, oh, what a sweet child.

Like, no, I was frustrated.

I wanted a normal life.

So I talked to my folks at school and when I came up with this crazy plan, wait, if my

mother was able to go to college with a GD, you know, unintentionally, what if I were to

drop out of high school, get a GD at 16?

I could go from making $375 of McDonald's or $5 of a deli and suddenly make $9 an hour.

That was the whole genesis.

If I could go to college and be a college student, I'd look through the penny saver newspaper

and it says, you know, college students only.

I thought, well, I don't know what this college student moniker means, but I'm going to

go get it.

And then I remember talking to my guidance counter, saying like, you will never shake the stigma

of dropping out.

It's a crazy plan.

It is a crazy plan.

And that was the second burn the boats inside I had and ordered a stick to your conviction.

You have to give yourself no option but to go all in because even in the beginning,

I thought, you know, there was a lot of pressure.

We'll just see how, see if you can, you know, pass a couple of more classes, like, give

it more time.

And then I realized, I, in order to do this, I need to fail everything.

I need to get left back over and over again and fully commit to being a total degenerate.

And that's what I did.

I failed every single class for two years, sat in the same room in the back, except for

typing.

I passed typing and I still type 100 words a minute, so this year, 15 year old son,

again, wrong ten quiz.

And, and, and then I had to execute.

And I remember the last day of school, I had to return my textbooks and I walked into

my science teacher.

I talk about this in a burn the boats and true story.

I go to have my boat back.

He doesn't look up because what's this?

I said, it's my, my textbook today is my last day and he looks straight, he goes,

Higgins, what a waste.

I'll see you at McDonald's and it's just, and I remember all the classes laughing and

I'm Irish and I feel like I'm going to pass out and then I start walking out the door.

And then I turn around and I say to him, you know, Mr. Rosenthal, if you see me at McDonald's,

it's because I bought it.

I went to that effect and all the clouds snapped.

You're going to take that and whatever and then I walked that sound.

The steps of Cardoza high school and I lit up a cigarette and I thought he's probably

right.

Like statistically, this is going to dictate a very bad outcome.

I picked myself up off those steps.

I went to Springfield Gardens high school on standby.

I took my GED.

I got a grade score enrolled in Queens College and went back to my prom as, as capital

debate team.

And I remember the look on the face of Mrs. Vega, Mr., Mr. Bark and I remember all the

names Mr. Rosenthal and it went from one of pity to one of admiration with one move.

So the same people who at a moment thought you're out of your mind were like, at a boy,

you know, and that's the other point.

When you make these radical burn the votes moves, like, don't worry about what people say

now because they can't see what you see.

They couldn't see that my mother was slipping away and she was going to die.

She couldn't see that I was getting more self-destructive.

You know, I was just like, I was having a really intrusive thoughts about my life.

I was just really unhappy.

And so they didn't know any of that.

And yet at the end, they were like, they saw all the pieces together.

So to anybody out there and part of the premise of the book is to give you the comfort

to be alone on the bleeding edge with your own insights, because it's lonely.

But the payoff is everybody comes along and says, you know, at a boy.

Okay.

Well, when you were just describing that story of when you told your high school teacher

that the only way you were going to be at McDonald's is when you owned the franchise.

When I was reading the book, I could hear you telling the story, Matt, you're a great

storyteller.

And actually when you were telling the story in the book, you weren't smoking a cigarette

outside.

You were smoking a mall road.

That's what just popped in my mind.

How funny is that?

So my point is for everyone listening, if you like a good storyteller and really want

to be pulled in by something, Matt Higgins new book, Burn the Boats, Toss Plan B overboard

and unleash your full potential is definitely the book for you.

So Matt, let's get into this book because it is so up my alley, which means it's so up

my listeners.

Like I love a great comeback story.

I love an underdog story.

But more important than that, you know, my listeners are going to love that piece of it.

But you did a great job of giving actionable direction in every single chapter, not only

through various stories of multitudes of entrepreneurs and success stories that you've befriended through

your life and your own journey, but also through data and research.

And it was really, really compelling and eye opening for me as a fellow author and just

as someone who always wants to get better and push myself to the next level.

When you start out at the beginning of the book, you use three examples that I really,

oh my gosh, I got so excited reading it.

Number one, you gave an example from the Old Testament, two from the iconic book, The

Art of War.

And then three, most recently from the Ukrainian President Zelensky talking about the ultimate

Burn the Boats move.

Can we start there?

By the way, you're very generous.

I just want to say that.

You're a really good generous human being.

I can tell that you get excited and animated to share somebody else's success, so that's

unusual.

So I just want to say, thank you.

Just nice to see you.

Oh, you're sharing good book.

This is amazing.

You read it.

You care.

I put so much of my being into this book.

It's an active bloodletting.

You know, so to hear somebody else appreciate it.

Thank you.

I, what I wanted to do is contextualize what is this phrase being Burn the Boats.

It's too often associated with Cortez, who is a very bad man.

And so I wanted to make the point, this notion of going all in and having no plan B goes

back to the beginning of recorded history, right?

And then zoom forward all the way up to Zolansky.

And I love talking about him in particular, because I believe there was a turning point

that at the moment we can't visualize because we're in the middle of it.

And that's when then conventional wisdom, including the CIA and the United States government,

I concluded there was zero chance that he's going to win.

And I'll leave that.

He's going to be assassinated.

So at a pity, they were like, we should offer the guy a ride.

And there was this moment when he had gotten a call and I guess they leaked it brilliantly

when the US government said, basically, we'd like to help extricate you from the situation.

And his response, supposedly, was, I don't need a ride, I need ammunition.

And that one simple statement telegraphs both the Ukrainians, but also the outside world,

I'm prepared to die for this, right?

So maybe that was self-talk, but it was, it was the first moment, if you look back, where

the media coverage and even the government, the behavior of the US government started to

pivot, that maybe we got some, this person's willing to invest in.

And it was catalytic that brought everybody along, say, let's, let's invest.

Let's go on Twitter.

It became the first social media war and whatnot.

So I use those examples to show that this principle that humans perform better without

a safety net goes back to the beginning of recorded time.

And we didn't need universities to teach people.

It was, it was intuitive.

And it showed up in the battlefield under the most exigent circumstances when, when people

were outnumbered, you know, tend to want.

Now a lot of them were nasty folks like Caesar and whatnot.

So I wanted to make it clear that it's everybody.

And we can, we can learn a lot from the fact that, that this has been proven time and

again.

We have different guests each week.

We want to travel.

Hopefully.

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Interesting to me, the examples were just so spot on and really connected with me specifically

to President Zelensky.

And it was funny.

I was just watching last night with he was speaking to the house and in Congress.

It was interesting to your point, from a leadership perspective, when someone has truly

burned the boats gone all in taking that massive risk, he didn't have to beg people for help

at that point.

People are rushing him wanting to be a part of what people want to support him and be

a part of what he's created and it was so visibly apparent last night watching him

in motion and how everyone wanting to touch him Pelosi, I think tried to kiss him six

different times.

I mean, it was wild to see so for everyone listening right now, just from a leadership

perspective, when you truly go all in and take the action steps to highlight what you're

doing, people want to be on board it and be a part of that movement, correct?

I had the same thought I was watching him and I was thinking how, how, how architected

that speech was.

All the difference constituents he was, he was trying to speak to the American public.

I know you gave up me tens of billions of dollars.

I'm a good steward of that money, but by the way, that's an investment in your own future.

You just, well, every little thing and then, and then the choice to not wear a suit to

me was fascinating, right?

What do I want to convey?

Do I want to convey that everything's fine and I'm meeting with the head of state?

Or do I want to say I'm taking a break from the war and remind you of it like brilliant.

Actually, I watched that and had the same reaction to it and felt more convinced that

he deliberately pursued a burn the boat strategy and it, and it made sense to sometimes people

can criticize.

I think it's amazing, by the way, and I'm grateful that I'm living through history and

got it to watch it.

But you can criticize.

He was an actor or silly like, was he an actor?

Was he a communicator who knew how to move people and know how to touch people?

Was he the perfect person for this moment at time?

I think he was.

So my mission with my book was to say, some of you have heard this phrase burn the boats

in a military context.

Let's appropriate it for peacetime, you know, because oftentimes we all feel like we're

in a war.

Let's take this concept and pull it forward into every, every day life.

Cool.

Okay.

And thank you for doing that because burn the boats isn't something that I had been applying

to my everyday life or my business.

And now reading your book, I was, you know, of course, applying it all back to my, my

own self, my business, my decisions, and the times I didn't do it too.

That was much more apparent to me as I was reading the book.

You broke the book down into three different parts, get in the water, no turning back and

build more boats.

Get in the water to me.

I mean, just let it really pulls you in, which I think is great because as soon as

you start reading, you're not going to want to put this book down.

You know, you're going to get through the majority of it within the first day.

Well, again, like I said, not only are there these amazing stories from so many different

entrepreneurs, so many businesses that had to go through these big moments, these big

scary moments, but you also give us as readers these examples.

For example, the anxiety study that you shared, that it's actually good to have certain

levels of anxiety and research proves that it will drive you to more success.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Yeah.

And the book for me, I think when you go on Instagram sometime, there's an inauthentic

layer right now to the universe where everyone has a stumble story, you know, vulnerability,

and then there's the arc and then the resurrection and the redemption.

That's not my life.

My life is full of resurrection, redemption, and regression, you know, I'm constantly taking

to stuff.

And part of that is a constant battle with a degree of PTSD from childhood and a degree

of anxiety.

I am not somebody who walks into the set of shark tang, it's like, whatever, Mark Cuban,

Laura Gagnier, I got this.

No, I am somebody who puts in tons of energy to go ahead and synthesize my doubt.

And what I wanted to show in the book from a scientific perspective and then examples

is that there is what is called a level of optimal anxiety.

It's a balance between if a certain degree of anxiety is going to propel you to excellence

and make you prepare and take the steps.

And too much anxiety is going to leave you paralyzed and crippled.

And that isn't just me saying that there's a York Statson law that goes back to the 1920s

that was, you know, demonstrated it scientifically.

But then there are all these different environments where it's been proven out and I wanted to

share them.

So one of the ones I talk about in the book that I love, I refer a coach with a coach

called Eric Mangini, the head coach of the near Jets.

And at the time he was given the like worst nickname anybody could have because he can't

love up to it.

Mangini's because he was a mad scientist and he was like a 37 year old guy who was always

tinkering, tinkering.

But one of the things he did at the time, which seemed absolutely crazy, was that he would

put the players in the indoor bubble where there was tremendous, you know, echo and it was

really hard to hear anyway.

And he would blare Metallica and like the worst heavy metal Metallica is actually great.

The worst heavy metal music to make it impossible for the players to hear and communicate so

that they could have to use hand signals and read body language to mimic what it would

be like to go to the metro dome when it was really loud.

So he was always putting his players in these most uncomfortable anxiety inducing situations

to get the best out of them to prepare.

So I use that as an example of optimal anxiety because it's, it is a utility to it.

And then I also talk about the in the unoptimal anxiety, right?

The crippling kind, whereas when I went on the set of Shark Tank, I was so paralyzed

that I was going to be discovered as an imposter that that little kid eating government

cheese on Queens was going to manifest on the set that I didn't want to go forward.

Then it's like embarrassing to talk about, you know, I debated like, should I put that

in there?

And I was like, if I don't put it in the book, people will see how I performed on TV and

think I was a natural.

And that's not useful, believing that I was good at it instinctively is not helpful.

Actually, it hurts somebody who was like, well, I'm not good at TV.

I was like, well, I wasn't either.

And I tell the story about how I was paralyzed the night before.

I did not sleep for two days.

And then I got on the set and that's when I froze and I had to steal my head.

There was a moment when I feel like Mark Cuban looked over me.

This did not happen.

But in my head, and he's thinking, like, who let this guy here, like, who are you?

And then the self-talk pulled me out of it.

This sort of third person super ego authority that can get you through things and sort of

coaches you through it.

And so in the book, I try to break that down and say, okay, what is the right way to use

self-talk to get you into that state of optimal anxiety?

And on the flip side, last point, the second time I went on Harvard, I had the opposite

problem.

This was like a layout.

I was totally comfortable.

Nothing bad happened.

I was good at it.

I felt good.

And I had no anxiety and fear.

And I felt a little bit bored.

So I had to say, what's my motivational system now that it's not anxiety?

And I had to switch to the pursuit of excellence.

So what I hope the book does is take these somewhat obvious topics that we all talk about

and we all know anxiety, we know failure is good, we know, you know, like, we know them

in platitudes, but do we know them practically speaking in real examples?

Do we know them with authority?

Do we know them with people that we can connect to and relate to?

And that's what I tried to accomplish with the book.

For everyone listening right now, the takeaway here that was really powerful, great reminder

for me is, and I'll use myself as an example, when I'm in a nerve-wracking situation is

not to say, I can do this.

I'm good enough to do this.

It's to say Heather, you got this.

Heather, listen right now, right?

You got to give yourself that space and put yourself in the third person as if you're coaching

somebody else, correct?

Yes. And do you find an annoying, though, by the way, that I mean, you've done really well,

incredibly successful two-time author.

You got this.

I mean, amazing.

Isn't it annoying that you still have to keep doing it?

I mean, maybe you don't.

Maybe you, you've, you've inquished it.

I haven't even I wrote the book.

Like, my book is aspirational.

It's not like I have, just because I have some of the answers to the test,

doesn't mean I can apply them.

But I still have to do it every day.

It's annoying.

I so see it differently now.

So, but do you say that?

I understand why you say that, because I, you know, we wish it would just be easy.

But it, because I was in corporate America in the nine to five, which, you know,

you hadn't been for so, so long.

I was there for the majority of my career.

I wasn't waking up scared.

I wasn't waking up with anxiety.

I was going to the man.

I was, you know, I knew the routine.

Everything was visible.

I knew what next quarter had to come.

I knew what I needed to do annually.

Everything was so clear.

I didn't wake up with anxiety fear and have to coach myself up.

Cut to now every day.

I'm freaking out.

I'm so scared that I've got a meeting with QVC and I've got to get this deal close

and this product has to get on there.

It's on me.

How am I going to talk them into it?

How am I going to get them to feel the passion?

Oh my gosh, Heather, you've done this before.

You can do this again.

I get so excited that I'm talking myself into these fear moments

because I know there's something potentially so great on the other side.

So I don't know, I'm like celebrating every day now

because I had so many days where I wouldn't choose myself.

That is the right attitude.

I think me.

I'm like, why can't I habituate my response to this

so we can preempt having to have the self-talk?

And I think that answer is, it stems from the fact that if you are like you and myself

and you're always putting yourself in these new situations that are uncomfortable,

that is the thing that triggers, right?

It's the fight or flight response.

It's like, oh, I got to overcome it.

And in the pursuit of excellence, I'm going to put a lot of stress on myself.

So I think it's a prerequisite.

So I've come to see that pain as a feedback loop,

but I still wish it wasn't.

I still wish they would be an efficiency to it.

Like, Matt, come on.

I mean, you teach at Harvard Business School.

Like you've been doing it before you.

You've never taught a day in your life.

But yet, no, every day, even it's talking to you.

I'm like, you know, you're amazing.

I write up about you.

Like, I'm like, we're going to crush this interview.

I'm going to put energy into it.

So I guess it's by putting yourself

in these unfamiliar circumstances.

Well, the good news is everybody listening.

You are not alone because we are all in that same boat,

feeling that same way.

Okay, when you brought up the coach of the Jets

and I think I have this right, you'll let me know if I don't,

I thought of the story of him kissing the wife's feet

and getting caught on video.

I love that story.

It was so interesting to me to hear how hard he was on himself

and how you saw that as such an opportunity.

And how it helped to empower and change a moment

of scaring moment for him.

Yeah, that was on the coach of the Jets Rec try

and the most amazing, lovely person.

And it's hard to actually tell this supposed scandal to anyone now

because I don't understand, I don't really get it.

Well, part of it was like a scandal.

But at the time, there was some suggestive videos

that I had gotten out to do with Rex idolizing his wife's feet.

Yeah, I mean, you can't make this up.

And then there was this constant, you know,

barrage of covers on like the post

and every New York paper, everybody trying to, you know, what's going on.

It's like so absurd to recount.

But at the time, it was actually really stressful

in aggravating embarrassing for Rex.

And we had a really close relationship

and I remember talking to him.

And I am that person because of my background

as press secretary to the mayor, running crises 9-11.

I've been through everything that people tend to call, you know,

when the crap hits the fan.

And so I remember going to his office is pretty upset.

And I said, Rex, you got it all wrong.

Something does affect like you're going to go on Oprah.

Like we're going to do it like a 10 book deal

about how to still maintain love for your wife after 25 years.

Like it's an interesting story.

And he like laugh to this day when he sees me there is Oprah.

The moral of that story is a couple of things.

One, when when you shed your shame, even though this is absurd

that it was shameful, but when you shed your shame,

it gives permission for everyone around you to do the same.

To all the catastrophization that you had about what would happen

when you did it never materializes.

And then you regret that you spend so much energy

anticipating what might happen.

Because it never, ever, ever happens.

And third, when you're there for somebody

who's going to the act of shedding shame

and you could stand beside them,

they will never, ever forget that.

And so Rex to this day, now he owns it.

Now he tells a joke like even like a decade later

it'll still come up on TV.

He'll make a funny joke when somebody's foot will come up.

And he realized by him doing that, by him owning it,

it made the players realize that, you know, he was human.

So throughout this book, now when I read my own book,

I'm like, I really, I shared that.

But throughout the book, there's attempts for me

to model what shedding shame looks like

and show by virtue of the fact that I'm still standing,

still writing the book, still, you know, achieving new things.

And it didn't matter.

I talk about my GED when I can instead talk about my honorary PhD.

I talk about Cardo's a high school in government cheese

when I could talk about Harvard Business School in Boston, right?

Like, I don't want to airbrush the end.

I want to show the beginning

so that you could see this journey of shedding shame.

And that's exactly what happened to Rex Ryan.

You do a great job of that when you share your cancer story

and getting divorced.

For me, as a reader relating that back to empathy

and understanding and how it helps you with leading people

and connecting with people you work with.

And I couldn't agree more from my own experience

getting divorced, having a baby getting divorced

made me the best and strongest leader I'd ever been in my career

because I finally could understand and empathize with people.

Yeah, I talk about that in the context of

before I got divorced, if I'm perfectly honest,

I discuss this in a book because I don't want to come across as a hero

that I, because I supposedly powered

through everything in my childhood.

Now I'm a hotshot 26-year-old press secretary of the mayor.

I have all these supposed accolades.

I'm healed, by the way.

Mom's in the rear-view mirror, you know what I mean?

I'm fine.

And when somebody would go through something,

I'd be like, what are you talking about?

In fact, when I had cancer,

testicular cancer, my first reaction

was that of being discovered, which is so crazy.

I was so worried that people were going to judge me as now walking dead,

that they were going to take everything that I had earned from me

in a very like tribalistic way.

Like, and my whole objective was to cover it up.

And I remember how day after surgery, I guess I have surgery,

you know, removed my testicle after finding out, you know,

24 hours earlier than I have to.

I'm like, what?

I mean, this takes a while to process the loss of that part of your anatomy.

Like, really?

Like, what is this entail?

But you have to move quick.

And then I went home and then immediately

once the pain meds were off, I was like, I'm going to lose my job.

So I'm just going to take my spot.

I got, I'm going to be back eating government cheese.

I'm going to be back in landlord Tennacourt on Queens Boulevard.

And then I went the next night.

There was a dinner with the coaches.

And I showed up at the dinner.

With an ice pack in between my legs, you know,

I wouldn't really talk about it.

And then I made a joke, a little toast.

I'm like, hey, everybody.

I was like, I only roll out my new moniker.

And I said, from now on, I want to be known as half the balls twice the man.

You know, now I thought that was like really tough.

They probably were like, what is it matter with this kid?

I did get dog tags made with that.

But my point is, if I could show up to the office having just had

testicular cancer and had this surgery,

then you better suppress your divorce.

All these other things that I thought were secondary that you should have gotten over.

So the reason why I bring this up, it's kind of a little convoluted contradictory.

I bring that up in the book to say,

number one, that is not something to be admired.

When executives, you know, act like they could shoulder everything,

because now you're telegraphing to your team,

we cannot accommodate whatever it is you're going through.

And then to the hypocrisy,

that I wasn't able to extend embassy to other people,

especially around, you know, divorce until I went through it.

When I went through it, it crushed me and brought me to my knees that,

you know, the fear of loss of children and all these other things.

But also, I had been known as the kid who was always doing better,

faster.

I was Dewey Hauser, TV show from the 80s, you know, about 14-year-old doctor.

I was that kid, that was my nickname.

So suddenly, my identity had become enmeshed with this notion of

doing things faster, and now I was taken away from me.

And I talk about how fragile we are when we allow our identity to be associated

with our track or kind of success as to who we are.

And so I wanted to be honest in the book about these things we don't talk about,

like, as an executive, just how corrosive it is when you try to adopt the hero status

and what you're really modeling.

And after I went through divorce and had a bit of an, you know,

what I believe, like in an apparition one night,

I'm spiritual, but not particularly, you know, one religion over another.

But I really felt like I heard the voice of God,

say to me in the middle of the night, Matthew, you know, you are okay.

That was the first time I began to realize that we are born whole,

and we're not dependent both on my track record,

or both on being validated by another human being,

and began to reconstruct my identity and self-worth based upon its own merit.

You know, and the fact that I have everything I need.

So, but the overall point of that chapter is, be careful what you're modeling to your team

when you think you're being a stoic and a heroic.

You might be actually forcing everyone to push their pain down.

Oh, it's so true.

And now, in hindsight, looking back on the leaders I've worked with,

and who I showed up as, the closer I became to my people,

were those moments that you actually were vulnerable.

You become so much more, people are pulled towards you

when they see, when you share your pain, when you share your shame,

like you said, because they finally know they're not alone,

and it's acceptable and that you're going to help be there to encourage them.

So, thank you for sharing that.

I love this idea of acting on lightning, not waiting for thunder.

Can you break that down for us?

So, it's a nice way to package up how to identify opportunities as a metaphor, right?

So, there's a great, great essay.

If anyone out there hasn't read it by Emerson,

it's a piece of writing I return to constantly.

It's called Self Reliance.

And the big theme of the essay is that we all have these spontaneous insights

that are rendered to us by, you know, providence and divine.

But because we lack respect for ourselves and our insights from time to time,

we reject them.

And then we wait till they come back to us,

and we are forced to take our own ideas from another.

All of us have seen this.

Maybe it's you're watching an infomercial or two in the morning,

like, damn, I had that idea.

Or you're watching Shark Tag.

And you're like, I had that idea,

but I didn't have the courage to pursue it

or the respect of myself to value it, right?

So, I talked, okay, how do we identify a proprietary insight that's worth pursuing?

And you have to, I believe, cultivate your mind

first by developing that self-respect,

and then understanding what opportunity is.

So, opportunity, it appears like a flash of lightning.

Not everybody saw it unless you were looking for it,

but you distinctly saw that flash.

What do you do next?

You either begin to pursue it,

because you value that insight and value you,

and you start taking steps in that direction,

or you raise the bar to action,

and you wait for validation from others, thunder.

But by the time you hear thunder,

which is a five-second delay, right,

then it's obvious to everybody else.

So, I'm trying to make the point that true opportunity

arise before the tipping point of evidence,

and you have to get comfortable.

If you really want to have breakout success,

figure out, how do I act on the lightning,

and not need the thunder?

So, it's my way of, I 100% believe this as a life philosophy.

It's the exact reason why I am where I am,

but it's very lonely when you have to act on lightning.

There's nobody to talk to.

And the mere fact that if opportunity and lightning

was obvious to everyone,

there wouldn't be any arbitrage, right?

Everybody would be acting on it.

Everybody would see it.

It reminded me when I was reading that part so much of faith

just having this faith, the unseen, this belief,

and or another way to look at it

would be through this idea of manifestation

and belief before seeing, feeling before seeing.

Is that how you see it?

Yeah, I think it is.

It is really faith.

And I tried to package it in language

that isn't necessarily about religion or spiritual in case

people reject that.

It's just fact, right?

Like when you hear those words,

you realize, oh, that is right.

It's an opportunity because not everybody's acting on it.

Well, there would be no delta anymore, right?

Everybody would have all exactly the same information.

And so, and then training yourself to realize,

like, it doesn't matter if others validated.

Why would they, same going back to my burn the boats moment?

Why, how does it tie into high school and the steps of Cardoza?

Well, they didn't have perfect information that I had.

Number one, I had the, I had the strangest model

of my behavior, which was my mom.

Here I have this brilliant person who inadvertently has,

is a, got a G8, which she didn't intend at H38.

But by seeing that and modeling it,

it opened up a portal to another world where it's saying,

wait, I could deliberately get a GD, right?

The loophole that I was taking advantage of

is fundamentally a rejection of everything they've bought into,

right?

This idea that I need four years of high school

to perform at college where I was like,

well, I don't really think that's probably true.

Like, I think that, I think I could learn it on my own

and fill the gaps.

And then they would have to accept the idea

that subsistence and survival is more important

in this principle of finishing the four years.

Well, that's survival and taking care of my mother was more

important than the idea that I would have a stigma

of being a high school dropout.

Like, they would have to subscribe to all that.

And then why would I put all that energy

when the decision I was about to make was hard already, right?

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I ask you to try to find your passion.

Okay, there's one other example that you shared in the book

that I thought was so eye opening.

It was research around being blindfolded

and taking a basketball shot and people encouraging

or not encouraging.

You can you break that down?

I had never heard it before and it was so interesting.

Yeah, there's a show out there called Brain Games.

It didn't last for a long but I love this show

and it's always looking at these different topics

and trying to understand the psychology of motivation

and whatnot.

So one of the episodes they had,

they were trying to understand what's the empirical impact

of people cheering for you or rooting against you.

And so in one of the experiments,

they had a woman come along who was terrible at basketball

and she went ahead and she tried to do a couple of, you know,

10 free throws.

I think she got zero of them.

She was awful, right?

Like didn't just airballs everywhere.

And then they put on a blindfold and there was a crowd around

and she knew it.

And the crowd was instructed to cheer multiple times

when even though she got an airball.

And she was so like enamored with her own performance.

I can't believe I did that.

And then they went ahead and they took the blindfolds off.

She shot 10 more times.

She shot four baskets.

This is a person who couldn't shoot a basket

of her life dependent about it.

And she was able to get a 40% hit rate.

I just thought that was like so incredible

and an empirical way.

And then they did the reverse.

They had somebody who was a great free throw,

a bunch, whatever like that.

Then the crowd did, they booed,

even though they were hitting them when they were blindfolded

and their performance degraded.

And then they actually did an elite athlete.

And the elite athletes performance didn't change,

which I thought was incredible

because they had trained their mind

to be able to handle both situations.

And so it's a way of simply saying

that the internal and external inputs

do affect your performance.

Like, I'm not immune.

The work I put in is not in spite of me being, you know,

immune actually is in spite of me being subjective

to all these forces.

I have to work on it, right?

It's not because I am intellectually curious.

If somebody gives me feedback

or is trying to tear me down,

it's not like I dismiss it outright.

I want to make sure that there's something to extract

that I could get better.

But then I need to immunize it

from making me suddenly a very bad free-thrower, right?

So it is a balance.

And I talk in the book about how to strike that balance,

how to take feedback, how to process information,

how to process failure, but not let it cripple you.

It's so good.

You definitely break down haters in a way

that I hadn't seen it as more useful

and how you can turn it into a useful exercise for you,

which I had not done before.

So thank you for doing that.

And one other thing I wanted to highlight,

a key takeaway for me personally, I love.

You shared that when you do have a plan B,

research shows that you are actually not as motivated

to pursue with that primary goal.

I'm not sure I don't remember what school,

maybe it was in Wharton, maybe it was in Wharton Business School.

And you gave the example that they had two different test groups.

One said, they said,

here's your plan, go after this one goal.

And the other one they said,

here's your plan, go after this one goal.

But you also have a plan B in case you needed available.

And how demotivated and quickly they wrapped things up

and gave up on that second team.

However, that first team delivered on their initial goal.

Yeah, I love that study because I think people could understand

if you have a real plan B when you're pursuing something hard,

like it's a it's a really fully developed

backup plan.

How that could actually erode some of your ability.

That's an intuitive thing we can all understand.

What this study showed was that even contemplating it.

Because all they said to the students,

you can think about your plan B.

You could think about the possibility that you don't get it.

There was no efforts to go in that direction.

It was purely theoretical.

And that materially impacted their motivation

and their likelihood of being successful.

Their performance materially degraded.

So the point of that is the mere presence

of even a backup plan affects your performance.

Now, when I talk about this,

a lot of people, and I'm sure the reviews will say it,

will reflexively recoil and say,

this is irresponsible.

Like you're basically saying that you should just go all in.

And what about people have to pay the rent?

People have children.

You know, what if it fails?

I talk a lot in the book about going,

burning the boats doesn't mean burning the boats with you on it.

You know, it means actually,

what does it take to you to fully commit

under the circumstances and a framework for you to go ahead

and do that?

One of the core elements of it is to process risk factors.

The reason why we don't fully commit often

is because it's not because we are necessarily afraid

of what's going to happen.

It's because we haven't processed the worst case scenario

and assimilated that information and realized,

all right, I'll be all right, right?

Like I'll get another job or whatever

whatever the rationalization is.

And so I think most people bypass the act

of processing the risk

because they don't actually want to be confronted

with the decision.

So part of the burn the boats philosophy

is yes, met a great risk.

Yes, we would think through the worst case scenario.

Yes, make provisions so that you could feed yourself

in your family because once you've done that,

you'll perform better.

You won't have the same anxiety.

So burn the boats is not a blueprint

for irresponsible risk.

It's a blueprint for synthesizing risk

so that you can go all in without worrying

about the downside because you've already processed it.

Oh, I love that.

And it's so true.

I have so lived that and I couldn't agree more.

Who did you write this book for?

I love that question.

And I really do because I feel like I

I feel like when you see the title,

somebody will think I was jingoistic.

You know, it's not for me.

It's belligerent.

It's, you know, some white male businessman,

you know, telling me what to do.

I wrote this for hopefully first and foremost,

the unseen for somebody out there

who says the die is cast.

Who thinks from because of the circumstances I was born into

because of some of the bad decisions I made

that put me in the circumstances I regret.

You know, it's too late, right?

I wanted to strip myself there

to give anyone any entry point to my journey

and the journey of 50 other people to say,

All right, well, he dropped that ice going.

Got there or he had cancer or he got the word,

you know, again, it's not an autobiography

because I'm not as interested in my own story

as I am interested in me as a vessel

to transmit this idea.

I wrote this book for anybody out there

who frankly thinks it's too late or it's not for them.

And you'll notice, I don't know if you notice,

but I'd begin with a female entrepreneur.

I end with a female entrepreneur.

My life has been guided by strong women.

The first was my mother who've been inspirational.

So I hope when someone reads this book,

say, this is a more thorough compendium of success

than I've seen in a long time.

And there's somebody in there that I could, you know,

grab onto.

One of my favorite parts of the book was at the end

of my Harvard class.

I was talking to two students, black women.

And they were making a really interesting nuance point.

We had an entrepreneur in the class

and he was talking militarily and gesticulating

and using a curse word every two seconds

to kind of breaking the decorum of, you know,

the August Harvard Business School.

And I thought it was theatrical and entertaining.

It's just style.

And one of the students says to me,

you know, I could never talk like that in this class.

And I was like, well, why?

She said a couple of reasons.

One, I'm a woman.

Two, I would be, I'm black woman.

And I would be judged.

And I'm not only concerned about me being judged.

I would then therefore be ruining

for every woman who comes after me in the same.

And I said, wait, tell me more about that.

And she says, I carry the entire weight

of my race and gender on me when I come into this room.

And it made me realize, wow,

despite what I've ever been through, right?

You know, all the poverty or that,

I'm still born as a white man

with the advantages that come into it, right?

And I never had to represent anyone but Matt Higgins.

Like, there is no stakes, you know what I'm saying?

And here's somebody who not only has to break through,

has to burn the boats,

but also has to make sure

in doing so she represents, you know, her community.

I put that story in there for a reason

to say, I hear you and I see you.

And that is true.

And it is a way to distinguish yourself from me.

Nonetheless, you wish to break through.

You wish to burn the boats.

You don't want to hedge and hesitate.

You want great things for yourself.

So let's see you and let's hear you and let's acknowledge you.

And then let's do something about it.

So that to me is one of my favorite parts of the book

because it is easy to say,

to remove yourself and say, well, that's not for me.

You were able to pull that off

for whatever structural advantage.

Like, of course, I have structural advantages.

But at the same time, we still both want the same things.

So that's who the book is for.

Well, I will tell you being an avid reader.

I love the book because it was so eye-opening for me.

So helpful.

If you are going through any period in your life

where you're questioning things,

you think it's too late for you

or you want to make a leap and you're not sure how

or what next step to take.

Get burn the boats.

Matt Higgins, where can we get burn the boats?

Where can people find you?

How can people catch up with you?

Burntheboatsbook.com is my website.

It's on Amazon.

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn.

I love LinkedIn.

I feel like it's like a warm bath.

You know, I'm on Twitter

and everything else, but if I'm honest,

I'm on everywhere else reluctantly.

And LinkedIn is amazing.

So find me on LinkedIn.

All right, burn the boats, guys.

If I'm Matt Higgins, Matt, thank you so much

for writing the book and thank you for being here.

No, thank you for having me. This was amazing.

All right, guys. Until next week,

keep creating your confidence.

You know I will be...

No one succeeds around you.

You don't stop and look around once in a while.

You can miss it.

I'm on this journey with me.

With you.

With you.