Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - Why It’s Time To Burn The Boats, With Matt Higgins CEO & Co-Founder At RSE Ventures Episode 295

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

In This Episode You Will Learn About:  How to live life WITHOUT needing the approval of others   Why we struggle with commitment and how we can use our anxiety for GOOD   The type of self talk you need to CONQUER your fears  The 3 part burn the boat theory to help you stick by your convictions and reach your ULTIMATE success  Resources: Website: www.burntheboatsbook.com Read Burn The Boats  Email: [e-mail]  LinkedIn & Facebook: @Matt Higgins Youtube: @BurnTheBoatsBook Twitter: @mhiggins Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/creatingconfidence and get on your way to being your best self. Show Notes:  Are you holding back from going after your dreams because of what other people think of you? Well, nobody can see your true potential better than YOU can! We’re joined by Matt Higgins, the CEO and Co-Founder of private investment firm RSE Ventures, and a guest Shark on season 10 and 11 of Shark Tank! He’s here to share his 3 part burning the boat theory so we can leave behind our shame and use our fears to go after our goals even harder!  About The Guest: Matt Higgins is the Co-Founder and CEO of private investment firm RSE Ventures and an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. As a guest shark on Shark Tank’s season 10 and 11, Matt is taking things to the next level and will soon star in a new spinoff, Business Hunters!  If You Liked This Episode You Might Also Like These Episodes: Start Putting Yourself FIRST, With Heather!  7 Steps To Manifesting the Life of Your Dreams With Suzanne Adams Business Development Strategist & Motivational Speaker  How to Make Things Happen with Heather & Kelley Tyan, Author & Success Coach! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Croger, fresh for everyone, must have a digital account to redeem offers. Restrictions may apply, see site for details. When you're lobbying for the approval of others, or lobbying to bring others along, I 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? The reason why we don't fully commit often, 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 realize. I'll be all right. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close to

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, 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, I know, 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 and I always have to pull forward my origin story in order

to do that, you know, 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 burial beasts 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 high watched her go to Queensborough Community College, get her GD and then enroll in Queens College. And so my earliest memories were the time before and the time after, you know, the time after it 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? Like, what's 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? Don't they 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 in 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 window and said, excuse me, sir, would you like to buy for your wife? Just every kind of thing.

These things are colliding. And as time went on, you know, you get more desperate as a kid. 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 knight 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 gotta do something radical to change my circumstances. And I came up with this crazy idea that I was gonna 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 fall around. I would think, you're good man, you took away the most salient points for the interview,

dumb shit. Right, it sounds really aggressive. However, looking back now, this is the beginning of your own, burn the votes, 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, Greg, don't want your 15-year-old son to, you know, take away the wrong lesson. But, yeah, I always say this, when you're concealing what's really going on in 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 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 started at the, 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 three seventy five in McDonald's or five dollars of a deli and suddenly make nine dollars an hour that was the whole genesis if I could go to college and be college student I'd look to 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 gonna 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 in order to 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 is to your 15 year old son, again, wrong 10 questions. 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 and I burn the boats and it's 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 and goes, Higgins, what a waste. I'll see you at McDonald's. And it's just, and I remember all the classes laughing and at McDonald's. And I remember all the class is laughing, and I'm Irish, and I feel like I'm gonna pass out, and then I start walking out the door, and then I turn around, and I say to him, Mr. Rosenthal, if you see me at McDonald's,

it's because I bought it, something to that effect. And all the clouds snap, you're gonna take that, or whatever, and then I walk that sound, the steps of the car does a 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 and rolled 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. Barker, I remember all the names, Mr. Rosenthal. And it went from one of pity, right, to one of admiration with one move. So the same people who at a moment thought, you're out of your mind, were like, out of 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. I was having 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 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, how to boy. Okay, well, when you were just describing that story of when you told your high school teacher that you, 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 bro. That's what just popped into 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 Pot 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 alley. 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 boat's move.

Can we start there? By the way, you're very generous. So I just want to say that. You're a really good generous human being. I could 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 the book. This is amazing. You read it. You care. I put so much of my being into this book. It's an active blood-letting. You know, so to hear somebody else appreciate it, thank you.

I, what I wanted to do is contextualize what does this phrase mean, burn the boats? It's too often associated with Cortez, who is a very bad man. And so I wanted to pick 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 gonna win. And now that he's gonna be assassinated. So at a pity, they were like, maybe 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 telegraphed both Ukrainians but also the outside world, I'm prepared to die for this. So maybe that was self-talk, but 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 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 intuitive and it showed up in the battlefield under the most exigent circumstances when people were outnumbered, you know, tend to want.

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gone all in, taken 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 everyone wanting to touch him, Pelosi, I think, 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 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.

Like just, well, everything's gonna be. Well said. 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 a 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's strategy. And it makes sense. He does sometimes people can criticize, I think is 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 or was he a communicator who knew how to move people and know how to touch people? Was he the perfect person for this moment of 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. Because oftentimes we all feel like we're in a war. Let's take this concept and pull it forward into every day of life. Well, okay.

And thank you for doing that because burn the boats isn't something that I have 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 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 like 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 throughs that it will drive you to more success. Can you talk us a little bit about that? Yeah, I am. 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 two steps. 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 tank,

it's like, whatever, a barcuba and a lower guinea, I got this, no, I am somebody who puts in tons of energy to go ahead and synthesize my doubt. And what I want 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 demonstrated 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 worked for a coach where the coach called Eric Mangini, the head coach of the near Jeds. And at the time he was given the worst nickname anybody could have because he can't live up to it. Manginius because he was a mad scientist and he was like a 37-year-old guy, he 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 the unoptimal anxiety, right? The crippling kind, whereas when I went on the set of Shark Tag, 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. 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'm 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. 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 at it. And he's thinking, I'm like, who let this guy here? 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, 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, you know, use myself as an example, when I'm in a nerve-wracking situation, is not to say, I can do this, 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've 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 it 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've, you've inquished it. I haven't even I wrote the book. Like't it annoying that you still have to keep doing it? I mean, maybe you don't. Maybe you've, you've inquisited. I haven't even I wrote a 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. It's so funny 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, we wish it would just be easy. But 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 need 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 closed 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've got, 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 wasn't to do 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 it hard for business school. Like you've been doing it for four years, never taught it day in your life. But yet, nope, every day, even talking to you,

I'm like, you know, you're amazing. I write up about you. And 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.

Could we, 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 Tim power and change a moment of scary moment for him. Yeah, that was on the coach of the Jets Retry 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 on aggravating embarrassing for racks.

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, he was pretty upset. And I said, Rex, you got it all wrong,

something that's a fact, like, you're gonna go on Oprah. Like, we're gonna do a 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. And to this day when he sees me there is Oprah. The moral of that story is a couple of things. One, 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 stamp 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 that it didn't matter. I talk about my GED when I can then instead talk about my honorary PhD. I talk about Cardoza high

school and 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 should know what that means already. That's the best kind of notification. That's the sound of another sale on Shopify. And the moment another business dream becomes a reality. Shopify is a commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide.

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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 discussed 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 rearview 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 for 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 miss it. It 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 gonna lose my job. So I'm just gonna take my spot. I got, I'm gonna be back eating government cheese. I'm gonna be back in landlord 10th court 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. 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'll only roll out my new moniker. And I said, from now on, I want to be known as half the balls, twice the man.

Now, I thought that was 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 a secular 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, too, 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,

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 do yehouser, TV show from the 80s, about a 14-year-old doctor. I was that kid, that was my nickname. Suddenly, my identity had become enmeshed with this notion of doing things faster, and now I was away from me. And I talk about how fragile we are when we allow our identity to be associated with our track record 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 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 are okay. It 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. And the fact that I have everything I need. 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 heroic. You might be actually forcing everyone to push their pain down.

It's so true. And now in hindsight, looking back on the leaders, I have worked with them 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 gonna help you 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 of metaphor. Right? So there's a great, great essay of 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, 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 Shirt 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 of just having this faith, but 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 pat kitchen 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 validate it. Why would they, same going back to my Burn the Boats moment? Why how does it tie into high school

in the steps of Cardoza? Well, they didn't have perfect information that I had. Number one, 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 GD, which he didn't intend at H38. But by seeing that and modeling it, it opened up a portal to another world where I was saying,

wait, I can 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 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 in 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? So I talk about this in a book and in life generally, when you're lobbying for the approval of others or lobbying to bring others along, you 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 a swage-me that I might be wrong because I'm nervous, right? And the end of the day, most of the times you don't need their approval, you're doing it because you're insecure.

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It was research around being blindfolded and taking a basketball shot and people encouraging or not encouraging. 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 very 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, did just air balls everywhere. And then they put on a blindfold and there was a crowd around and she knew it. 10 free throws, I think she got zero of them. She was awful, right? Like did 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 for life dependent on it, and she was able to get a 40% head rate. I just thought that was so incredible and an empirical way, and then they did the reverse.

They had somebody who was a grape-free throw, a rubon, whatever like that, and 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 immune. Actually, it 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 out 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 in 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 important, maybe it was a 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 need it 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 really fully developed backup plan, how that could actually erode some of your ability.

Like 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 can 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, alright, I'll be alright, 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, so part of the Burn the Boats philosophy is yes, Middegrate risk. Yes, we think through the worst case scenario.

Yes, make provision so that you could feed yourself and 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 risks so that you can go all in without worrying about the downside because you've already processed it. Oh, I love that.

And so true. I have so lived that and I couldn't agree more. Who did you write this book for? Oh, I love that and so true. I have so lived that and I couldn't agree more. Who did you write this book for? Oh, I love that question. And I really do because I feel like I, I feel like when you see the title, somebody will think, oh, it's jingoistic. You know, it's not for me, it's belligerent.

It's, you know, some, some white male businessman, you know, telling me about what to do. I wrote this for hopefully first and foremost, the unseen for somebody out there who says The die as cast who thinks from because of the circumstances I was born into because of some of the bad decisions I made that put me into 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 out of high school and got there or he had cancer or he got to

avoid it. 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 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 grab onto. One of my favorite parts of the book was at the end of my harbor 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 of belligerently gesticulating and using a curse word every two seconds to kind of breaking the decorum of the August Harbor

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 thought it was theatrical and entertaining. It's just style. And one of the students says to me, 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'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 way. 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 and 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 wanna 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. Book is, 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 burned 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 on Amazon. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I feel like it's like a warm

bath. Yes. The month, Twitter and everything else, but if I'm honest, I'm on everywhere else reluctantly. And LinkedIn is amazing. So find me out LinkedIn. Alright, burn the boats guys. It's by 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. I'll write a word over here. I decided to change that time here. I'm a head of my fill out. I couldn't be more inside of the world when you're getting here.

Start learning and growing. It can inevitably start to go happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You can miss it. I'm on this journey with me. At a time when change is constant and we are pulled in far too many directions. We need a way to stay present to life and to increase our ability to remain calm, think clearly, and

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