Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Matt Higgins: Burn the Boats, Refuse to Die. Legendary Shark Makes the Case for No Plan B | Entrepreneurship | E212

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Matt Higgins spent most of his teenage years taking care of his single mother and scraping gum off of tables at Mcdonald's. After he dropped out of high school at age 16, he graduated from Fordham Law School and became the youngest press secretary in New York City history during the September 11th attacks. Matt created an entrepreneurial career that has now spanned multiple industries. In today’s episode, Matt comes back on YAP to discuss his brand new book Burn the Boats and his winning formula to stop hedging and embark on a lifelong journey of breakout success! Matt Higgins is an Executive Fellow and teacher at Harvard Business School, and, through RSE Ventures, the private investment firm he co-founded, an investor in some of America’s most beloved brands. He was a Guest Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank, and became the youngest press secretary in New York City history during the September 11th attacks. He then helped lead the effort to rebuild the World Trade Center site as Chief Operating Officer before becoming Executive Vice President of the New York Jets and then Vice Chairman of the Miami Dolphins.  In this episode, Hala and Matt will discuss:  - Why Burn the Boats is Matt’s most important project - How “familiarity breeds contempt” - Why your Plan B should be eliminated - Compound decision-making - Cultivating your own belief in yourself - Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-reliance” - Why Matt brought Kim Kardashian to Harvard - Who is cut out for being an entrepreneur - Harnessing the power of Linkedin - And other topics… Matt Higgins is a self-made serial entrepreneur with deep operating experience that spans multiple industries over his twenty-five-year career. Higgins holds dual roles as co-founder and CEO of the private investment firm RSE Ventures. His business-building acumen also earned him a spot as a recurring guest Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank during seasons ten and eleven. He is a prolific investor in the direct-to-consumer space and leveraged this expertise to become an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, where he coteaches the course “Moving Beyond DTC.”  A lifelong New Yorker, Higgins was appointed press secretary for the New York City mayor’s office at age twenty-six—the youngest in history—managing the global media response during the 9/11 terrorist attacks before ultimately becoming chief operating officer of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. After transitioning to the private sector, he spent fifteen years in senior leadership positions with two National Football League teams, starting as EVP of business operations for the New York Jets before serving as vice chairman of the Miami Dolphins for nearly a decade. Resources Mentioned: Matt’s Website: https://www.burntheboatsbook.com/ Matt’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-higgins-rse/ Matt’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/mhiggins Matt’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mhiggins/?hl=en Matt’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ManifestorMindset/ Matt’s Podcast The Manifestor Mindset: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-manifestor-mindset/id1517691358 Matt’s book Burn the Boats: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Boats-Overboard-Unleash-Potential/dp/006308886X Shark, Matt Higgins: Attacking Entrepreneurship | E145: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/young-and-profiting-with-hala-taha/id1368888880?i=1000544767334 LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 40% off at yapmedia.io/course. More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/

One common theme I have for successful founders is they refuse to accept things for the way they are. They just like refuse to believe that this is how it has to be because this is how it's always done. Two, they just always get back up again. You have to ask yourself, will you always get up again? Because the number one predictor of future success is past refusal to die. The idea of compounding applies equally as much to good decisions and bad decisions as it applies to money. If you could collapse the amount of time it takes for you to go ahead and implement a bold decision, if you could limit the energy leakage that you devote to contemplating lack of success,

you can pull forward your entire life. Everything has more time to exponentially compound. What is up Young and Profiters? You're listening to Yap Young and Profiting Podcasts where we interview the brightest minds in the world and unpack their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. I'm your host, Halitaha. Thanks for tuning in and get ready to listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to Young Improfiting Podcast, Matt.

Thank you. It's so great to be back. I'm so happy that you hear. So Young Improfitors, Matt Higgins is back again for a second appearance on the podcast. If you don't know, Matt, he's a self-made serial entrepreneur. He holds dual roles as the co-founder and CEO of the private investment firm, RSE Ventures. He's also a recurring guest on Shark Tank. It's ABC's number one show.

He did that for seasons 10 and 11, and he's also an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. So the last time we had Matt on the show, we went super deep on his inspiring come-up story. We got schooled on some major lessons in entrepreneurship. He's got a crazy journey from dropping out of high school at 16 to working at McDonald's. He jumped started his career as the youngest press secretary

for the mayor of New York. He's got a crazy story. and it was one of my favorite conversations of 2021. So if you want to hear that conversation, go back to episode number 145 after you listen to this one, and I'll try to play it as a Yap classic when this episode airs, so it's easy to find. So in round two with Matt Higgins,

we're going to focus on his new book, Burn the Boats. It's out February 14th, and we're going to learn the winning formula to stop hedging and embark on a lifelong journey of breakout success. So Matt, congratulations, is your first book, which I was sort of surprised to learn that it was your first book. I figured you must have had a few books

under your belt? Yeah, I wasn't sure the moral of story. So I had to wait to figure it out. I love that. As you know, probably know, I do my due diligence and lots of research on this show. So I was, you know, musing around on goodreads and I saw a note that you wrote to your fans. And you're a man of many accomplishments. And you wrote in that note that nothing you've done in your career matters as much as this book. And you call it the most important project in your life. So why is that? Oh, you're getting me like sensitive going to bring that fast. I remember. I'm memory when I wrote that note. It's because I think I figured out the moral of the story. So for those who go back to my origin, I'll let you listen to it. I feel like I bore witness to a lot of

suffering as a young person. And you sort of wonder like, not in a why me, but what for? That's the question I asked myself. And as time has gotten by and I've been blessed to be able to break out and do a lot of crazy things I've done and accumulate a degree of wealth and influence, I just kept going back to that moment in time, that origin story of being 16 and watching my mother struggle and then ultimately die and realize that there's no higher, greater use of my talent and time and money than ameliorating suffering, and then hopefully providing some of the answers to the test. And I have a lot of incredibly rich, deep, vulnerable conversations people one-on-one. When you share a lot of your gut-wrenching details, a little bit of TMI, it makes people feel

safe and open up to you. But you can only do that so much, and I live a lot of my life in guilt or anguish that, ugh, I don't have time, and I have my own goals. I wish I had time for you. My book is an attempt to scale, the things I've seen. the things I've learned, the pain I felt, and actually convince people, I am not an aberration. Like, it's my book, but it's your story. And I really believe that. And I killed myself for two years to make it interesting enough so that you're sort of hooked. And the Trojan horse of the book, as I have all these incredible stories about great people, include some gut-wrenching details, but it's a little bit of an act of inception to seep into your subconscious, that there

is a formula to achieve what I achieved. And I am no different than you. So if it were to work, if it was to connect with people and people were to read and say you move me in a positive direction. What could be more glorious than that? Yeah, I have authors on all the time and I'm never like, this was such a good book. I really don't do that often. But I found myself like highlighting all these quotes like, this is a bomb ass quote. This is a bomb ass quote. And it was really entertained by the book. So great job writing it. Very, very entertaining. Thank you. I love hearing that. Thank you. Even if you're just saying that, I don't really care. I thank you for doing it. I'm not just saying that. I don't, my fans know that I don't do that very often. Thank you. So let's talk about the title of the book.

It's called Burn the Boats. And to me, that's a phrase that basically means destroy your plan B, give yourself no option to return or retreat. And I found out from you that it's actually an ancient phrase that dates all the way back to the Old Testament. And it's usually related to times of war. So I'd love for you to kind of give us a history lesson. What does Burn the Boats mean in your own words and share some stories from Sun Tzu and Caesar and other people who use it in war? Yeah, so throughout the course of my life, at different moments, this phrase, I don't, burn the boat, says come up in a differing context, right? So most people associate it with Hernan Cortez and taking on the Aztecs 15, 19, very bad man. I do not endorse any of his tactics. But most people assume that's where it comes from, right? But when you look backwards, actually it shows up in art of war. When Sun Tzu uses the phrase, when an army is outnumbered, paraphrasing, you burn the boats and break the cooking pots. so they have no hankering after home. It shows up in Caesar when he crosses the Rubicon and on and on and on to the ancient Israelites. And what's fascinating is you're talking about multiple

different languages, multiple different centuries, but military leaders tend to be somewhat ruthless, realize that the way to get maximum output from your army is to extinguish any thought of retreat or any plan B. So this idea has resurfaced throughout the course of my career. And then when I work for the New York Jets, those out there listening who are sports fans, remember Rex Ryan, in, you know, around, you know, and I think it was 2011, I forget the year. We were taking on the Pittsburgh Steelers, we're an underdog,

and Rex gave a speech to the team the night before. And Rex is like a big guy with, you know, big jowls. And he started crying in this emotive speech about Cortez and saying, you know, he burned the boats and all I'm asking you to do is give me one game. And the team went out there, they won. New York Times did a big article about that speech and how the team, the players said it unlocked

another level of effort. Okay, interesting. After Shark Tank, I was on a panel with Kevin O'Leary and Mark Cuban and Bethany. I made some reference to the crowd about burn the boats. And Cubans like, burn the boats. What are you talking about? And I was like, oh, I thought this was deep in like the Gestalt, you know, everyone sort of knew the phrase. And I realized they don't. So that got me thinking, what do military generals intuitively know about us that we don't fully embrace? And it's the idea that humans perform better without a safety plan. My purpose for this book is one to demonstrate to you that that is true. A lot of people listening to be right now, I said, what are you saying, Matt? I have to pay the rent. I need a backup plan. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that when you

have less choices, you actually perform with more conviction and more focus. How do we take that idea and appropriate it for peacetime? I thought that was so impactful, like just kind of seeing the visual of people in war, you burn the boats and you're left to do. You're left to do. nothing but fight to the death, right? And make sure it's a life or death situation. There's no chance of retreat. And then your analogy of using that in business is just so powerful. So let's talk about how you burn the boats in your life. So like I mentioned, I covered your story for an hour in episode number 145, but I know not all 50,000 people who are listening to this is actually going to go back and listen to that. So I know you've never been to war like Caesar or Sunzu,

but you did burn boats many times in your life. So talk to us about the the times in your life where you didn't have a plan B, you burn the boats and went on to accomplish your dreams. Yeah, absolutely. And one more historical context for those listening. If you think it's an aging concept and we've all outgrown it with social media or whatever, think about Zelensky. A lot of people remember this. When he was invaded, conventional wisdom was that he was going to be toppled within days, even the United States, the CIA. All of our resources predicted this man did not have what it takes. The Ukrainians don't have would it take. And he was offered in a secret conversation, you know, a ride by President Joe Biden.

And he went public with the conversation and he said, I don't need a ride. I need ammunition. And if you think about that was his way of telegraphing to the world, I have burned my boats. I will die here. And that was the warning. You're going to be assassinated. And he told his people, I'm all in. And look what it did as a catalyst. It actually enabled got everybody to slightly escalate their commitment until we were all in. Nobody would have predicted the United States would be spending billions of billions of dollars to support Ukraine. So a little bit more of the bringing that historical context up. So as it pertains to me, without going through all the details, having grown up in abject poverty, I was so desperate and depressed, taking care of my mother

and felt like if I don't do something radical to change our circumstances, I know how the story's going to end. She's going to pass away, and I'm going to live in squalor. And I came up with this crazy idea after watching what she did. She was a high school dropout. She got her GED as an adult when she was 38 years old and enrolled in a community college. And when I was in seventh grade, earning like 375 at McDonald's scraping gum under the tables, I was like, there's got to be a better way. I read a newspaper ad that was inviting people to apply for a job delivering flyers. I think it was like $8 an hour. I was like, wait, I can two and a half X my salary if I just get this thing called a college student. How do I do that as fast as humanly possible? And I came up

with this idea that I was going to torpedo my education. I was going to drop out of high school at 16 and get a GED. But I realized, once I started floating this, conventional wisdom was like, woof, you're going to be branded a loser forever. You're never going to shake the stigma. People don't do that. I'm like, well, people don't grow up on a dirty mattress with eating government cheese either. So that isn't working so great. And then I realized, I had a, I don't know where this came from, but I realized the only way for me to go forward with this plan is if I fail every single class. sit in the back of this home room with the kids wearing beepers, doing drugs, whatever, if I just fail everything, except for typing, I mentioned that before, that I will have no choice

but to go forward. And so I share that as the genesis moment of my entire career. That single move to drop out of high school and stick to my conviction to ignore conventional wisdom because they didn't have context and to implement my radical plan pulled forward my entire professional life by two years so that I went from a high school dropout one day to a college student at 16 the next day. And by 26, I was press secretary to the mayor of New York. I went from making $375 an hour at McDonald's to making $105,000 a year, all because I burned the boats and I gave myself no other option to retreat. I love that. And then when you were press secretary of New York, that also was a time where you burn the boats. I think that's how you got that promotion, right?

You actually quit your job. Tell us that story. There's a lot of talk about quiet quitting. do you do in the different circumstances? So I've kind of nuanced opinions on this, but at the end of the day, one, you have to always know your worth, and everybody's always going to try to put you in a box. There are different managers out there. They're the good-hearted ones, which are the minority, the majority of people just extracting value from you. And if you don't know your own worth, you don't know how to set your boundaries. However, increased opportunity is a leading indicator of your future success. So what that means is you're going to get more responsibility before you get more money. Compensation, renumeration is a lagging.

So you have to be a little bit of patience and accept the responsibility and try to make yourself indispensable. That's always been my thing. Every job make myself indispensable. I'm not a quiet quitter. I'm an aggressive promoter and get what I want or I quit. And so at the mayor's office, I found myself ghostwriting speeches at age 23, I think, because I had been a writer. And I was doing all this great work, but I was ready to be promoted. And it wasn't happening for me. I was deputy press secretary at a young age. And the message I got back was wait your turn, you know, young man, Which, in retrospect, I was out of my mind to think it was my turn, but I said, I have a better idea. I'm going to quit. And so I actually quit working for Mayor Giuliani twice. This is a different

version of the Mayor Giuliani. America's come to know so well. I quit twice, and you have to have the courage to sort of go all in on what you know is true about yourself. And four months later, they called me back after saying I would never be invited back. And they offered me the job as press secretary at 26. So I share that story and the balance to say, your first instinct should always be patient, give people the benefit of the doubt that they're going to do right by you, advocate for yourself, but not too forcefully. But when the time comes and the balanced tips in favor of the idea that you're being exploited, then you've got to be prepared to quit. Yeah, I found that with my own journey as well. When I was 19 years old, I worked at a radio station called

Hot 97 for free for three years. And when I wanted a paying job and they refused to give me I left. I started my own website, blew up, became a very popular entertainment website. And then all the same DJs who wouldn't pay me minimum wage started hiring me to host their parties. And then all of a sudden, I went from intern to peer, like on the flyers with them and everything. And it happened right away because I just took control. And I was like, you know what? I'm not appreciated. I'm going to just do something on my own. And they came back knocking. And I find that a lot of people are so worried about like taking that big risk and burning those boats when it's the fast. this way towards your success. It helps people appreciate you more, I feel.

100%. And for those who don't know this phrase, it's really important for the rest of your life. Familiarity breeds contempt. It's annoying. It shouldn't be that way. But that's just the way a lot of humans are wired that when they know someone and they're in a desperate situation or they need a problem, they always look outside the organization. They're looking for that fresh savior. So understanding that managers often are wired that way tells you that, one, you have to know your own worth. People don't respect those who don't respect themselves. And too, you've got to be willing to gamble. And once you take the gamble, like what happened to you, everyone looks at you differently. Oh, you had the courage to quit. You must be valuable because you bet on yourself. So hard thing for

a lot of people to come to terms with because they don't like conflict. And it feels like asserting your worth feels either greedy or unbecoming. I think the opposite at the end of the day. Like, you got to know your own worth and you got to be willing to bet on yourself. Totally. So let's talk about how we've been programmed to have a plan B and to hedge our risk, because your book really turns this idea on its head. So what is the problem with having a contingency plan or a plan B? So I wrote the book very, you know, in a sort of bombastic way to provoke a reaction because a lot of the reaction from people is like, that's not true. I need risk mitigation. I didn't say toss your risk mitigation overboard and be recklessly irresponsible with your kids' 529 plan.

It would be a long title, too. I said toss plan B overboard. And what that means is, you know, is advocate for a process. When you're making bold moves, there's a template and a blueprint for how to do it. And by definition, you're going to feel uncomfortable. You're going to feel like an imposter. A lot of things are going to challenge you. So you need to make provisions for the journey. The first provision you need to make is to synthesize and contemplate the worst possible thing that could happen. What's the worst possible thing? I quit this job and I didn't get the job I wanted. I'm not as good as I think I am. And then I got to go back, you know, hand and hat in hand and say, can I get my job back? Yeah, they'll probably take me back.

What you find is when you process the worst possible scenario at the beginning of the journey, you can then refer back to that exercise and say when your mind plays tricks on you, what if, what if? You say, no, not now. I already did that. I already processed the worst case scenario. And it turns out I could live with the worst case scenario. And the alternative of doing nothing is actually worse than a speculative possibility that this is going to go

terribly wrong. And analyzing why people are afraid to make the move, the number one reason is because they invoke risk, but they have not taken the steps to synthesize and actually process, well, what is the magnitude of that risk? It's an excuse. We don't want to ask the question about what's the worst possible thing to happen because we don't want to know the answer, because we don't want to be challenged to take that step. So I'm deliberately trying to provoke you into saying, just hear me out. Just ask yourself if you were to actually take that step. What's the worst possible thing to happen. I am the most paranoid risk taker you're going to have on this show. Like, I don't take a step without agonizing all the things they're going to go wrong.

When I've taken a move, like even this book, I've included some details in this book that make me cringe. Like, ugh, why'd you share this? And then I remember, you already processed the worst case scenario. You're talking about your divorce because there's somebody out there who's desperate and broken right now, and you decide to send a little signal to them that it was going to be okay, even though you prefer not to mention it. You already did it. And so even myself, every single day, as I make these bowl moves, I'm revisiting the exercise that I did at the beginning to ask what's the worst that can happen. I love that. And is there any data or science that backs up the fact that contingency plans and plan V actually sort of slow us down from what we want? Yeah, for those who,

I'm a science junkie, I tried to hold back so I didn't bore you with my book, but I love studies. I'm always reaching for a study to prove, you know, that I can get through something or disprove something that's happening to me, but there was a great study at a Wharton in 2014, where they just decided to assess what is the impact of just contemplating plant B? And I won't go into the study details, but it's in the book. But what would happen if you had two groups of students, and one was told, suggested, you're allowed to think about another way to succeed, just allowed to, not even start and what they found in a empirically measurable way that not only were students less likely to be successful by just thinking about it, they cared a lot less to actually achieve the result.

They measured both desire and they measured likely success. So it's really fascinating. And I bring it up in different contexts. But science 100% bears it out that the mere contemplation of an alternative to achieve your result will make it much more likely that you ever get what you want in life. So the two statements that I just said a second ago, and that statement must always be together. I'm not saying don't process the worst case scenario. I'm saying, doing at the beginning of the journey, and then later on when your mind placed tricks on you, or that frenemy tries to undermine your ambition, you'd be like, no, no, no, I already thought it through before I started.

Yeah, I think that is such great advice. So like I mentioned, I kept highlighting quotes in your book. One of them I really liked was by learning how to confidently burn the boats and set a match to whatever corrosive plan be your cradling, you will collapse the time delay between insight and action and you will reap exponential returns. So I thought this is really important. I'd love for you to break it down for us. Oh, I love that. I love that you pull that sentence out. It's just Warren Buffett, those of you Warren Buffett fans out there, talks a lot about compound interest is the most important principle in all finance.

And he's right. Caviot. The idea of compounding applies equally as much to good decisions and bad decisions as it applies to money. So let's talk about good decisions. If you could collapse the amount of time it takes for you to go ahead and implement a bold decision, If you could limit the energy leakage that you devote to contemplating lack of success or the friend of me who's trying to undermine you, if you could collapse that, you can pull forward your entire life. I share my autobiographical details, not because I think I'm particularly important or it's particularly compelling. It's because I'm trying to illustrate what happens if you drop out of high school at 16 and start college? What happens if you do what Hamilton does in a play and he writes like he's running out of time? If you always treat everything with a degree of

urgency and you act more decisively, everything has more time to exponentially compound. I am simply the byproduct of compounding of a human life that started a little bit earlier. So I love that sentence. And it's such a hard thing to communicate in words, which is why I use all the storytelling in the book. Yeah, I loved it too. I mean, as a CEO and entrepreneur, like, that hit me so hard because I was like, man, I need to make decisions faster because, like, I know what the right thing is to do. But sometimes I get too emotionally attached. I feel bad for people, whatever it is when I just know sometimes the right thing to do is like cut the cord, move on, make a decision fast, because you'll be more successful faster. Like we all know what the right thing to do is inside most of the time. That's the bottom line,

right? I mean, that's the point of the book. We all know what the right thing to do inside. You know, interesting, in my Harvard class, I teach at HPS and I bring all these incredible founders and leaders. And we always leave the last one minute for them, what's the most important message you want to communicate to the students? So I have like this. this longitudinal study of incredible CEOs, Kim Kardashian, a wide range of people, what's the message they want to leave people with? And by and large, the most successful people I bring to the class always have the same consistent message, which is, don't overthink it. You already know what you need to do. So if you can figure out how to do what you already know you need to do faster,

then the world is telling you to do it, you will be successful. And those people tend to have put together the most outlandish dreams that I'm like, how did that 28-year-old pull it out? And when they give that talk, it's like, oh, because the thing you knew more than anything else was your capacity to just figure it out. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees.

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all these great success stories. Can you walk us through some of your favorite examples of an entrepreneur who burned the boat and went on to achieve their dreams? Yeah, my favorite, so many good stories in a book. But it was fun for the book. When you get to write a book, you get to celebrate all the people around you. And so I have been around so many strong female founders and women in my life who've made a huge difference. And so it gave me a chance to showcase them, which is amazing. So in the, aggregate, those are my favorite stories. One of them actually is about a woman who rejected a job for me, only to build her own firm and sold it at the same time as I sold the firm that we were

creating. My favorite story in the book, though, is about an Irish bartender named Aiden Kehoe, who came to the country with nothing except tremendous charisma and drive. He had went from being a bartender to creating a cybersecurity company that I had purchased. And Aiden and I became very close, but I noticed, and he was young, that there were certain things. that he didn't want to deal with. And I go through the archetypes of different types of leadership, and I would put him in the category of a martyr, the CEO who takes on everything on their shoulders, because they're probably not wanting to deal with some type of conflict to get the best out of somebody else that they take on every job. But nobody's a superhuman individual, and ultimately

crack started showing up in the business. And so about three years in, we had taken on a new investor, the business model wasn't playing out. He had tolerated certain employees that he probably shouldn't tolerate it. It just wasn't working. And I get a phone call one night. I remember I stepped out of the restaurant to take the call. And he's through tears. He says to me, Matt, I'm sorry. Like, I failed you. I know you bought the business. I'm so sorry. I'm going to resign in December. And as he's talking, I hear this beeping in the background. And I'm like, wait, what is that noise? Where are you? Because I'm in the hospital. My daughter is getting a test done. We're not sure what's going on with her health. And I was like, Aiden, first thing, when you're done, I'm

perfectly fun giving you this phone call. I'll let you know. I'll be your friend. I'll be the first person to let you know. I think you failed. Second thing, you need to be okay with the possibility that it won't work out. You're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and it's forcing you to not face things head on because you're scrambling to stay alive another day. You actually need to contemplate the worst stay scenario. Hang up the phone. Call me if you're ready to do the work again, whatever. Calls me back a few days later and he goes, it was such a relief to contemplate that this might not work out and that it would be okay, that it's given me the, I'm ready to go to work. Long story short, I always use industrial psychologists. I'm just that person. I just love

looking inside my head. And we bring an industrial psychologist. It was one of the most uncomfortable reports that I've seen anybody go through. And this report's supposed to be private. Even I don't read it because it's the exercise of allowing somebody to guide you that matters, not whether I know what happened or why. He goes ahead and says, excuse me for a moment, walks into the room where his entire staff is meeting, puts the report on the center table and says, you might as well read this and pass it around because I got a lot of work to do. And you already know what's broken. In two years, he turned the entire company around. An incredible success story, creates a culture of self-awareness and transparency and sells it for nine figures. And he is one of the most talented

human beings in my life, the person I turn to for guidance all the time. And the reason why I share that story is it shows the power of self-awareness. It shows what happens when you stop looking without, but turn the lens within and are not afraid to find out what's there. Why am I not functioning the right way? What trauma have I not dealt with? So it's an incredible story. So in this story, it's almost like he burned the boat on himself. That's my point. So I love that you said that, by the way. Well, I love talking to you because you always hit on the like the nuance. In my case, I'm using boat as a metaphorical boat. It's not the like Cortez boat where we literally can't eat and the boat is on fire. It's the things in your life that are preventing you from

fully committing to your full potential, internal and external. The image on the cover, for those who haven't seen it, this is the image on the cover. If you notice, it's meant to actually trigger, it looks like a paper boat in a child's bathtub. And the reason why I went with that image is because so many of the boats that we need to burn actually go all the way back to childhood. It's these legacy issues that we carry with us. And my journey began ultimately when I was brought to my knees with the idea that I need to shed my shame. I need to come to terms with the fact that my childhood was torture and I watched my mother die powerless and I have a lot of resentment against the world. And I need to process that. So boats is a metaphor for everything in internal and external that you

need to literally burn in order to do what you were meant to do on this earth. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful message. So your book is to split into three parts. I thought it could give everybody sort of like a high level of what they can expect. If you can briefly go over it, the first one is get in the water, no turning back and then build more boats. Yeah. So big picture. The boat is meant to boat is premised on the idea that the joy of living is in the striving. There's a ton of science, and I touched upon in the book, that demonstrates, why do we feel melancholy after we finish the marathon? Why does an Olympian suffer from depression after the games? And it's because what we really enjoy in life is the pursuit of our full potential, is trying to, like, what's the ceiling

of my potential? What did the, what did God put me on this earth for? What am I capable of? We are all endlessly trying to figure that out. But that's not reinforced in society. What's reinforced is the podium, where the anthem is playing. What's not reinforced is the 4 a.m. jogs, you know, in the cold, whatever. So the whole book is premised on this idea that the joy of living is in the striving, and I am 100% sure of that. So then the question is, the book is meant to construct in three parts, that journey, that cycle. So the first is how to prepare yourself for the journey. And it begins with self-auditing. It begins with increasing your belief in your own intuition. It begins with clearing the deck, so extending the boat metaphor, of the things that are getting in the way of you trusting your own

intuition, then it takes you to, how do I stay on this journey? How do I deal with the things that try to derail me all the time that try to undermine me as I'm going on this journey? And the corporate saboteurs in this world who are, you know, throwing rocks at you and you feel it, but you can't articulate it. And I go into how to put words to those things that you into it about your manager or, you know, whatever's trying to hold you back. And then lastly, like, how to stay on that. Matt, how to continue? How to when you achieve something, how to consolidate your gains so that you're not what my partner calls a grasshopper. I did this. Matt's not Harvard. Well, now he's doing a TV show. Well, how is he making sure Harvard's successful? How to ensure that you consolidate your gains so

that you can build this life of perpetual pursuit, but you don't look back and behind you is half measures. Because that'll erode your self-esteem. So I also talk in the book about how to consolidate your gains, how to use the fact that through habituation, things do get easier the second time you do it. Second time I went on Shardtank, I didn't have imposter syndrome the first time I did. So I can take that extra energy that I was using to combat imposter syndrome and now redirected to teaching at Harvard where I did have imposter syndrome. So it's, again, it's meant, and forgive me for the metaphor, but you know, the boat metaphor does kind of work, but it's meant to be a narrative framework to take those three aspects and then convince you and show you how to begin the journey again

and why it gets easier and easier each time. Yeah, I'm super happy you had that breakdown because I want to dig into a lot of things that you just said. So let's talk about the importance of trusting ourselves. If you don't trust yourself, you miss the chance to be extraordinary. I always say something similar. I'm always telling people like, you got to believe that life is limitless. And then you also got to believe in yourself. To me, those are like two rules of life if you want to be massively successful.

So talk to us about your guidance for gaining more trust in yourself and your skills and your talents. Because I feel like a lot of people have a hard time actually trusting themselves. Yeah, that's, by the way, I love what you said about Limitless Possibility. I was thinking about this book. This book only resonates and only works if you want to believe that anything's possible. If you don't want to believe that anything's possible or want to believe the die is cast or the deck is stacked against you, the book doesn't work.

I won't resonate. So I totally agree with you that anything is possible. In terms of cultivating your own belief in yourself, it begins by asking, honestly, why don't you believe in yourself? And accepting the simple premise that you have, one fundamental job on this earth, which is to love yourself, and that you can't outsource that job to mom or dad, to your spouse, to anybody. You have to believe that your fundamental purpose on this earth is first to love yourself. And then second, to say, okay, what's preventing me from actually

having faith, to actually believing that I have the answers? And honestly, a lot of it, maybe I have confirmation bias because of my childhood. I do think a lot of it comes from the nature and the influences that are around us that undermine us. A lot of people are. in toxic relationships. I talk about this in a book where they have a partner who is like, well, I really like, you know, Bill because, you know, he puts me in my place. He brings me back down to earth. He grounds me. And I was talking about this book like, Grandma wants to be grounded. Airplanes are grounded when there's a traffic jam in Newark Airport. Like, I don't want to be grounded. And so to be honest, when you audit, what's preventing me honestly from

believing that I actually have good instincts, that I have good experience, right? That I may I have good judgment. It usually is something in your environment that has influenced and undermine your confidence. So start there. Sometimes it's anxiety, which can be treated in so many different ways by staying present through meditation, through medication, but for recognizing that we all need a degree of anxiety to perform at our best. I talk in the book about this balance and a study that finds that there is a state of optimal, optimal anxiety, too little and you're not motivated to do your best, too much, and you're paralyzed. And I illustrate what both of those look like. So summarize, one, audit, what might be preventing you from believing in your instincts,

and two, if you have something fundamental, potentially in your factory settings, well, then let's mitigate it by embracing and understanding it, not be ashamed of it, and maybe treating it through medication or meditation or whatever it takes. I love what you're saying here. What you said about your environment and the people that you surround yourself really hit home for me. I was with somebody for 11 years, basically married, and he didn't want me to be an entrepreneur. And I started my company, and he was furious with me. And I actually had to leave our house, move out. And as soon as I did that, my whole career skyrocketed. I got on the cover of podcast magazine. It became a number one

podcaster. My company, like $5 million in two years, 60 employees, all this stuff, as soon as we broke up. Because like you said, like if you're with somebody who doesn't want you to shine and grow, I was doing great. I had a great corporate career or whatever, but I was as great as he wanted me to be. And then as soon as I wasn't with him, I was allowed to be my full self and have my full potential. So sometimes even, like, I still love him. He's my friend. But like, even to people that love you, they can't see your own potential. Only you know what you're capable of.

Can we go deeper around that? I love this conversation because you may be different, but often I find there are two fundamental reasons why people will accept that situation. One is they either don't believe they deserve more. So it's a lack of self worth. or two, they don't believe there's anything better. It's not like we have a ton of reps. We can remember our past life or whatever you believe and like,

well, I remember, you know, so-and-so, that was a much better relationship. And we're all starting out. We honestly don't know better. And then a lot of ways we're conditioned to believe that somebody will complete you, that we're not born whole. And the reality is we are 100% born-hole. It took me going through my divorce to recognize, like, objectively, I am born whole. Technically, I am born whole.

I can only see the world through my own two eyes. I don't know what red looks like for you. And so as a result, we are technically born whole, but we're not taught those things. We're not actually conditioned to believe any of them. And it's very insidious because then when you align yourself with the wrong person, it can unravel your entire life. I talk a lot about my partner, Sarah, and not in like a cliche way,

like, oh, he really likes this way. Like, no, no, Sarah is the reason I'm on Shark Tank. She's the reason I teach at Harvard. She's the reason I've been so successful because she's a force multiplier. She derives pure joy out of helping me unleash my ability, and I derive pure joy out of watching her shine. It is out there. But if you don't believe you deserve it or don't believe it exists, you won't go find it. And I think that's the reason why a lot of people stay. And so I heavily wait the insidious impact of people who are in your foxhole who don't,

who aren't rooting for you. Because nobody, nobody can win. Now I'm going to war metaphors, but true, nobody can win a two front war. Nobody can. Not you, not a country, not anybody. Yeah, I love that. So I hope you guys take heed, especially my young listeners, your partner in life is so important. And once you feel like somebody who's around you that you're spending a lot of time with is actually trying to hold you back, that's time to move on, even though it's going to hurt short term, long term, you're going to be way happier, I promise. And that's why insecure people are really dangerous. If you have a partner, if you're listening out there and somebody's actually always trying to be a little bit like, one, make you afraid of the danger on the other side or two, make you feel as if you're not equipped to handle it. One, they shouldn't be doing that.

That's not a friend. But two, they're probably doing it because they're insecure, that if you shine too brightly, you'll leave them, you'll start believing yourself more. And it stems from the fact that there's something they feel is ugly about themselves, right? But look how corrosive that is. Now you're with somebody who's insecure,

has low self-worth. Now they're using that to undermine you to destabilize you so that you stay put. You're not just going to stay put physically in the relationship. You're going to stay put in every other area of your life, too. If you don't feel like you're worthy of a good partner, spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, you're not going to feel like you're worthy of a raise or worthy of a better job. It cascades straight your entire life.

So please believe if I say one thing, that person is out there who could be the greatest force multiplier of your life, but it starts with knowing that you deserve it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Powerful conversation. Yeah, I love talking to you. And I love this topic. I honestly, I don't care about talking about NFL teams or whatever the stuff I've done.

I care about talking about these issues because they're more important than anything. else. 100%. Nobody talks about them enough. So let's talk about this habituation concept. So in the third part of Burn the Boats, you say that habituation can hurt us. What do you mean by that and why should we want to take more risks? I think that we should not habituate our behavior any more than necessary to extract more from ourselves. What I mean by that is certain things are more efficient by habituating, right? Like certain routines make sense. Certain things about self-care makes sense, meditating, which I don't do enough of, things that make sense that unlock you. But however, a lot of society tries to make you conform to a consistency so that you stay in a box. And we treat

a degree of inconsistency or excitableness or open-mindedness as if it's haphazard or you don't have a plan, right? So there's a lot of pressure trying to make sure that your behavior looks consistent. And why does that matter? Because a lot of people say, well, I can't quit the job after six months because I'm going to look flaky. I can't change my major because my dad's going to be disappointed at me because I'm always trying to do something different every day. So like there are a lot of forces in this world that are trying to organize your behavior. It goes back to our previous conversation. Why do we think they're doing that? Why do those forces exist? Because people don't want to put the pressure on themselves to do the same thing. So if the entire world is being told,

stay in your box and stop being so abhazard, then at the end of the day, you're eventually going to conform to it. So I'm trying to articulate this unsaid force in the universe that tries to get people to behave consistency for no good reason to open your mind like, who says I can't quit that job? And by the way, why do I give a shit if somebody's going to judge me? It's a crappy job. I want to get out of here. Emerson, one of my favorite writers on planet Earth, if I was on an island and I could only take one essay with me. Forget about me with my book. Don't take my book. Take self-reliance from Emerson. He calls out this idea of foolish consistency that's meant to placate a people around you. That's what I talk about. Make sure that you're not habituating things in order to

please some constituency so that you don't look flaky. Okay, so let's talk about a gut sandwich. So you talk about a gut sandwich in your book. You give the story of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. I'd love to understand what a gut sandwich is and how we can use it in business. What's great about writing a book as you get to make up words for concepts that are in your head. So I've taken the liberty to make them while gut sandwich is one that I've made up. And it's a way to articulate, like, what are the ways in which breakthroughs happen? And what I have found and observing founders that I work with looking at breakthrough innovation, right? They begin with intuition about the way how the world could work or should work. Something is broken. Lola is a

good example in the book, right? But there are tons of others. Hey, something is happening to us or being put in our bodies that isn't good. And two, it shouldn't work that way. And there's a better way to do it. Right. So usually that's how innovation is now. Now, what happens next? all look for data or confirmation, confirmation from friends, from people. Again, I talk on the book about how be very careful with who you consult with your nascent dreams because they're fragile. And since a lot of people have a negative bias, you want to make sure you consult pragmatic optimists. People who are inclined to think positively and think about potential, but can give you honest feedback. So we consult people and then we look for data to support our intuition.

Here's the problem. Opportunity arise before the tipping point of evidence. And I'll say that again, opportunity arise before the tipping point of evidence, meaning that the real breakthrough innovations happen before there's going to be any confirmation in data. And so if you end the inquiry based on data and want data to give you the green light, most of the time data will give you a red light. And that's where innovation dies. So I came up with this idea of gut sandwich to give you out there confidence to say, I'm never going to find enough data to support my groundbreaking innovation because it's arriving before the tipping point. I'm going to have to make the call based on intuition. And every single breakthrough I've seen has been based upon intuition as to how things

should work or will work. Yeah, to me, this was such an interesting part of the book, the fact that data actually can deter you from starting something before you even start. And too many people are numbers-based, facts-based. My business partner is such a numbers guy. I'm totally the opposite. And he was like, we got to follow the data, follow the data. And I'm like, no, I'm following my heart. Like, let's go this way. I do that every time and always win, you know? But to stay with that, but that's a great point. Like to stay with that, at the end of the day, if we were to use these two words, who is most likely to make breakthrough groundbreaking innovations or revolutions in society

an operator-executor or a visionary? And of course, you'll say a visionary, right? But the visionary is not operating on data. So if those are the ones responsible for birthing, the best things in life, of course they weren't operating on data when they made the choice. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. young and profiteers. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't

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follow the numbers. It will tell you what to do. And it's like, there's lots of nuances that you need to be aware of. I love the story of Lola. I thought that was great because I'm a woman. I remember for years, I was like, what is all these chemically enhanced products? It's so bad for us. I'm going to get cancer from these things. There's nothing else out there. And I always felt that way before a product like Lola came out. And it's just so interesting that the data told them otherwise, but they just went for it, knowing that there was, if they felt like that, then other women must be feeling like that. I love the Lolo story, too, because I'm a guy, obviously. So as a guy, one step removed and you're listening to them explain why this isn't how products should be made. And they are envisioning an

entire new category. You would say, like, well, that makes sense. And actually, when I consulted a lot of women to say, what's they thinking, like, no, it'll never work. Women have too much brand loyalty to their existing product. They'll never switch. Isn't that interesting? I would love for you to share this story for it. Some people are like, like Lola what, right? Lola is as feminine care products that use, you know, much better ingredients. They eliminated bleach. I mean, start there, right? And just all the ways in which it's, you know, made just more enlightened, right? Big picture. And they started that movement. Now there are a bunch of other products on the market. So it was actually started by my partner, Jesse's wife. And as I was deciding

whether we invest or not, and I'm consulting, you know, women on it. By and large, the feedback was people would never switched. And I like sharing that because this is the consumer. So the end consumer was predicting human behavior in the aggregate that they would be more loyal to the brand. And even the end consumer couldn't anticipate how they would respond to Lola's messaging once Lola explained what's in your feminine care product. So the founders had to say, I need to look past that initial feedback, including my wife, too. She was like, I don't think it's going to be successful. And in the end of the day, they had to go on intuition and set of data. And a lot of VCs also said the same thing. You can't take on these big juggernauts, you know, women won't switch too much brand loyalty. And they did it anyway.

Yeah, I love it. And now they're everywhere. I think they're in like Target and they're pretty much everywhere. Walmart, everything. Yeah. So let's switch gears. Let's talk about vision. So like we mentioned, you teach at Harvard. And I heard you, were you the one who brought Kim Kardashian to Harvard? I was the one who brought Kim Kardashian to Harvard, which I haven't talked about if you want to talk about that for a second. Yeah. I saw all the pictures and stuff. I had no idea you were the one who brought her in. Yeah, that's my, that's my, my course I created with my, with, uh, with, uh, with, uh, fellow faculty members. And it's a, it's devoted to direct to consumer. So we bring it over the course of a week. It's crazy intense and it's very well curated, you know,

up to 20 classes over a course of a week. And it's meant to, uh, to really dissect the Omni Channel journey, which usually starts with direct a consumer, but morphs into retail. So all those brands that people out there know and love, it's hymns and all birds and all these great consumer brands. They usually began as DTC. I put this lollapalooza of Eco, at Harvard Business School, which is amazing. I've been doing it for four years. So we always like to bring in a couple of celebrity founders that have crossed over into trying to become business people, because they also expose a lot of vulnerability. You know, celebrity brands, as much as they have a huge following on the fan side, they tend by investors tend to think, like, is this for real?

Are you really committed? They actually have to overcome a lot of the hangover from celebrity. So we brought in Scarlett Johansson as a good friend of mine. She's zoomed in from set. Bobby Brown This is a good friend of mine, Bobby Brown Cosmetics. Now I'm really name-dropping, but is what it is. And then Kim Kardashian, which was fascinating. And I'll tell you what. So Kim Kardashian co-founded a business called Skims. Everybody probably knows that.

This business is such an extraordinary success that I don't think it gets a fraction of the coverage it can as simply a business case study. So we wanted to bring it in and say, why is Skim's so successful? And one of the core themes that played out over the course of the week was DTC is really struggling. right now because customer acquisition costs are very expensive. A lot of these companies became

very dependent upon the pandemic because everybody was home. It was easy to get customers. It was cheap. So people became dependent. And suddenly pandemic ends. The model doesn't work. Acquisition's expensive supply chains up. Kim Kardashian's company, Skims, has defied those trends. Her customer acquisition costs are very low relative to the average order. And the reason why is when you have a celebrity at the top of a brand, storytelling becomes everything. thing. And they're able to use organic customer acquisition through storytelling, social sharing, to subsidize their acquisition costs and bring those numbers down a lot. So we bring Kim in with her co-founder, Yens, for an hour and 45 minutes. The students at Harvard Business School do not

hold back. They asked every question you might ask, how long will celebrity last and like to delve into the authenticity? And I told Kim afterwards, I was so surprised the extent to which she held her own with the best founders in a country, so thoughtful, so nuanced. I said, is there a reason you don't share that? Now, I'm not, it's not like I watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians or have any exposure to Kim Kardashian, and I would admit it if I did, but I did not perceive her as being this extraordinary female founder. I was so impressed and she had said to me off to the side, like, I want to share that, but like, you know, back in the day, E didn't think it was that interesting. And, you know, she just, so for me, I was fascinated to see this incredible female founder who I don't believe gets a fraction of

the coverage she deserves. It created a great backlash, which was entertaining to watch. A lot of people saying, what does Kim Kardashian deserve to be at Harvard? She deserved to be there just as much as some of the greatest founders in the country that came to that class. Pretty remarkable. Really interesting. Now you make me want to try to get Kim Kardashian on the show. You should.

I'm mostly inviting all the negative tweets that I'll come out of here. But I don't really care. It is what it is. And she was remarkable. Yeah. By the way, I'm also an investor in fair. I should disclose that. I'm investor in Skims.

I invested in the last round, which is like $3 billion valuation. So obviously you can reject everything I just said, but I thought it was amazing. I teach a lot about personal branding. And there's something really powerful when you have pull marketing rather than push marketing. A lot of founders get it wrong. They're pushing ads, pushing ads. Like you said, high acquisition costs, unsustainable. They think they're doing great.

But really, they're just pouring money into something. When you have a content marketing machine, like you said, storytelling, spokesperson, things just come to you. You don't have to chase it all the time. So that's what she's getting. People are finding out about it. And to me, that's so powerful. I've been thinking about this a lot that we need to migrate the KPI that we analyze businesses

on. We need to go from customer acquisition cost, CCC, because anybody in America listening to or you could be a small business listening to your podcast. I don't care where you are. You have the ability to create a conversation around your brand that starts with making people evangelical about you or your product. First, deliver something exceptionally surprise and delight. And then you need to foster a conversation.

It begins by having the confidence that what you have to say is worthy. When I talk to small businesses a lot or LinkedIn, whatever, they're like, man, nobody cares about what I'm doing. I'm like, that's not true. 20 people on your block kind of care. And I think to be successful in e-com especially, but in business in general, this in America now, you need to have the loudest microphone on your block. And it's not hard to do to actually draw a page from Kim Kardashian.

The good part is she's competing against civilization. Lots of conversations have. When you're in Main Street, USA, most small businesses around you aren't putting in the time because they don't believe that what they have to say is important. It's a lot easier to kind of compete.

So I've been thinking about this idea a lot about CCC rather than CAC, customer conversation, how are you fostering? And you've done it yourself and you see the benefits. And you know why customer acquisition costs are so high? It makes sense. If the conversations are happening everywhere around us

24 hours a day on TikTok, on Instagram, it would make sense that the interloper, i.e. the ad, is going to have to pay a lot of money to interrupt that conversation. But if you are part of that conversation, you pay nothing. Yeah. It reminds me of something. I had the founder of the NPS survey, Fred Reich held on the show a while ago. And he talks about this KPI of like customer referrals and that nobody's looking at how many people are telling their friends about your product as a future projection of growth, right? People are just looking at like the revenue that's coming in and not necessarily like,

how many people are referring your product? That would actually be an amazing metric because even back to my point about customer conversation metric that it really, from the beginning of the time, that's how stories were passed down was word of mouth, that's how people get caught. And it would make sense that somebody's going to trust

somebody who is less biased, who isn't being paid. They're going to trust that recommendation and the paid chill or the ad, which is the worst form of shilling, right? And yet there's no way to measure it actually and therefore it's undervalued. That's what I love about the book.

process, which you'll see one day when you write a book, like that you can work really hard to try to improve your ranking on Amazon, try to sell a lot of books, whatever. But that only works for a very short period of time. The cream always rise to the top with books because people vote through referral. They vote for reviews. It's like one of the last pure forms of like the echo chamber. And you probably notice to do, whenever I read a book that's pretty high up on the Times list or the Wall Street Journal that's been on there for like three, four weeks, the book is always damn good. Like, I've never been like, I don't get why this is on this. It's like, exactly. And so that's just a proxy for what happens when there's word of mouth, because in a book

world, you really can't spend money efficiently to like advertise. It doesn't work. So it's basically because people like the book. Yeah. And I hope that happens to you. I hope I see you. New York Times bestseller, Wall Street Journal bestseller. I have a feeling it's going to happen. From your mouth to God's ears and your listeners. Yeah. Go buy the book. Okay. So like we were just talking about, you teach at Harvard Business School. And in your book, you mentioned that sometimes they seek advice from you about what they should do after their college career. So what private equity firm should they go to? What consulting firm? And you always tell them to take a step back and you say, I don't want to hear what you want to be. I want to know who you want to be. And I thought this was

a great lesson for all my listeners. Yeah, I'm always amazed. I went to Queens College. And I imagine, wow, if I ever went to Harvard Business School, I wouldn't have a care in the world because you went to Harvard Business School. You get every job you ever want. your life has been derrissed. And in having these conversations with students the first year I taught, I was like, wow, you're just as vulnerable as anybody else. You're just as just as sort of confused trying to figure things out. And what I would find is they have so much pressure to sort of know the answer of like, which private equity firm are you going to go to? Should I go back to consulting? You know, 10% of the student body is being subsidized by a consulting firm. Anyway,

all these very tactical questions. But if I would ask them the big picture existential questions, they had put so little effort into and figuring those out. And what do I mean? by that. I think the questions of what kind of environment do I thrive in? Do I want to be in a place where it's very prescriptive and I have a boss telling me exactly what I want what I should be doing? Or do I want to be in a place where I have the freedom to innovate? Do I want to be in an environment where I'm in charge or do I want to be part of an army? Am I a creator or am I a builder? Like they sound so obvious, but a lot of people bypass these questions of like, what environment will I thrive in? And so I always try to break it down. Hey, let's not worry about where they

go to KKR or Blackstone. Let's find out, do you really want to be in private equity? Do you, and like, just because somebody told you that you should be a founder, because you've been watching videos on Instagram about hustle culture, do you really think you have what it takes to be a founder? Do you even want to be? And it's like, not really. I kind of, I don't want to be in charge. So a lot of times I find that there's like a gravitational pull that people follow that make them try to focus on the doing rather than, you know, who they want to be. So one last question before we start to close out the interview. You just alluded to it, made me think of the question. So obviously you're around entrepreneurs all the time, right? You

invest in companies. You're a serial entrepreneur. You're friends with all entrepreneurs. You know what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And there's equally, you can have a great life not being an entrepreneur. Not everybody has to be an entrepreneur. This is pretty much an entrepreneurship show. But I've seen lots of successful people, more successful than entrepreneurs I know who are corporate executives and they're doing great in those types of roles. So I'd love to understand from you, like what's the personality type or the type of people that thrive as a founder? And how can you tell if you're cut out for entrepreneurship? Oh, such a great question. I like the first point you made. There's way too much social pressure on trying to, you know, value being a founder over being part, you know, of a team.

And then there's also way too much, there's way too much papering over of all the bad parts that go into being a founder and how hard it really is. And I won't, I won't, you know, be Debbie Downer here. It's just a fact. So setting that aside, because I know you address that stuff. I do think, The one common theme I have for successful founders is they refuse to accept things for the way they are. They just like refuse to believe that this is how it has to be because this is how it's always done. They just always have a very strong view about how things could be done and how things should be done. That's number one. Two, they just always get back up again.

Like they, no matter what I find, I talk about this in my book, those without landish breakthrough success that we can't even like conceive, I do find a common fact pattern in them. in that they tend to absorb the wins. When there's a win, it enhances their self-esteem, their self-worth. And when they have a loss, all they do is expand the definition of what winning looks like. So in other words, like, oh, whether it's like, I mean, it's kind of good that that happened because as a result, I saw this and now I'm going to do it a different way, actually comes across as borderline delusional.

So I caveat that. Like, I'm not built that way. I actually scrutinized my losses very heavily. And because I'm intellectually curious, I do absorb the losses a bit. I'm not going to lie. I'm an amalgam of losses and wins, but the most successful people manage to completely repel, reflect the losses. So big picture for anybody listening out there, you have to ask yourself, will you always get up again? Because that is the number one predictor of future success is past refusal to die. When I see a company that has like nine

life and death moments, that company's not lucky. That's companies driven and led by somebody who refuses to die. So being an entrepreneur, I'm having literally right now three near-death moments, like, around me. Every day, all I do is wake up in a state of near-death with something that I care about. That is completely undermining any joy of some aspect of things that are working out. People are like, you have a book coming out. Isn't it great? I'm like, yeah, but, you know, that's what being an entrepreneur means. And it's a little bit like whack-a-mole. One moment, you're like, thank God. And then, so do you have what it takes to never give up? Do you have what it takes to live in an unending state of putting your finger in the dam and just

trying to prevent catastrophe because if you do, you'll probably be successful. Ask yourself, have you been socialized by Instagram to believe that there's something better about being an entrepreneur than doing something else? Because that's a lie, a complete lie. The world doesn't work without people who are part of teams and are willing to draft behind, you know, creators and help them execute. Yeah, I totally, totally agree. I feel like, like you said, it's like a personality type. The person who's like, is unwilling to just give up. That's what an entrepreneur is because you always have to like pivot and kind of like, burn the boats to your point and move on to the thing that you think you want to go for because you think

it will have a better outcome, right? And just always switching gears. That's what I feel like entrepreneurship is. Yeah, Jeff Bezos has a great quote. He goes, you have to be rigid in your conviction and flexible in your execution. So I think that's like the burning the boats has to be like believing in the vision. But when you're actually rigid in your execution, like you just said, that means you won't make all those little pivots along the way. No business resembles five years later the original PowerPoint mostly. And so if you're not willing to make those pivots, you never get to the five-year-later version of a PowerPoint. People who are very rigid in their execution are not successful entrepreneurs.

They're successful enablers of entrepreneurs. People who are rigid in their vision are successful entrepreneurs. But people who have self-awareness will make the course corrections before they're imposed upon them. They don't need interventions from an external because they're intervening all the time with their brain and saying, like, where am I going wrong? They're intellectually curious about their own mistakes. So I would summarize saying that vision, that rigidity of the vision, the confidence,

the willingness to never die, but the self-awareness to constantly reflect upon what's going wrong and the confidence and humility to acknowledge what's going wrong and make those course corrections before the universe imposes them upon you. It was so good, though. It recapped a lot of what we just talked about. And it's also making the decisions quickly following your gut, not just like the data and the numbers and following your intuition.

So, all right. One last question. We'll close this out. I know that you went through a lot of failure during the pandemic. and I would love to understand the types of failure you went through and how you overcame them and some lessons that we can learn in terms of overcoming failure. I would say that the number one most important thing, obviously failure was happening everywhere with the businesses and trying to stay flat.

But I actually think the pandemic period was less about failure and more about survival and triumph, if I'm being honest. When I recall the pandemic, I recall triumph. And the central theme was predicting how things were going to play out, not needing for them to play out in order to act on them. That's the most important variable in being successful in business is the willingness to act on danger before you have pure evidence that the danger is going to materialize.

Do you need to see the iceberg of the bow in order to be able to course correct? Or can you use feedback data intuition to say, let me course correct. And so in the pandemic, applying to that, we had a paradigm across the portfolio and I would talk to our founders and say, every time I found we were acting on old assumptions, say, wait a second, is this a business

we would build if we were building this business today? Maybe it's liberating that we can't open our stores anymore. We did that with Milk Bar with Christina Tosi. It was like we were scrambling to reopen the stores and we were like, why are we scrambling to read? Who needs story? What are our stores? Why don't we just sell cookies, you know, at retail? And like, so I would say that to me, that pandemic is an exercise in crisis decision making where you just simply say, how do I make the most of the situation. And what I like, what I take with me from the pandemic is we shouldn't need a crisis to have a clarity of decision making. We should accept the fact that too many options is paralyzing. And we should accept the fact that we can avoid disaster before it's upon us.

And that speed of decision making is more important than perfect information. So I look back at that ear and be like, wow, that was actually pretty remarkable that, you know, every business I care about, nothing went under. I love that. Matt, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I always enjoy you coming on the show. You're somebody that I highly look up to. I recommend your book, burn the boats. Like I mentioned, one of my favorite reads so far this year. Thank you. I love coming on. I appreciate it. Such thoughtful, great questions. Got me all jazzed up for this week. Yeah, I can't wait. And I'm going to tell all my podcaster friends to make sure they interview you because you've got a lot to say. So again, thank you for coming on. So we always close out the show asking two questions.

The first one is what is one actionable thing our young improfitors can do today to be more profiting tomorrow. Wow, such a good question. I believe that everybody has inside them a leverageable asset. And that leverageable asset comes from a few different places. A lot of times it comes because you sit in a stream of data of information. Everybody sits in a stream of data. I was on my TV show that I'm working on that helps business entrepreneurs buy a business for the first time. and I met this amazing woman from the Bronx, and she had a bunch of Airbnbs.

And I was like, well, what's your business model? She's like, I focused on visiting nurses who are coming in from different places. And I said, well, why them? She goes, because they can stay for 30 days and they can pay a higher rate because it's being subsidized. I was like, well, how did you figure that out? I was working as a clerk in a hotel and I would overhear all the people checking in and visiting nurses.

And I decided I was going to go ahead and create an Airbnb business based on that. Wherever you are, whoever you are, just like that woman from the Bronx, had a levergible asset that came from a proprietary insight, something she could only see from sitting in the stream of data. You're sitting in a stream of data that could form the nucleus of your own business or a new life or a promotion. So just ask yourself,

what are the proprietary insights I have that could become a leverageable asset to change my life? That's so brilliant. Because you brought it up, can you tell us about the new TV show at all? I can. I shot it. I shot it.

It's basically, I'll shorten this into 30 seconds. It's Shark Tank appeals to all the people who have like an invention or an idea and they want Mark Cuban or Kevin O'Leary to write a check. We all love it, yet very few of us can actually relate to it because very few have an idea that they're going to seek venture funding. So why do we love it? Because we all love the idea of being free of calling the shots of owning our own business. We fantasize about it. And so I wanted to create a show with Mark Burnett, creator of The Voice and Apprentice, that teaches people, the other 99%. What if I only have 75 grand and I want to start a business?

and buy a business. How do you buy a business? How do you value a business? Oftentimes, it's usually a couple. And so what are the misperceptions about what it's going to be like to work together? All these derailers that I call that get in the way. So that's the show where we shot it. So fun to do in Florida, eight episodes. And now we're looking to find it home. It's originally going to be on C&BC, but they went to know the direction this year with their content. So we're finding a home. So by next time I come on, we'll be talking about the premiere of this show. That's so exciting. And, you know, I've been hearing this as a trend. that a lot more people are going to start buying businesses instead of creating new, brand

new businesses. So this is like right on trend. Well, by the way, anybody listening out there, you really need to think about it because objects in motion tend to stay in motion. If you have an existing business and you can determine why it is at the seller's selling, a lot of times they're tired and they've been out of 20 years. If a business crosses a certain threshold of duration, they're less likely to go under. Whereas if you are in the cohort that just launches a business, you have like a 50% shot of being bankrupt in a few years. If you buy something that's already been around for over five years, you move into a different cohort. But people don't know how to buy a business. It's like a big mystery, and they certainly don't know what to pay for it. And that's

the purpose of the show. It's basically house hunters for business. Really cool concept. So I hope you find a home. And our last question that we ask every guest on Young and Profiting Podcast is, what is your secret to profiting in life? I ask myself the same question every week, sometimes every day. what is the highest and best use of my time, energy, and resources today? So to break that down, there's a concept in zoning called highest and best use. It's a flaw. It's a legal principle, which is every piece of land must be put into its highest and best use in the current context. A warehouse in Tribeca in 1920, its highest and best use was a slaughterhouse. In 2020, it was for Leonardo DiCaprio's vassalapad. Everything changes. You change every week based upon the accumulated

experiences you've had in this life. And those accumulated experiences enable you to do something different. When I went on Shark Tank, just being on the show, opened up all sorts of doors, and it unlocked this dream that I had been harboring but didn't feel like I could pull off, which is what if I could be a professor at the best business school in the world? How do I do that? And I spent a year of my life creating it. Because I asked that single, simple question, what is the highest and best use of my time, energy, and resources today now that I've been on Shark Tank? Every one of you listening right now has done something different, harder, better today this year than you did last year. If you're moving along in a progression, you need to audit what you're capable of now, what you have permission to do now,

because otherwise you find yourself, you're on autopilot, you wake up in 10 years and you're like, this isn't the life I wanted. And it's because you never asked that question with enough discipline to make sure you're constantly pushing yourself. I love that advice. I love being put on the spot with your questions because I'm like, all right, let me, those two things were the first thing that came to mind. be very important. Exactly. Like those questions are meant to be like, all right, like, what is this value that you have to share that you didn't get a chance to talk about? Because usually that piece of value is like floating in your mind, right? So I'd like to get that out at the end. Yeah.

Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do and your new book, Burn the Boats. Okay. I have a website for the boat, burn theboatsbook.com. In terms of where I spend my time, it's largely on LinkedIn because it's like a warm bath. Everybody's civilized. You know, You can also find me on Instagram, M. Higgins, M. Higgins on Matt Higgins on LinkedIn. But I tend to engage more on LinkedIn. And I'm on Twitter for in small doses. Yeah, you guys have like two of the biggest LinkedIn influencers on one call right now. So I love it. Yes. By the way, don't sleep on LinkedIn, youngens. I know it's not interesting, but eat your vegetables. And LinkedIn, you can go viral and you can't go viral on Instagram. The TikTok is great, but it'll probably be gone in a few years. So spend some energy on LinkedIn. Yeah, couldn't agree. I've got a LinkedIn masterclass if anybody's really curious about it. Take it, by the way, take it. That's the most value that you can provide is to take her masterclass because there's an alchemy to LinkedIn and there are certain hacks that change the outcome. And if those out there who listen like I try but my content didn't resonate, LinkedIn especially

social media generally, tactics are everything, strategies less. Loaning the tactics that make your content resonate will change the outcome. So take that class. 100%. LinkedIn's algorithm is actually hackable and I don't think any other algorithm is. So 100%. Matt, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. I can't wait for you to come on again. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody. Yeah, fam, I've had Matt Higgins on the show two times and he's always a favorite of mine. I loved learning the psychology behind why the same burn the boat's mentality that worked in ancient wartime also works in modern life, relationships, and business. We've all sort of been pre-programmed to always have a

plan B and to hedge our risk. But like Matt says, hesitation kills more dreams than speak. ever will. And when you hesitate, hedge, or divide your attention between your goal and the safety net you think you need to build, it all just begs the question. What are you waiting for? Research has shown that backup plans can actually hurt us on the road towards success, that abundant choices end up making us feel paralyzed. Your plan B that you think is giving you peace of mind is actually getting in the way of your plan A. Breakout success means boldly taking an opportunity before the tipping point of evidence. Making a decision in that space

between intuition and data. It's following your gut. In fact, I saw this recent quote from Alex Ramosey, who was a recent yap guest, and I'm just going to try to find you it really quick. Opportunities only look like opportunities in the rear view mirror. Today, they look like risk.

Totally reminded me of this episode. I hope this episode inspires you to burn your boats and to set a match to whatever corrosive plan be your cradling so you can collapse the time delay between insight and action and reap exponential returns. Thanks so much for tuning in to today's Young and Profiting episode with Matt Higgins.

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You guys can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Halataha. And we're also on YouTube. So subscribe to our YouTube channel if you like to watch podcasts. Thanks so much to my Yap team for all their hard work behind the scenes. This is your podcast, princess, and the LinkedIn, Halitaha, signing off.