Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Matt Higgins on How to Burn the Boats and Just Figure It Out EP 254

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

I welcome Matt Higgins to Passion Struck, who 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. We explore his new book Burn the Boats: Toss Plan B Overboard and Unleash Your Full Potential. Matt Higgins discusses why learning how to burn the boats unleashes your potential. If you want to achieve significant success, you can't fall back on backup plans. Your potential is limitless if you adopt a solid resolution and the perseverance to overcome roadblocks.  This is how our guest today, Matt Higgins, has coached entrepreneurs Gary Vaynerchuk, Bobbi Brown, Julianne Hough, David Chang, and Brian Chesky (co-founder and CEO of Airbnb). Matt's stories are captivating from the beginning of our interview, and his practical strategies and research will significantly enhance how you approach your life and career. You'll feel like you're receiving personal coaching from a Harvard professor who has gone from poverty to incredible success. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/matt-higgins-on-how-to-burn-the-boats/  Brought to you by ZocDoc and Fabric. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/M7S-c2ojeHg --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. It would be very simplistic to say, oh, just burn the boats. That's it, right? Just to make no provisions, just go all in. That's actually not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what we all want to do is to burn the boats and digettison our backup plan and our crutches.

We don't respect ourselves when we hatch. Nobody wants to hatch, but it's easier said than done. So the book is meant to be an actual blueprint for how do you burn the boats? How do you go all in? Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles,

and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.

We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 254 of PassionStruck, which was recently ranked

by InterviewValley as the third best podcast for mindset and the fourth best for conversation. And thank you to each and every one of you come back weekly. And listen and learn how to live better and be better and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, where you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode stutter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into collections, to give any

new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything that we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it, last week I did two book launches with Jamie Braunstein and Steph and Falk. Jamie was recognized by Yahoo Finance as the number one relationship coach. She is the author of the new book, Manifesting, a step-by-step guide who attracting love that is meant for you. Steph and Falk is an internationally recognized executive

coach and human performance expert for top business executives, special forces operators, and elite athletes. We discussed his new book in Transak motivation. Learn to love your work and succeed as never before. Please check them both out in case you miss them. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. And if you love any of our episodes,

a five-star rating interview would go such a long way in helping us not only increase the popularity of the podcast, but bring more people into our community where we can bring them hope, inspiration, connection, and meaning. Now let's talk about today's incredible episode. If you want to achieve significant success, you can't fall back on backup plans. Your potential is limitless if you adopt a solid resolution and the perseverance to overcome roadblocks. This is how our guest today, Matt Higgins, has coached entrepreneurs Harry Vaynerchuk, Bobby Brown, Julianna Huff, David Chang, and Brian Chesky, the CEO and founder of Airbnb. In today's episode, we'll explore how to use your intuition over received wisdom. Only when we are aware of the full scope of our abilities, are we

able to take the direction that we should go. We will explore how you let your imperfections guide you. How pain and humiliation can be motivators rather than dragging you down. That will talk about why you should not wait for the thunder, but respond to the lightning. If you wait for others to confirm your vision before taking action, that will talk about why it can be too late. And we will finally explore embracing the crisis. Why would it first seems impossible and unachievable? May end up being the catalyst that propels you forward.

Matt Higgins is the co-founder and CEO of the Private Investment Firm, RSC Ventures, and an executive fellow at the 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 start in his own spin-off business hunters, also produced by Mark Burnett. Matt is the author of the brand new book which releases today, Burn the Boats. POS Plan B Over and unleash your full potential.

Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled today to have Matt Higgins on the Passion Struck Podcast. Welcome Matt. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, I wanted to start out by just congratulating you for this amazing book you've written, Burn the Boats, which is for the people who are watching this on YouTube right over your left hand shoulder. So congratulations. I know just how much it takes to get one of these

things into the world. Now, thank you. It's so cathartic you fork and feels like a bloodletting all at once. It's been many years in the making. As often they are, well, I'm going to start this off because I like to give the audience a way to get to know you. And on the show, we've often talked about how we are born into circumstances that we can't control. Some of those are our parents, our siblings, our zip code, and even which side of the poverty line that we sit on.

And you grew up with what anyone would say were meager resources without a lot of hope in what your future had in store for it. How did that upbringing shape who you would become today? Roodley honest, a lot of depression and rejection are very young age. When you're a little boy, you're watching your parents suffer my mother in my case,

and you're forced to grow up faster. In my case, selling flowers on street corners as a little 10-year-old, I was that kid. On Mother's Day, it would knock on your window. Excuse me, sir, would you like some flowers for your wife? That scraping gum at the table, McDonald's, just really poor, really desperate. And I spent a lot of years really hoping there would be a white night.

My mom had gotten divorced. I'd wish a man would step into our life and occupy that father figure role. I didn't have a lot of contact with my dad. In the case of health care, we had no insurance. I was hoping a doctor would magically appear and help resolve my other health issues. It was always hoping for the cavalry to come. And then of course, you learn the cavalry is never gonna come after enough rejection. And so that pivot to deciding that I have two choices, I can either feel sorry for myself and be a victim

or decide that going forward, I happen to things, things don't happen to me. There's pretty grandiose thoughts for a little 13, 14 year old kid, but if I'm perfectly honest, that's the pivot in a correction that I made. It just, the pressure was so intense. And the stress was so intense on me as a child

that it sort of forced this course correction. Maybe a little bit earlier than a lot of other people figure out in their life. And I made some pretty radical decisions as a result. Well, I'm gonna dive just a little bit deeper on that because we all make these huge life decisions. But you made yours, as you were just saying, when you were 14 years old, then you thought about it for two years before you implemented it.

And then you put the plan into action. Can you explain? Yeah. So the genesis of this particular decision. So my mother was incredibly intelligent, but really didn't discover that about herself until she was 38 years old. And so she always felt ashamed that she didn't even have a high school diploma.

So I watched her go through this journey where she went to a community college, she got her GD and then she enrolled in Queens College. And there was this transformation in her sense of self worth from somebody who didn't have an education to somebody who was good enough to succeed in a college environment. So I'm sure to discover these things about herself

and how that gave her a sense of dignity that she never had. Anyway, my mother became a perpetual student. She just decided she was never ever gonna leave and never did and I'll get to that a second. But watching her get a GD, gave me an epiphany one day when I was looking through the little local free newspaper and Queens, in my case, was called the

Penny saver. And I saw an ad, it was for college students. I think it was delivering flyers for like $8 an hour back then. And at the time I was making 375 an hour at McDonald's, scraping gum, and then I had a job at an overnight deli, building New York Times newspapers on Saturday overnight. And it was making nothing. And I remember thinking like, why does a college student get to make eight nine bucks? So if I could just get into this place called college, it would change everything. I could help actually take care of my mother and I started looking into it and I went to college night at my high school and I was in ninth grade and I was like, excuse me, you know,

it would you ever admit anybody who had a GED and that condescending look? I would say my talk about this, but no bless oblige like well son, we believe in second chances if you did well enough Of course, we would accept somebody with a GD and I thought, huh, okay, I'm gonna do this and at that point I made the decision I was gonna drop out of high school two years earlier I was gonna ace my GD and I was going to enroll in college and get that job delivering flyers or something equivalent as soon as humanly possible. And the problem is, it sounds really good on paper when you start floating this crazy idea. And back then, being a dropout, this is before the hoodie wearing Mark Zuckerberg made it cool to drop out of things. And it wasn't cool back then. Said, you're going to throw your life

away. My guides counselor at the time, Mr. Baker said that you're never gonna lose the stigma of being a high school dropout. So that was the beginning of my birth and the boats philosophy. I realized, you know, if I have any other option other than pursuing this at 16, I won't go through it. So I decided to fail every single class for two years straight except for typing.

And I sat in the same home room with a lot of other kids wearing beakers and doing lots of other different things, pursuing very different life choices than I was. And then I went through it. And I always go back to say it was the most important decision of my life because it was the first time that I had the full weight of conventional thinking against me.

This is absolutely crazy. But my instincts telling me this was the right move for Matt Higgins, given the circumstances of my mother degrading and how desperate I was living in poverty. And you come to realize that a lot of the information, a lot of the advice you get in life is biased by the lack of perfect information

of visibility into your circumstances. When you're a kid, you do everything you can to hide the shame of poverty, at least back then. And so my guidance counselor, teachers around me, well-meaning individuals had no sense of just how bad the situation was, and I'm sure if they came to my house, which not a single person did for 26 years, never had a visitor, if they had walked into that house and saw me sleeping on the floor, and saw my mother screaming all night long, with a towel wrapped around my head so I could hear through the filters,

just in case this was the one time we needed to call an ambulance, they would have said, dropping out is probably a good idea. The circumstances, Matt, son, get your GD, get to college, and going on because I'm so passionate about this one moment in my life. But that began everything that came after. This podcast can be traced down to the steps of Cardo's high school. Well, it's interesting as we're going to discuss throughout today's episode. You and I have had some interesting cross-erver points and I grew up in a humble family myself. We didn't face poverty like you did, but I got my first job delivering papers when I think I was nine or ten years old, did it all the way till the end of junior

year in high school. But as soon as I possibly could, I got a job in a grocery store, I think around 14. And I remember having to scrape gum off the floors and other places, the break room and other things. And it is one of the worst experiences that I think I've ever had. And it's something every time I see someone throw piece of gum out of their car or something else. I have this viral reaction. Yeah, but it actually birth, I'm sure you can relate to this. It birthed one of my core philosophies, which is it first it felt so demeaning to do this.

You learn a lot about human behavior, gum you find underneath the table. And the reason why gum was so important, if it was still wet, an apparent came and sat in a party room and then got on their knee, and then I have the spidery web of gum that would ruin the event, right? So I came to realize, one, removing gum while medial is actually really important, but two, no one else wanted to do it, and had a pivot in my mind to, if I become the best gum scraper that McDonald's on Springfield Boulevard ever saw, somebody would eventually pay attention and give me another opportunity. And that's exactly what happened. That was my first taste of making yourself indispensable

the job you have in order to get the job you want. I did that job for a few months and then ultimately got promoted as a little kid to manager of the party room, which meant that my new job was to scrape chicken minnugged fragments from the corner of the wall, but it was a step up. So I have a weird relationship with gum now.

But I'm like, who's the piece of crap that threw that on the floor? I'm like, well, it did play a key role in my career. Well, another interesting cross-over point we have is I remember 9-11, I happen to be with my wife at the time at a clinic because at this point we were trying to have a second child and we were having difficulties and it happened on the screen in front of us, but it just so happens that I had just taken a job as a senior executive

for a company called Lennelies, which owns Bovis, which you're probably very familiar with given where I'm leading with this. But at the time, you were working for Mayor Giuliani, and I wanted to ask, what was that experience like, being a member of the staff, and you eventually went on to become the youngest press secretary? Yeah, so to fill in the gap from 16 to 26, by making that decision to drop out,

I enrolled in Queens College, spent seven years at night school while working two jobs, and then ultimately enrolled in law school. So 11 years of education, give me everyone context. By starting two years earlier, Warren Buffendock talks about this idea of compounding, but in the context of money, compounding also applies to professional success.

I pulled forward all my professional achievement by two years, which from a percentage of age, it's over 10%, right? And that got that compound. So I got a job as a reporter very early, won a bunch of journalism awards and eventually landed in the mayor's press office by time it was 26 or so,

a decade to go from high school dropout to press secretary to the mayor of New York. So, but on that morning was actually a primary day. And remember, we were sunsetting. Everyone had enough of Mayor Giuliani. On the one hand, they were grateful for how he had turned around the city. On the other hand, Mayority Breeds contempt.

So, everybody was ready to push him out the door. And then of course, the attacks happened. So, I was on site after the second plane struck but before the towers collapsed. And the mayor's central principle was the first rule in any crisis as to show up, right? Half the battle is just showing up. And so I was standing on the corner of I think a church street and part place, only a few blocks from the trade center, setting up a press conference that ultimately never happened because the towers collapsed. So for me, a lot of it, if I'm perfectly honest, I know I experienced

through clips. It was such a fog of war that I don't, I feel like a lot of my memories are manufactured or barred from other people. So the things that do stick out of my mind was, I actually didn't know if the mayor was dead or who was dead. We were separated. He was in another spot on Barclay Street and we didn't all meet up until about 30 minutes after the towers had collapsed and we met at a firehouse. And I remember walking into the firehouse and the fire commissioner was sitting on the floor and his head was in his hands and he was crying. And again, I'm still processing the enormity. He's crying and I remember looking up above his head and where all the gear hangs, and there was no gear in the entire firehouse.

And so so many of the firefighters in there ultimately died. And then to my right was the mayor on a phone. And I believe they were on the phone with Vice President Dick Cheney asking for air coverage. Kind of seems absurd, right? But again, in the fog of war, you feel like this is a sustained attack. So I just have a lot of memories and then for me personally there was no communication and we all were trying to tell our loved ones that we were okay and somebody was handing around

a beaper to type it out back then and then I just I remember I didn't have anybody to send it to and later my family my brothers were so mad that I didn't communicate. My mother had just died. I had felt such loss and emptiness anyway. So I just have all these emotions of still grieving my mother's death and then this insanity that we couldn't really process. So I spent 90 days by the Mara side

bringing every world leader to the site so that we could show them the devastation and rally support for the war on terror. So I walk through that site, if I tell you the names great, but the most insane group of people have the Emir of Qatar. I had the prime minister, Britain, and then Vladimir Putin, believe it or not. And we had a viewing tower for the families to come and just be close to the site, right? The site was still in a furno burning thousands of degrees. So we had a platform overlooking it. And alongside that platform was a mural with 91 countries and their flags. And

we would have heads of state come to there. But anyway, if Vladimir Putin back then be a very different version of Vladimir Putin wrote, we will get you or something very jingoistic and whatnot. So I have all these memories in my mind, but a lot of it's just have to be pieced together. Because when you're so close to something so horrific, literally walking through a site, recovering bodies, you do dissociate,

much like I did a lot of my childhood. So I always give that disclaimer because I can't really quite distinguish between. What do I know? Because I saw it on TV versus what I witnessed there. Because it was just so horrendous. Yeah, I remember. And I can't remember if it was the Marriott or the Hilton, but I

stayed. I think it was a Marriott. And I was on one of the upper floors looking down. And this is before the new tower, Freedom Tower has been created and everything else. And the immense size and death of the utter destruction was unbelievable. eyes and death of the utter destruction was unbelievable. Yeah, when 816 acres, obviously, and went eight stories down, the compression just, it's just inconceivable. And then there was this impatience to like, okay, let's get back on our feet and we have sort of a limited attention span, obviously, in our society.

And it's like, this is going to take decades, not months. I don't know why that's probably, but then I transitioned from being the press secretary to the mayor. I just figured my work is not done here. With the administration ended only 90 days later, but I wasn't on. So I became one of the first employees, maybe the first of a new federal agency charged with rebuilding the World Trade Center site with a massive federal budget to get started. That was the most insane job you can imagine, because there's no template. Like, here's a budget, here's money,

go figure it out. Yeah, well, that's why I mentioned Bovis because I believe they were pretty involved with that project overall. The enormity of that undertaking is some of the biggest companies in the world working on the recovery and the rebuilding operation. Well, then how did you go from there

to then landing a job with the jets? Great question. It goes back to a philosophy I talked about in the book, right? And you've experienced this too, having had such a diverse career, right? We have a tendency to put ourselves in a box more than anyone else does. So I've always felt that I was never gonna escape

my circumstances if I allowed them to define me. So the first step in not being defined by your circumstances is to refuse to let anyone else put you in a box and not put yourself in a box. So what do let me unpack that statement, right? At various times in my life, I could have been a high school dropout, but I refused and that wasn't a high school dropout. I was a success story that went to college and law school. I worked for government chief operating officer of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, right? Largest design competition in the history of the world,

largest development project in the history of the world. So I could have defined myself as a government person or even as a press person, right? I could have limited, but when you zoom out and I encourage everyone listening to this zoom out on your experience at any one moment in time and say fundamentally, what are you doing? Not specifically in terms of your domain, but fundamentally what are you doing?

So my domain was government redevelopment in the wake of the worst terrorist attack, but what I was fundamentally doing was bringing together very different constituencies and trying to forge consensus on a complicated land use project and moving the levers of media, communication, decision policy making, whatever it took to forge a degree of consensus on that 16 acre piece of land. So that was the core competency and the work. And so when you define it that way, it opens up lots of possibilities, including working for an NFL team. The New York Jets, where there's nomadic team always treated like like second class citizens, sharing a stadium with the giants on the unequal terms, practice facility in Long Island.

So the fan base resented it, the ownership resented it. So they decided they were gonna build a stadium and they wanted to build a stadium for better or worse, turned out for worse, in the middle of Manhattan. And they thought who better to oversee building a stadium in the middle of the hat, even though I had no sports experience was bad higgins because of his work at Crown Zero. So that's how I transition.

And the second point, you have to be incredibly intentional with your career if you want to make these types of transitions. So there are key moments when you have an opportunity to redefine yourself and other people are going to try to hold you back. So I knew that if I didn't transition from being the quote unquote press guy, I would always be the press guy. And I was not meant to be my destiny. I didn't feel that way. And so when the reality is, I was very influential in decision making at Lower Manhattan and overseeing the reconstruction, but my title was VP of communications. When there was a critical moment,

I was thinking about leaving. And they wanted me to stay. And so, well, if you want me to stay, I need the authority that I'm demonstrating behind the scenes to be acknowledged formally as chief operating officer. And so then I had a tremendous change in reporting, responsibility of being intentional about my career at that one moment and leveraging the asset I had, which was my feet, I had the operating impromotor from the job, and I had the subject matter expertise of bringing people together, and that's how I transitioned to sports. Well, one of the questions I've always wondered being a huge NFL fan, are what are the perils of being in the front office of an NFL franchise? But more importantly, how hands on do you actually want an owner of a franchise to be such great questions.

I would love to write a book on the dynamic one. I don't know if anybody would read it, but it would maybe it would be just for myself for my kids, but the it's fascinating about the dynamic and the front office is side by side. You have the football side or the sports side every sports organization has this general nomenclature. So I'll just use football side of the football side and you have the business side. The football side is run like a military organization, right? And very hierarchical. You work all the time. Everything you've seen in these movies, glorifying NFL life is not true. I never went to a single party or had a title like all they do is work and sleep and not only are they they do is work, all they're doing is out working each other. So there is a degree of them.

Maybe that's changing with a degree of more open mind andness about work life balance, although I could doubt it. But at the end of the day, just non-stop work. And I remember as the business guy, I always think like, well, the president of the United States, he's carrying the nuclear codes in a briefcase and he could sleep.

Like, I don't get how you are the only one that has to work all time. So you have that culture, militaristic, non-stop alongside a business culture that isn't those things. It has a very fundamental mandate, which is to generate as much money as humanly possible to feed the beast. So those two cultures are alongside each other that create this sometimes interness and conflict. A lot of the job of a sports executive is how to try to bridge the gap. So that's number one. Number two, you have very different social pressures operating on the sports side. Their performance is live on TV every Sunday in the case of

the NFL or Thursday or Saturday, now Monday, but it's live on TV. So everybody can instantly judge their performance and then you have millions of people who are's live on TV. So everybody can instantly judge their performance and then you have millions of people who are in the peanut gallery. So the pressure is enormous. If a coach doesn't perform, they're gonna get fired in three to four years, just like all this on the business side,

they're it's considered sort of not like a daisiele, but just immune from a lot of that pressure. So point is a lot of the fun part about being a sports executive is trying to address those gaps and try to be respectful and to bridge them. And then the third thing, the business executive needs to access the sports side in order to leverage those assets to sell things. Right. So there's always a degree of like stop distracting me. But I loved it. I think I was pretty well suited for it if I'm perfectly honest, because I work with Rex Ryan, Eric Manigini, a lot of different coaches, because a lot of times the business guy is like a fantasy football player who's just dying to get anywhere close to that draft room.

And I like sports, I like football, but I don't live or die for it, frankly. And as a result, I was able to maintain a degree of separation and just do my job. But bottom line is, I would say to somebody, if you love football, you love baseball, whatever it is, and you like watch it on TV. And like, you don't need to go to sports team.

And if you are, make sure you disabuse yourself of all these fantasy notions that you have about what it's going to be like. It's going to be one of the hardest jobs you've ever done. Yeah, and then how do you manage the owner, especially if there's someone like Jerry Jones or someone who is just wanting to put their hands over every aspect of what you're doing. I think sports teams are no different than any other business. That people look for leadership at the top.

They look for somebody who's at the town, organizations that have enduring values where people can, or anthem cells, too, tend to perform better in my opinion. So I think you need visible owners, you need active owners, you need owners who really care, you need owners who communicate because back to the point of insecurity. I don't think people perform well when they're very insecure and they don't know where they stand, right? And when people don't know where they stand,

they fill in the blanks and assume they're standing on quick stand, right? So I think when you have an owner who occupies the role and communicates at least coaches and GMs, understand where they stand. And when they don't, they create a vacuum where everyone's vying for power. And so that's what happens in a lot of sports organizations. I've seen as that when the owner isn't sort of occupying their role, then it creates this vacuum that is occupied through international

tension. Again, no different than any other organization. The difference is the rotation is so sudden and quick. And people are so impatient, right? You don't have that level of turnover in the private sector. So bottom line is I think every owner of the doing the job needs to set the tone with their values and principles and needs to make sure people understand what they're fighting for.

Yeah, I know another thing that you're responsible for is selling your suites, which are one of the most profitable things for the clubs, but one of the hardest things to do. And I understand you had a very interesting meeting with someone who I would think maybe the biggest Jets fan that there is on the planet, Gary Vee. I'd be interested, and I'm sure the listeners would of how that conversation went.

Yeah, so for context, I spend probably 15 years in the NFL first with the Jets for eight years, another eight years with Miami Dolphins and more of an oversight capacity. But at the Jets for eight years, another eight years with Miami Dolphins and more of an oversight capacity. But at the Jets, I was ultimately responsible for the business of the team. And as you pointed out, part of the job is to sell sweets. Sweets are really hard to sell. And good times great hospitality does well and bad times nobody needs a sweet.

And so my team pleaded with me, you got to meet this guy Gary Vaynerchak. He is this wine guru and he says he's gonna buy the jet. So he's probably got a billion dollars. I'm like, you guys don't know what you're talking about. He's making YouTube videos. But okay, I'll do my part. I'll go out to Springfield, New Jersey. And I'm at Gary in a bagel store.

And I know I've told this story. So I apologize anybody's heard before, but I do love it. It's one of these great moments. And a lot of teaching moments in this is that I go to meet Gary and sit down in a bagel store. I don't have a high opinion of him. I have no opinion of him, frankly. But I think a lot of teaching moments in this is that I go to meet Gary, we sit down in a big old store. I don't have a high opinion of him, I have no opinion of him, frankly,

but I think a lot of the early YouTube stuff is nonsense, right? So we sit down and Gary is fantastic and cursing every two seconds, just stimulating, just sounds good. So whatever. And so I'm thinking like this guy is not by a sweep, but I'll listen. But as he was talking,

and I started focusing less on the delivery and more on the substance, I started thinking about, huh, he's predicting that in the future, everyone is going to be their own content creator, and not only they're going to be their own content creator, the phone is going to enable them to be Comcast. And there's channels like Twitter, which is emerging at the time,

is going to enable everyone to basically be HBO. And then we're going to be able to create our own shows and communicate like this is 2009. So a lot of predictions, and I think I'm pretty good at pattern recognition. A lot of that just made a ton of sense. And so what I realized it in that second 10 minutes is like, here's a guy who sits in the stream of information is obviously getting his hands dirty with wine library at the time and being very tactical. So he could pick up the signals and then figure out how to monetize those signals, take advantage of it. It's very careful not to dismiss people that you see doing things that seem very tactical or frenetic under make sure that what they're doing before you dismiss them isn't actually

sucking up data by sitting in the stream of that data so they could leverage those insights into something more powerful. So the more powerful thing in that bigel store was Gary saying in the future, everyone will have the power to communicate directly but corporations will not know how to meet this demand because college right now, we're going to launch a new firm. We're going to do social media on behalf of these big battership carriers called Proctor and Gamble and Toyotas of the world. And we're going to build a big firm. I said, okay, interesting. I said, well, let's run a little social experiment. What if I were to take one of our players who doesn't have a high profile and will run your magic and we'll see if we can leverage social media to make that person high profile. And that's what we did. We had drinks in New Jersey with one of our players and we started making content. I gave Gary Ford near Chets tickets on the 50-yard line, which he still owns to this day. And that birthed his firm called the Intermedia. I was the first client. That meeting sat with me for three, four years when I went to partner up with Stephen Ross

on Earth Adolphin, thinking having a firm like that in your back pocket makes everything better and could amplify and teach your portfolio companies where the future is going. Tick-tock before it's tick-tock, Instagram before it's Instagram. And so I went back to Gary and we cut a deal and I became a co-owner of that firm. And now fast forward from the bagel store, that was 2009, it's 2023, and it is the largest independently owned agency in the world. That's a great story. And I have not met Gary. I've been fortunate enough to meet other members

of his executive team. And I did a great interview with Claude Silver, who you probably know. She's fantastic, amazing executive. Yeah. And I think if you speak about Gary's foresight, this new role that she's in of the chief heart officer, I think is just hitting the world right at the right time

with so much employee disengagement that we're facing and could be a new paradigm shift for so many companies across all industries to follow suit. So. Well, he's definitely got his finger on the pace. A lot of what he does always gets similar to my big old story experience, why share it, get would get mocked or people just feel uncomfortable and he's so assertive with it that it's like, stop. All right, let me see with it. But it ends up playing out to this day. I still routinely underestimate Gary to my own detriment. We joke about it all the

time. He's like, when will you ever learn? I said, apparently never, because I continue to not act on your insights. Well, the next thing I wanted to cover was the topic of weakness. And I'm going to stick to the jets here. And then we're going to move on to the rest of the book. But you become the executive vice president for the jets, which for those who don't understand this, means you're in charge of the entire team's business. You have a new lucrative deal signed. You have a three-month-old baby boy, and you finally feel like you've overcome all the tragedies that you've gone through from your childhood, then you're here

and you're faced with the three worst words that anyone wants to hear, which is you have cancer. My question to this is why with everything on the line, were you afraid to show your weakness and how by not showing the weakness did it demonstrate your weakness? Yeah, you're transporting me back in time. Actually, you're transporting me to, I don't think I talk about this in a book,

but I remember standing on a corner, meeting an HR person the day after I got the diagnosis to change my health insurance. I forgot exactly what I was doing. That's how ashamed I was though that I had cancer that I had to have somebody meet me outside on a corner to go ahead and deal my benefits before I went in and had my testicle removed. So to put a little bit of context, I finally felt like I had gotten there. I had arrived and everything was going to be okay. The deal I was doing at the time was significant bump in pay. It's just like I had arrived and I could finally breathe. Like

after all this work and I've always been operating on a flight, running away, running as fast as I possibly can. And then I had a pain in my groin, which I dismissed for the longest time, thinking I'll can't be anything, can't be anything. And finally, it was so painful, I was doubled over. And I went to the doctor and they, and you get the look on their face, right when they're giving you a sonogram and then calls me and said, it's a very large tumor and it may have escaped into your lymphatic system. You need to get operated tomorrow.

Like tomorrow, like as in tomorrow, you need we need to go quickly and to get out of your body. And my first reaction was like, they're going to find out. And I'm going to be a lame duck. And I'm going to be gone in 30 days. Like, this is as factual as what I'm saying, is that I presumed once that weakness was discovered, my utility would be over and everything I'd work for would be gone. And so I have only one objective, which was to not be defeated by this. And so I did everything I could to keep it quiet.

Like, okay, I got cancer, I'm going for surgery, I'm going to be okay. So I have the surgery, I go home, and the next day there's a dinner with the dinner. I have a ice pack on my grind. Like, I'm just painting a picture for all of you. Can you imagine how painful the surgery is? And then I have a glass of wine. Now, at the time, I thought everybody was looking at me with respect. They were probably looking at me with a degree of horror and pity. But I was like, I thought everybody was looking at me with respect. They were probably looking at me with a degree of horror

and pity. But anyway, we're going around the room, we're doing toast. And I was like, hey, I just want to tell everyone I know you. I had cancer, I know everyone knows. I said, but I got a new motto. I'm going to get dog tags made. Want to roll it out. Half the balls, twice the man.

Like, which by the way, I still love that. I still have the dog tags. But I tell that story. And I talk about it in the man. Like, which by myself, I still love that. I still have a dog tags. But I tell that story and I talk about it on the book because it's funny and tough and I could own that story in one way, which is to tell you, wow, look how tough I am, which I think a lot of executives do. I got about four in the morning, I had a testicular cancer and I have one testicle and I have dog tags, or I could share the more important takeaway, which is by showing up the next day and by giving myself, by getting radiation every single day at the end of a day and feeling like death, but never getting myself any slack. I was telegraphing everyone in the organization.

If I could have my testicle removed and show up for that dinner, there isn't anything that I'm not going to expect you to show up for too. I look back at that and I cringe. That's not leadership. Like telling people that you're going to deny yourself the benefit of compassion and empathy, that's fear. Right? It's fear of discovery, that's fear of shame, whatever it is, everyone else will model that and just make an organization where the number one imperative is to push down whatever it is you're dealing with.

Yeah, we can get into a bit, but it took me a long time to actually reflect upon that scene for what it is, not as bravery and burrow rato, but as a maturity until I had a more important life moment, which was going to divorce, which really brought me to my knees in a way that cancer couldn't even compete. Cancer was like a flu compared to getting divorced. I've been there too, so I haven't had that cancer side of it. Unfortunately, for the past 18 months, we've been feeling with my sister, who has pancreatic cancer.

So that's like my cancer doesn't compare less than a different kind of group. I know how hard it is to go through pancreatic cancer. So I'm sorry to hear that. Now, but I also went through the divorce. And especially when you've got kids, it just complicates everything so much. Yeah, and I, one of the things that really horrified me about it is I had dealt with other people in the organization. If I'm being perfectly honest, I had no understanding. I was like, all right, you're going through divorce.

Well, you got to second lease on life. It means you're going to be going out and have more fun to go to the games with you. Like I just had no understanding. Not remorse for say we're all human, but the things I reflect on I'm like, wish I could get over is being a little more compassionate to people who are going through traumatic life events that aren't the official traumatic life events for which we cut people slack, right? Oh, bereavement got that. You know what I mean, baby sometime off, but what about the nebulous category of things

that destroy you and destroy your judgment? When I look back to when I was going to divorce, somebody should have taken the keys away. I should not be making decisions. And not even that obviously everyone gets back on their feet, but the sooner you give your employees some space to be human and allow them to bring that pain to the workplace, the faster they'll get back on their feet, they'll make better decisions, right? So again, not to go on and on about divorce, but you can relate about that unique set of pain that so many people go through that isn't given any accommodation in the workplace. Yeah, I just remember I've reached a point because it took us about

two years to get divorced where I just felt my emotional cup was so overfilled. It was just overwhelming. And I think a lot of people, yeah, let's talk about that for a second because I do think that's emotional cup was so overfilled, it was just overwhelming. And I think a lot of people, yeah. Let's talk about that for a second, because I do think that's the crux of it. When you're a leader of an organization and have any management authority, the most important decisions you have to make

are emotional decisions full of friction because there are people decisions, right? Whether to promote somebody, terminate somebody, hire somebody, right? And let's talk about course corrections with having to make changes. That's a very emotional decision that, I don't care, unless you're a sociopath,

like you have to get up for, right? If you have to terminate somebody or even hard, provide feedback that's critical, especially to a toxic employee, you just have no bandwidth. And if all your emotional capacity is being used up by something you're generally keeping quiet, like divorce, then you have nothing left. And what you do is you make excuses for why you're not going to make that decision, right? You tend to defer all decisions with emotional friction, which are the most critical decisions.

So I know now we're getting into real psychology, but I do think giving space for people to acknowledge, I have limited emotional bandwidth because I'm taking on incoming. And I need some acknowledgement of that and some space. I need some assurance, by the way, that everything's okay. Life won't fall apart so that I can resupply my emotional capacity to make those decisions that are full of friction. I don't talk about it a ton. I've moved on in my life.

I have an amazing life and an amazing wife. And I'm grateful for everything. But that definitely left a mark. And it brought me to my knees in a way that nothing else has. Yeah, well, I appreciate you sharing that because I guarantee you and I are not the only two who are part of this episode today who have gone through this. Somebody out there, anybody listening, especially, and don't often talk about the pain of going through the force. And the suicide rate's very high,

but people are going through it. So anybody out there who is listening, like people do care, you and I care, we've been through it before, we're a testament that things do get better, things always get better. You will have a relationship with your children if you stay and you put in the work,

it'll be a different kind of relationship, but they will remember that you put in the work. So for those who are feeling hopeless, if defeated, or feeling like a failure, like I did, there's another chapter ahead of you, but you do unfortunately have to endure this pain, but it starts by letting people in and knowing that people do care. Well, I think the other thing is take a step back and really do the work to understand yourself, step back and really do the work to understand yourself, reflect on what happened because it's there are two of you who created this outcome and then figure out where do you want your life to go. And for me, I ignored doing that for a bit of time and my biggest advice to anyone is the

more you can spend that time with yourself, which is hard because when you're going through this, you want to surround yourself with a bunch of people, go out and do the fun things. But I found when I took two steps backwards and became self-aware, that was when the magic kind of happened and I came out of it so much better on the other side. Yeah, I talk about this and burn the boats too. The other, it's again, so hard to hear because your point is exactly right. You want to soothe yourself.

So you want to get past this. Like any, that's why people drink. It's why people do all sorts of things but people do self-destructive things. We're looking for soothing, right? But if you can try to sit with it for a little bit longer, that's where you can discover. When I hit my breaking point,

I talk about this in a book. I'm spiritual, but I don't necessarily, I'm not on any particular team, even though I met with a pope a couple of times, had private audience, that's incredible experiences. But I'm generally, I'm available to figure out, but I'm very spiritual. And I was laying in bed and I was so upset and just feeling so depressed and dejected. I couldn't sleep. And I was pleading with some higher authority to just let me sleep. Let me fall asleep. And I had the closest thing to an apparition. I heard a voice in my head and it just said to me Matthew you are okay

Like and it was a voice of authority. It was like a parental super ego or the voice of God I don't know I remember called Curtis Martin one of the jet spiders is my spiritual group and he said like no that's God Like that is God like come on Curtis I was like what how do you know how do you know are you sure cuz a cell? Look at his God. He's like no bad that is God that is'm like, come on Curtis. He's like, what how do you know? How do you know? Are you sure? Because the cell look at what's God. He's like, no, bad. That is God. That is when God comes to you in those darkest moments to let you know. But why I dwell on those words, Matthew, you are

okay, is because the I interpreted it as meaning that we are all okay, because we are born whole. I am self sufficient. I am independent. My self worth, my identity is not defined and relationship to another person, another level of success. To my children even, I was born whole. And when you come to terms with that, anybody listening to it, I know it sounds so spiritual, but you are born whole. And no one else, nothing else, no level of professional success or personal success will ever define you or change that simple fact. And so for that moment forward, I began

to rebuild my sense of self-worth. This is the stuff we should be talking about. This is the stuff all of us should be talking about. I love talking about this more than my book or more than the Jads or any of that stuff. It's the unseen layer of the universe that we all deal with, but don't talk about. Well, you're right. I'm going to use this just as a segue to bring up a quote. I was hoping I get to bring up from your book, but I didn't know if it would fit in. But you write in it that it is so vital that before we can burn the boats, we have to be confident in who we are, unafraid of being felled by the forces

gunning for our demise, which I think we both discovered that when we were talking about, but it's an extremely important point. I just wanted to jump to both this and the central theme of your book is if you want to accomplish something great in life, you have to give yourself a no escape route. And so I wanted you to talk about that, but also why confidence in who you are plays such a

big role in that. Yeah, and my message to anybody, think about reading the book or needing to read the book is it would be very simplistic to say, oh, just burn the boats, that's it, right my message to anybody, think about read the book, or needing to read the book is, it would be very simplistic to say, oh, just burn the boats, that's it, right? Just to make no provisions, just go all in. That's actually not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is what we all want to do, is to burn the boats and to jettison our backup plan

and our crutches. We don't respect ourselves when we hatch. Nobody wants to hatch, but it's easier said than done. So the book is meant to be an actual blueprint for how do you burn the boats and move forward and go all in on plan A, there are these things that hold us back from full commitment. One of them is your sense of self-worth, right? The extent to which you put in the effort to construct your self-esteem so that you're not dependent upon whether that whether you succeed or fail it, right? So we talk about it off. Everyone

loves failure. This is fetishization of failure, which I think is way too simplistic. But the most important part about failure is that you never allow your identity and meshed with an active failure. You are never a failure, you have failed. So there's a process I go through.

When I'm synthesizing failure, I'm intellectually curious about my failure. I want to extract as much value from it. And then I'm going to bury in the desert and never come back to pay my respects. So, what I'm trying to say in order to burn the boats, you need to put in the work to construct a solid foundation first with your self-esteem and self-worth, but then also risk mitigation. It's not realistic for people to say I'm going to go all in on planet. When I have this recurring voice in my head saying I have to take care of my children,

I got to make sure that I can eat like there are all practical things we have to do as long as we're alive. And so part of the burn the boat's philosophy is to go through this exercise to synthesize all the things we catastrophize about and say, all right, what if that did happen? How would I handle that? What would I do? How would I eat? When you go through that exercise, nine at a 10 times, you have already within your power, the ability to mitigate almost all risk, right? Like, no, all right. Well, I'd call Uncle Billy, give me a job in the auto potty shop for a bit while I rebuilt. And that's the part people skip. They want that excuse to remain. They actually don't want to knock down the objection. They want to accept it as a priori fact that I at this moment in time cannot afford to take on this risk. So if anybody listening

to me that might have a reflexive reaction to the books, I say, well, I can't burn the boats. I'm not saying it's the simplest stick is that I've tried to give you a formula to overcome those objections for why you wouldn't want to read it in the first place because nobody respects themselves when they hedge. Well, I'm going to stick on this risk topic for a second. And one of my favorite things about the book, and if you're listening to this, Matt does a very good job of weaving in stories of entrepreneurs, leaders, other people to help amplify the different chapters. And one of these that he talks about it is his partner at RSC Stephen Ross. And one of these that he talks about is his partner at RSC Stephen Ross. And if you're not familiar with who Stephen Ross is, he may be the largest

in the United States, real estate developer, Ian's, Miami Dolphins, and is on the Forbes billionaires list. But Matt, can you tell the story of Hudson Yards and how Stephen made the seemingly impossible to become possible. Yeah, it's incredible. I have my own personal history with Hudson Yards in New York. It's basically this massive open rail yard, which think about New York, right? How do you have this incredible open space that's never been developed? And there's been multiple aborted attempts to put something there. One time it was going to be Yankee Stadium, and then my experience with it was gonna be the home of the New York Jets as part of a new vision for a convention center, decades and decades

of failed attempts to go ahead and develop it. And part of the challenge is like, how do you build a massive mixed use development or a stadium or anything else over active subway lines because the property is owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York state. And so that was the prerequisite, obviously, so you can't shut down New York.

So this tremendous engineering complexity, just impossible challenges by partner Steven Ross has just an enormous capacity to take on the most complicated projects that everyone believes is destined to fail. And he just refuses to accept it and him over the last decade. I will say that there's a couple of themes

that I've tried to discern him. He is one of one, so it's hard to emulate, but a couple of things that I've noticed. One, when he faces a setback, talk about this in a book, he just bronzes his definition of what winning looks like to accommodate that setback. He never allows that

particular setback to define him. And I have seen that as a common thread with a lot of people who break out success. So if they fail to get a vote they needed, okay, well, I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to make the project larger than that vote. And I have watched him with having unrelenting capacity to absorb the wins and allow the wins to fuel him and inspire him and drive him and reflect the losses and never let those losses define them. So Hudson Yards is the largest development project in history since maybe Rockefeller Center. I might be even bigger. If you come to New York now, you'll see Hudson Yards and incredible mixed use development, mall condominiums's office towers. He's done it through the 2008 downturn, then the pandemic, now that whatever this is that we're in, the morass, maybe we need a name. But I've been blessed to be around these individuals. As you said in the book, I dissect them.

The reason why I took the time in the book to make a not-and-out of biography, but to rather interview 50 different people, including Stephen Ross and Scarlett Johansson, and an Olympian who's now a paraplegic who believes her life was better off as a result of the accident. I have a victim of sexual abuse who's an activist and now runs the New York Florida Senate on the Democratic side. I wanted to make sure that I would beat down one of the arguments people have when reading my book, which is well-matched.

I wasn't this. So maybe you believe because I've had certain privileges in society, which are true, that it makes it harder for you to do whatever it is you want to do, or you believe you come from a certain region of the country, whatever. I wanted to have a wide enough range of people opening up about their vulnerability to shed shame, shed imposter syndrome, overcome whatever barrier that was preventing them from going all in on planet to reduce the separation between you the listener and whoever it is you wish to emulate because I think it's one of our defense mechanisms where we say not me sorry Matt I'm not as smart as you or I'm not as whatever is you and I really hope I and of all things I hope I succeeded in the book is that when you read it, everyone out there can see some semblance of themselves and feel like they can identify and resume the journey.

So for me, I would prefer not to share some of the stories about my divorce, about the failure to save my mother, about imposter syndrome on the set of shark tank, which is embarrassing, be much better for you all out here listening to believe I was a natural. But I wrote about it because I wanted you to identify a point in which you could relate to me so that you do not relate to the end result of me, which is a guy on Shark Tank and with this portfolio, whatever it is you want to believe, but a guy who was a high school dropout who was eating government cheese and was taking care of his mother and have dealt with

the same anxiety stresses and sense of failure that you have so that you can relate and hopefully be inspired to go after Plan B just just as hard as I have, a long way of answering the question, but I put a lot of time to interview these incredible people. And what you realize when you talk to a billionaire, or you talk to one of the top actors in the world, all these people have to have hacks to overcome the same internal and external obstacles

that all the rest of us have to deal with in order to go well and on planning. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I think so often we see the people like you're describing who it seems for us where we're at in our world right now unfathomable that we could have the success that they have had, but we all face the same issues. It's how you work through them. And ultimately, the forces within yourself that you utilize to create the extraordinary life that you want that make the difference.

And I think a great example of this is, I'm gonna talk about another person you focus in the book who I happened to know. About four or four and a half years ago, I was doing a completely different gig than what I'm doing now, and I was working with a great guy who had a business called Bold Business, and we had this digital platform. He used to be the owner of CEO Magazine,

so I learned a ton from him. But we're in New York, we're interviewing a bunch of people, and his son, Michael, had gone to Harvard with this young guy who had this brand new idea for this crazy racing league that they were going to do using drones. And so I'm gearing up for this interview with Nicholas Horbicciowski and I'm like, this sounds like crazy idea. And then fast forward today, it's the fastest growing sport in the history. And it's someone that you invested in. So can you tell me the story of meeting Nicholas and why when you first invested in DRL, you were ridiculed? It's great. I love making those moves. I'm always looking for somebody to be ridiculed about, frankly, I do feel quite comfortable being alone on the bleeding edge and taking on incoming, especially when I think I'll be right. It's almost unfair.

So with Nick, rewind anyone out there who is investing or building an early stage company, I do think this is a useful case study. One of the young people in my office spends a lot of time sort of figuring out a culture said, you got to meet this guy, Nick. He's got an idea to take drone racing and turn it into a sport. And he comes to my office, what's tough when you're doing early stage investing is you obviously don't have a lot of data to go on to validate whether or not the person's heading in the right direction. So call, I call the exercise looking for proxies of traction. What are the proxies for traction that tell me that this might actually become something.

And again, it can't be about revenue, because we're talking DC, really. So in a case of drone racing, he showed me these videos on YouTube, where there are people all over the world and parking garages and in parks who are already racing drones. And it looked like front. So number one, the behavior was already happening organically.

I think when you try to prosthetically install a sport and impose it on a culture, it almost never works. But when it has an organic activity that's already happening as it's underpinning, it has a shot. So one, we saw that number two. When I meet a founder, I want to make sure that the universe put this founder on the earth on this earth to pursue this business. It's not some kid at Harvard, a Wharton who's like, I sure would love to do soul cycle, but I have no passion for racing and I could care less, right? Like a lot of people engineer their business intellectually, but they have no hard for it. And that's not sustainable. So Nick already worked a tough murder as the CMO or CRO. I forget had that background, how to monetize. If you

can't monetize a sport, it's not going to ever happen. Anyway, and three content, like that's where a lot of founders fall apart. They don't have a storytell. And when you're building a sport or anything that's a consumer business, you need to know how to story tell so that you can tap into emotion. Nick was a aspiring film producer, had done short films, right? So I look at the founder and I say, okay, put on this earth to do it, has the background necessary to actually bring it to life. And here's something that is actually happening organically. And when you're at the seed stage, that's enough, right? That's enough for me to take a leap.

Anyway, fast forward, man, it has not been easy. Like he has put his heart and soul. And I opened up the New York Times last year, late last year, I encourage anybody to Google it. It was in the style section, massive article about how the fastest drone racers in the world are now part of the drone racing league. So I don't know how it ends, like, woof, like that is hard work. I would not have enlisted in that war, but he has done it.

He has taken it this far. And I would argue to anybody listening that signals were there even in that PowerPoint, and they could have made the same decision I did. Well, thank you for sharing that. And there are so many different things that I could interview on. I probably have 20 more questions. But for the sake of the listeners, one of my favorite chapters in your book was on optimizing

your anxiety. And it was one of my favorite chapters because it's very similar to a chapter I have coming out in my own book, which is about how do you perform on the edge without going over the edge. And it's interesting because in this chapter, you bring up one of my favorite professors who I interviewed earlier this year, Chicago Booth Professor, I let Fishback, who's an expert on the science and motivation. And why is it so important for us to turn inward and ask yourself how comfortable are you?

And how did this lead you to finally finding this passion for teaching at Harvard? So anyone out there who's ever run a marathon can relate to this or any kind of race where you had to train for or any kind of endurance event that took months of tremendous focus and times when you were like, why am I doing this? I've run three marathons mostly as as a form of self-tourcher,

but also to work with different type of motivational system, where I tend to power through things. You can't power through a marathon. You have to put in the work. My point being, I remember when I ran my first marathon and I've put so much effort and I had like dropped almost 50 pounds and you're times even wrote an article

about my transformation, but I've put in, lost so much weight, had done it. And then I was depressed. I was like, huh, that was really a big letdown. And I love studies and I've started doing research and just looking into it. It's a common phenomenon from anybody. Olympians, it's this sort of letdown that way you all feel.

So what does that lead me to? I firmly believe that the joy of living is in the striving. It's not actually in the winning. The winning is the illusion because we need to quantify how we're doing. But at the end of the day, it's not the objective. The objective is the endless pursuit of growth, of trying to touch the ceiling of our potential to bring us closer to God and the universe to know why we're here, what can we do.

And so when you accept that fact, that's when you enlist on the mission of my book, right? It's to pursue a life of perpetual growth. And why is it so important to focus on anxiety? Because if you try to eliminate all anxiety from your life, you also will not enlist on missions that make you uncomfortable, which is where the growth lies. Because you will see discomfort as something to be avoided. You'll see discomfort as a sign of your body telling you something or your emotions telling you something that you're in the wrong place.

And that's actually not true if you want to live a life of perpetual growth. You need to see discomfort as part of a feedback loop that is on anxiety. Go hand in hand. This comfort is what triggers the anxiety. If you eliminate it all, it hinders excellence, and you can't do anything. If it overcomes you, it impedes the ability to perform. It paralyzes you.

So when I go into the book, I love that you like talking about this, but I go into the book, the science of it, and the original sort of York Stodson law that talks about this. But the science is irrelevant. It's very common sense that you want to try to strike a balance between triggering your anxiety by putting yourself in uncomfortable positions, but managing it so that it does not overtake you. I talk about how I went on the set of Shark Tank and I catastrophize so much about all these unrelated things that the imposter syndrome and anxiety almost made it impossible for me to perform. But when I went on the second time, it felt so natural to me that I belong there the whole time that it made it hard for me to perform. Don't eat eggs, all things on Shark Day. So I tend to resist habituation more

than necessary because habituation makes me so comfortable that it actually makes it hard for me to perform. So these are all very abstract concepts. It's why I devote a whole chapter to how to strike a balance between up to anxiety that drives you and the anxiety that paralyze you. And that's the state of optimal anxiety. There's great examples in a book, our head coach Eric Manjini at the Jets at the time. I used to think it was so nuts, but I banned to understand there was a method to this madness. He would put the players in the indoor bubble and he would blast heavy metal

at the loudest level to make it impossible for the players to communicate so they had to use signals so they could emulate what would it be like to be playing in the metradome at the time. So anxiety is a really important thing and something that we don't talk about a lot, like a lot of people have come to me since reading my book.

Thank you for talking about anxiety at your level and I'm like, will you think I don't have it? Are you gonna say, imagine walking into Harvard Business School as a teacher for the first time, I never stepped or you can say, imagine walking into Harvard Business School as a teacher for the first time. I never stepped foot in a classroom. I walk into Harvard Business School as a one-time school dropout,

and I got a teach. Fast forward four years later, it's one of the post-popular immersive programs in the school, and it feels second nature, like, oh, I belong here. In fact, back to anxiety, I got to find new ways to freak me out so that I perform at my best.

Well, I would love to take clients myself that has a chain smoker, rock himself, and others Gary Vee who come in as guest lectures. And by the way, let's just spend one second on that. So without giving everyone the background, I talk about it in a book. It's but the important part to know that being a newcomer and imposter to a space, one of the benefits and a gift of it is that you don't have context about what's minimum viable performance, right? What's the minimal acceptable effort

that is going to make this a passable performance? And if you're somebody who has a bit of anxiety that fuels you and the pleaser, complex, whatever it is that drives you to be the best, as a result, when you don't have context, you're gonna do way more than necessary. So the first course I ever did in HBS, we did, me and my partner, Lensh Lesinger, is an amazing professor at school. We did 22 classes and I brought in every rock star.

See, we're so hard on this curriculum. I bought in the Gronkowski brothers to kick everyone's butt at 7 a.m. literally, all of them. When Like when I look back it was like the theater of the absurd. And at the end of the class, now, in my new I'm struggling the whole week thinking, was this any good? The class stands up and they give me a standing ovation. I'm trying not to lose my composure. My professor, Len, turns to me,

goes, well, this doesn't happen normally. What if I did it? At the end, one of my greatest possessions, one of the students, Hanemiah, a handwritten note, he said, read this when you get home. I get home, I open the letter. He basically said, look, I decided that Harvard was not for me, doesn't have enough of an entrepreneurial vibe,

and I was going to leave the school until I took your class. And your class was so amazing and transformative that it delivered value for my entire education. A lot is wrapped up in that little note. What happens when you channel your anxiety to deliver your best? What happens when you put yourself in really uncomfortable positions? The magic that is created. So back to the overall premise of the book, I really believe that everybody listening to this right now

has a leverageable asset that they could take advantage of in their life, that can move them along this continuum of journey to push the potential of their life, to do something that they've never done before, that in their mind are thinking it's not for me, it's not possible, it can't happen for me. And I tried to take these abstract concepts and reduce them down to stories and anecdotes and principles to make you really believe that anything is truly possible.

I am not exceptional, I just have done the work and done the journey. And hopefully when you read it, you think, oh, I can do that too. Well, I think this is what I'm going to title the episode. And it's on one of the last pages of the book. You say the reason you wrote the book was to teach people to have the infinite capacity to just figure it out,

which I love. Well, Matt, if a listener wanted to learn more about you, where can they find all things, Matt? Okay, great. LinkedIn, a Matt Higgins on LinkedIn. The book website is burntheboatsbook.com. Those are the two places where it's easiest to get in touch with me and hear more about what I'm up to. Okay, well Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show. It was really an honor to have you and listeners. What a fantastic book. Please pick this one up. You will enjoy it regardless of what your profession is.

Just bits of wisdom throughout all of it. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Good luck, everybody. Can't wait to hear from you and hear it. Let me know what you think about the book. That was an incredible interview with Matt Higgins. And I wanted to thank Matt Hanna Clark and Harper Collins for giving us the honor and privilege of interviewing him. Links to all things Matt will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.

Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. You can find our videos at PassionStruck Clips and on our main channel, John Armyles. Advertisers deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at LinkedIn and you can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at JohnArmiles.

If you want to know how I book amazing guests like Matt Higgins, it's because of my network. Go out and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with Annie Duke, who is an author, former professional poker player, corporate speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as a special partner focused on decision science at first round, capital partners, a seed stage venture fund. We discuss Annie's latest book, Quit, the power of knowing when to walk away. What you see with poker players, what you see with entrepreneurs,

what you see honestly with people climbing Everest, with people running projects that are over budget, continuing to develop products that can't find product market fit, staying in relationships too long, staying in jobs too long, whatever it is. What you'll hear from them a lot is, but if I quit now, I'll have wasted everything that I've already put in.

I've come so far, I've put so much time into it, so much effort, my heart and soul, like all these things. And they're thinking about waste as a problem that's retrospective, but it's not. Waste is a prospective problem. It's a forward looking problem. The fee for the show is that you share it

with family or friends when you find something interesting or useful. If you know someone who wants to understand how to create a fulfilling life, then definitely share today's interview with them. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share with those that you love or care about. And in the meantime, do your best to apply

what you hear on the show so that you can know what you listen. And until next time, live life Ash and Stark. safe, and should start.