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Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Why Plan B Is Holding You Back with Matt Higgins
00:46:23
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [02:57]
Matt Higgins
you're lobbying for the approval of others or lobbying to bring others along, always have to ask yourself why am I doing that? Am I doing that because their buy in is necessary to advance my insight or am I doing that to assuage me that I might be wrong because I'm nervous? The reason why we don't fully commit often it's not because we are necessarily afraid of what's going to happen. It's because we haven't processed the worst case scenario and assimilated that information and realized, all right, I'll be all right.
- [03:23]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow.
- [03:33]
Matt Higgins
I'm ready for my close up.
- [03:35]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus Confidence Classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week?
- [03:41]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to.
- [03:44]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
So these bonuses are a great way
- [03:46]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as
- [03:51]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
much as I do. Hi and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet our guest today. Matt Higgins is co founder and CEO of private investment firm RSE Ventures and an executive fellow at Harvard Harvard Business School where he co teaches the course moving beyond DTC. A guest shark on ABC Shark Tank seasons 10 and 11. He will soon star in a new spinoff business Hunters, also executive produced by Mark Burnett. Matt, thanks so much for being here with us today.
- [04:21]
Matt Higgins
Thank you for having me.
- [04:22]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
All right, so one of the things I love about your story, Matt, the more that I researched you and was reading your new book Burn the Boats was the level of success that you've created in your life is incredible. However, most people would be shocked and they definitely wouldn't imagine that you grew up the way that you did. And I'm just hoping you can share a little glimpse into what it was like growing up in your situation with a single mom and some of the bold moves and decisions you made at a very young age.
- [04:55]
Matt Higgins
Yeah, and I'm glad we're starting there because I always say I want to be known more from where I began rather than where I end up. And, and I always have to pull forward my origin story in order to do that. You know, Shark Tank, all these shiny objects, it's easy to see me A certain way. Whereas what I really want to be seen as a 16 year old kid who dropped out of high school. So I grew up in Queens, New York. Shout out to anybody out there from Queens or New York City. And I was raised by a single mom who was amazing. My earliest memories are watching her deal with a lot of health issues. She ended up being very obese and had all sorts of comorbid issues that went along with it. But she also was really desperate to make something out of her life, the product of abuse. She left my dad when I was about nine years old. And she had been a high school dropout. And she was always insecure and ashamed about that fact. And I watched her go to Queensborough Community College, get her gd and then enroll in Queens College. And so my earliest memories were the time before and the time after. You know, the time after was filled with a sense of dignity and hope for becoming a college student. And she would take this little boy with her to classes on Saturday. And I'd sit in the back of the room and watch my mother, my head on the desk thinking, like, why are we here? What is she doing? And I remember her reporting back to me like, I got this an A in history and Dr. Factor told me that I'm smart for the first time. So one view is education, the power of transcendence, and the other view was desperation. Right, Little kid, why do we have nothing to eat? Why are we taking a bus for an hour and a half in order to go to a food pantry? Don't they have food pantries where we live? Shame. And I always say that a gourmet meal in my house was this block of government cheese, which I keep on my desk, by the way, as a reminder. So just poverty and selling flowers on street corners. I was that little kid on Mother's Day who knocked on your window, said, excuse me, sir, would you like to buy for your wife? Just every kind of thing. These things are colliding. And as time went on, you know, you get more desperate as a kid. And you and any kid who's a product of a single parent could relate to this out there. It's like you wish there would be a white knight that would come along. In my case, I wish there was the hero man, male figure, who would take care of my mom because I was tired of taking care of her. And so as desperation grew, I was like, I got to do something radical to change my circumstances. And I came up with this crazy idea that I was going to drop out of high school at 16 years old.
- [07:15]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Well, yes, it does sound crazy. As a mother of a 15 year old, if he ever came home one day and told me he was dropping out of school, I would literally.
- [07:23]
Matt Higgins
Good man. You took away the most salient points for this interview.
- [07:26]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
No, I'm just kidding, right? It sounds really aggressive. However, looking back now, this is the beginning of your own burn the boat life and path to such ultimate success. However, everyone in the world was second guessing you when you announced this, correct?
- [07:45]
Matt Higgins
Yeah, let me, let me explain my takeaways because I agree. I don't want your 15 year old son to, you know, take away the law the wrong lesson. But yeah, I always say this. When you are concealing what's really going on in your life, the people who you get feedback from don't have full context because you're hiding it. Right? So in my case, what was I hiding? I was hiding poverty. I was wearing my Jordache jeans back then, dating myself. But you know, I had, I looked, I looked typical, right? Nobody knew I was going home and sleeping on a door guan mattress on the floor. My mother would literally wail through the night in pain. You know, just, I was bathing her. Like all sorts of things when you're a kid, like, you don't want any of that. Like, I don't want to pretend that I was just, oh, what a sweet child. Like, no, I was frustrated. I wanted a normal life. So I talked to my folks at school and when I came up with this crazy plan. Wait, if my mother was able to go to college with a ged, you know, unintentionally, what if I were to drop out of high school, get a GED at 16, I could go from making 375 at McDonald's or $5 at a deli and suddenly make $9 an hour. That was the whole. If I could go to college and be a college student, I'd look through the Penny Saver newspaper and it says college students only. I thought, well, I don't know what this college student moniker means, but I'm going to go get it. And then I remember talking to my guidance counselor saying, like, you will never shake the stigma of dropping out. It's a crazy plan. It is a crazy plan. And that was the second burn the boats insight I had. In order to stick to your conviction, you have to give yourself no option but to go all in. Because even in the beginning, I thought there was a lot of pressure. Well, just see if you can pass a couple of more classes, give it more. And then I realized in order to do this, I need to fail everything. I need to get left back over and over again and fully commit to being a total degenerate. And that's what I did. I failed every single class for two years. Sat in the same room in the back, except for typing. I passed typing. And I still type 100 words a minute. So this is to your 15 year old son. Again, wrong take ways. And then I had to execute. And I remember the last day of school, I had to return my textbooks. And I walked into my science teacher. I talk about this in the burn the boats and true story, I go to hand my boat back. He doesn't look up because what's this? I said, it's my textbook. Today's my last day. And he looks straight, he goes, higgins, what a waste. I'll see you at McDonald's. And it just. And I remember all the classes laughing and I'm Irish and I feel like I'm going to pass out and I start walking out the door and then I turn around and I say to him, you know, Mr. Rosenthal, if you see me at McDonald's, it's because I bought it something to that effect. And all the clouds, oh snap, you're gonna take that and whatever. And then I walked outside on the steps of Cardoza High School and I lit up a cigarette and I thought, he's probably right. Like statistically, this is gonna dictate a very bad outcome. I picked myself up off those steps. I went to Springfield Gardens High School on standby. I took my ged. I got a grade score, enrolled in Queens College and went back to my prom as captain of the debate team. And I remember the look on the face of Mrs. Vega, Mr. Barkin. I remember all the names, Mr. Rosenthal. And it went from one of right to one of admiration with one move. So the same people who at a moment thought, you're out of your mind were like, atta boy. You know, and that's the other point. When you make these radical burn the boats moves, like, don't worry about what people say now. Cause they can't see what you see. They couldn't see that my mother was slipping away and she was gonna die. They couldn't see that I was getting more self destructive. You know, I was just like, I was having really intrusive thoughts about my life. I was just really unhappy. And so they didn't know any of that. And yet at the end they were like, they saw all the pieces together. So to anybody out There. And part of the premise of the is to give you the comfort to be alone on the bleeding edge with your own insights, because it's lonely. But the payoff is everybody comes along and says, you know, attaboy.
- [11:24]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Okay, well, when you were just describing that story of when you told your high school teacher that you the only way you were going to be at McDonald's is when you own the franchise. When I was reading the book, I could hear you telling the story. Matt, you're a great storyteller. And actually when you were telling the story in the book, you weren't smoking a cigarette outside, you were smoking a Marlboro. That's what just popped into my mind. And how funny is that? So my point is, for everyone listening, if you like a good storyteller and really want to be pulled in by something, Matt Higgins new book, burn the boats, toss plan B overboard and unleash your full potential, is definitely the book for you. So, Matt, let's get into this book because it is so up my alley, which means it's so up my listeners alley. Like I love a great comeback story. I love an underdog story. But more important than that, you know, my listeners are going to love that piece of it. But you did a great job of giving actionable direction in every single chapter, not only through various stories of multitudes of entrepreneurs and success stories that you've befriended through your life and your own journey, but also through data and research. And it was really, really compelling and eye opening for me as a fellow author and just as someone who always wants to get better and push myself to the next level. When you start out at the beginning of the book, you use three examples that I really, oh my gosh, I got so excited reading it. Number one, you gave an example from the Old Testament, two from the iconic book the Art of War, and then three, most recently from the Ukrainian president Zelensky, talking about the ultimate burn the boats move. Can we start there?
- [12:57]
Matt Higgins
By the way, you're very generous. I just want to say that you're a really good, generous human being. I could tell that you get excited and animated to share somebody else's success. So that's unusual. So I just want to say thank you. Just nice to see you excited, like, oh, you're sharing my book. This is amazing. You read it, you care. I put so much of my being into this book, it's an act of bloodletting. So to hear somebody else appreciate it. Thank you. What I wanted to do is contextualize. What does this Phrase mean burn the boats. It's too often associated with Cortez, who was a very bad man. And so I wanted to make the point. This notion of going all in and having no plan B goes back to the beginning of recorded history, right? And then zoom forward all the way up to Zelensky. And I love talking about him in particular because I believe there was a turning point that at the moment we can't visualize cause we're in the middle of it. And that's when then conventional wisdom, including the CIA and the United States government, had concluded there is zero chance that he's gonna win. And not only that he's gonna be assassinated. So out of pity, they were like, maybe we should offer the guy a ride. And there was this moment when he had gotten a call and I guess they leaked it brilliantly when the US government said, basically, we'd like to help extricate you from the situation. And his response supposedly was, I don't need a ride, I need ammunition. And that one simple statement telegraphed both Ukrainians, but also the outside world, I'm prepared to die for this. Right? So maybe that was self talk, but it was the first moment, if you look back, where the media coverage and even the government, the behavior of the US government started to pivot that maybe we got some this person's willing to invest in. And it was catalytic. That brought everybody along, saying, let's invest, let's go on Twitter. It became the first social media war and whatnot. So I use those examples to show that this principle that humans perform better without a safety net goes back to the beginning of recorded time. And we didn't need universities to teach people. It was intuitive and it showed up in the battlefield under the most exigent circumstances when people were outnumbered 10 to 1. Now a lot of them were nasty folks like Caesar and whatnot. So I wanted to make it clear that it's everybody. And we can learn a lot from the fact that this has been proven time and again.
- [15:04]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Meet a different guest each week. Confidence Creator.
- [15:11]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [18:07]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
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- [18:23]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Confidence creators I asked you to try to find your passion. It's interesting to me. The examples were just so spot on and really connected with me, specifically to President Zelensky. And it was funny. I was just watching last night, he was speaking to the House and in Congress. And it was interesting to your point. From a leadership perspective, when someone has truly burned the boats, gone all in, taken that massive risk, he didn't have to beg people for help at that point. People are rushing him, wanting to be a part of what people want to support him and be a part of what he's created. And it was so visibly apparent last night, watching him in motion and how everyone wanting to touch him. Pelosi, I think, tried to kiss him six different times. I mean, it was wild to see. So for everyone listening right now, just from a leadership perspective, when you truly go all in and take the action steps to highlight what you're doing, people want to be on board and be a part of that movement.
- [19:19]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
Correct.
- [19:20]
Matt Higgins
I had the same thought. I was watching him and I was thinking how. How architected that speech was all the different constituencies. Caesar was trying to speak to the American public. I know you gave me tens of billions of dollars. I'm a good steward of that money. But by the way, that's an investment in your own future, like just every little thing. And then the choice to not wear a suit to me was fascinating. Right. What do I want to convey? Do I want to convey that everything's fine and I'm meeting with the head of state, or do I want to say I'm taking a break from the war and remind you of it? Like, brilliant. Actually, I watched that and had the same reaction to it and felt more convinced that he deliberately pursued a burn the boat strategy. And it makes sense. You know, sometimes people can criticize. I think he's amazing, by the way, and I'm grateful that I'm living through history and getting to watch it. But you can criticize he was an actor or silly. Like, was he an actor or was he a communicator who knew how to move people and know how to touch people? Was he the perfect person for this moment in time? I think he was. So my mission with my book was to say, some of you have heard this phrase, burn the boats in a military context, let's appropriate it for peacetime, you know, because oftentimes we all feel like we're in a war. Let's take this concept and pull it forward into every everyday life.
- [20:30]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Well, okay. And thank you for doing that, because burn the boats isn't something that I had been applying to my everyday life or my business. And now reading your book, I was, you know, of course, applying it all back to my. My own self, my business, my decisions, and the times I didn't do it, too. That was much more apparent to me as I was reading the book. You broke the book down into three different parts. Get in the water, no turning back, and build more boats. Get in the water. To me, I mean, just like, it really pulls you in, which I think is great, because as soon as you start reading, you're not going to want to put this book down. You know, you're going to get through the majority of it within the first day. Well, again, like I said, not only are there these amazing stories from so many different entrepreneurs, so many businesses that had to go through these big moments, these big scary moments, but you also give us, as readers, these examples. For example, the anxiety study that you shared, that it's actually good to have certain levels of anxiety, and research proves that it will drive you to more success. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
- [21:35]
Matt Higgins
Yeah. And the book, for me, I think when you go on Instagram sometime, there's an inauthentic layer right now to the universe where everyone has a stumble, story, vulnerability, and then there's the ark and then the resurrection and the redemption. That's not my life. My life is full of resurrection, redemption, and regression. You know, I'm constantly taking two steps, and part of that is a constant battle with a degree of PTSD from childhood and a degree of anxiety. I am not somebody who walks into the set of Shark Tank is like, whatever, Mark Cuban, Laura Grenier, I got this. No, I am somebody who puts in tons of energy to go ahead and synthesize my doubt. And what I wanted to show in the book from a scientific perspective and then examples, is that there is what is called a level of optimal anxiety. It's a balance between if a certain degree of anxiety is going to propel you to excellence and make you prepare and take the steps, and too much anxiety is going to leave you paralyzed and crippled. And that isn't just me saying that there's a Yerke's Dotson law that goes back to the 1920s. That was demonstrated scientifically. But then there are all these different environments where it's been proven out and I wanted to share them. So one of the ones I talk about in the book that I love, I worked for a coach with a coach called Eric Mangini, the head coach of the New York Jets. And at the time he was given the worst nickname anybody could have because he can't live up to it. Mangenius, because he was a mad scientist and he was like a 37 year old guy who was always tinkering, tinkering. But one of the things he did at the time, which seemed absolutely crazy, was that he would put the players in the indoor bubble where there was tremendous echo and it was really hard to hear anyway. And he would blare Metallica and like the worst heavy metal. Metallica's actually great. The worst heavy metal music. Heavy metal music to make it impossible for the players to hear and communicate. So that they had to use hand signals and read body language to mimic what it would be like to go to the Metro Dome when it was really loud. So he was always putting his players in these most uncomfortable anxiety inducing situations to get the best out of them to prepare. So I use that as an example of optimal anxiety because there's a utility to it. And then I also talk about the unoptimal anxiety, right? The crippling kind. Whereas when I went on the set of Shark Tank, I was so paralyzed that I was going to be discovered as an imposter, that that little kid eating government cheese on Queens was going to manifest on the set that I didn't want to go forward. It's like embarrassing to talk about. You know, I debated like, should I put that in there? And I was like, if I don't put it in the book, people will see how I performed on TV and think I was a natural. And that's not useful. Believing that I was good at it instinctively is not helpful, actually. It hurts. Somebody who was like, well, I'm not good at tv. I'm like, well, I wasn't either. And I tell the story about how I was paralyzed the night before. I did not sleep for two days and then I got on the set and that's when I froze. And so like I had to steal my head. There was a moment when I feel like Mark Cuban looked over me. This did not happen. But in my head it did. And he's thinking like, who let this guy here. Who are you? And then the self talk pulled me out of it. This sort of Third person superego, authority that can get you through things and sort of coaches you through it. And so in the book I try to break that down and say, okay, what is the right way to use self talk to get you into that state of optimal anxiety? And on the flip side, last point, the second time I went on Harvard, I had the opposite problem. This was like a layup. I was totally comfortable, nothing bad happened. I was good at it, I felt good and I had no anxiety and fear and I felt a little bit bored. So I had to say what's my motivational system now that it's not anxiety? And I had to switch to the pursuit of excellence. So what I hope the book does is take these somewhat obvious topics that we all talk about and we all know anxiety, we know failure is good, we know, you know, like we know them in platitudes. But do we know them, practically speaking in real examples? Do we know them with authority? Do we know them with people that we can connect to and relate to? And that's what I tried to accomplish with the book.
- [25:30]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
For everyone listening right now, the takeaway here, that was really powerful, great reminder for me is, and I'll use myself as an example when I'm in a nerve wracking situation is not to say I can do this, I can do this, I'm good enough to do this. It's to say, Heather, you got, you got this. Heather, listen, right now, right, you've got to give yourself that space and put yourself in the third person as if you're coaching somebody else. Correct?
- [25:52]
Matt Higgins
Yes. And do you find it annoying though, by the way that I mean you've done really well, Incredibly successful, two time author. You got this. I mean, amazing. Isn't it annoying that you still have to keep doing it? I mean maybe you don't, maybe you vanquished it. I haven't. Even though I wrote the book like my book is aspirational, it's not like I have. Just cause I have some of the answers to the test doesn't mean I can apply them. But I still have to do it every day. It's annoying.
- [26:14]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
I so see it differently now. It's so funny you say that. I understand why you say that because I, you know, we wish it would just be easy, but it. Because I was in corporate America in the 9 to 5, which you know, you hadn't been for so, so long. I was there for the majority of my career. I wasn't waking up scared, I wasn't waking up with anxiety. I was Going to the man I was. You know, I knew the routine. Everything was visible. I knew what next quarter had to come. I knew what I needed to do annually. Everything was so clear. I didn't wake up with anxiety, fear, and have to coach myself up. Cut to now. Every day I'm freaking out. I'm so scared that I've got a meeting with QVC and I've got to get this deal closed and this product has to get on there. It's on me. How am I going to talk them into it? How am I going to get them to feel the passion? Oh, my gosh, Heather, you've done this before. You can do this again. I've got. I get so excited that I'm talking myself into these fear moments because I know there's something potentially so great on the other side. So I don't know. I'm like, celebrating every day now because I had so many days where I wasn't myself.
- [27:16]
Matt Higgins
That is the right attitude, I think. Me, I'm like, why can't I habituate my response to this so we can preempt having to have the self talk? And I think the answer is, it stems from the fact that if you are like you and myself and you're always putting yourself in these new situations that are uncomfortable, that is the thing that triggers, right? It's the fight or flight response. It's like, oh, I got to overcome it. And in the pursuit of excellence, I'm going to put a lot of stress on myself. So I think it's a prerequisite. So I've come to see that pain as a feedback loop. But I still wish it wasn't. I still wish, like, there would be an efficiency to it. Like, Matt, come on. I mean, you. You teach at Harvard Business School. Like, you've been doing it for four years. Never taught a day in your life, but yet. Nope. Every day, even talking to you, I'm like, you know, you're amazing. I read up about you. Like, I'm like, we're going to crush this interview. I'm going to put energy into it. So I guess it's by putting yourself in these unfamiliar circumstances.
- [28:07]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Well, the good news is everybody listening. You are not alone, because we are all in that same boat, feeling that same way. Okay. When you brought up the coach of the jets, and I think I have this right, you'll let me know if I don't. I thought of the story of him kissing the wife's feet and getting caught on video. Can we? I love that story. It was so interesting to me to hear how hard he was on himself and how you saw that as such an opportunity and how it helped to empower and change a moment, a scary moment for him.
- [28:37]
Matt Higgins
Yeah. That was on the coach of the Jets, Rex Ryan, the most amazing, lovely person. And it's hard to actually tell this supposed scandal to anyone now because I don't understand. I don't really get it. What part of it was like a scandal. But at the time, there was some suggestive videos that had gotten out to do with Rex idolizing his wife's feet. Yeah. I mean, you can't make this up. And then there was this constant, you know, barrage of covers on, like, the Post and every New York paper. Everybody trying to, you know what's going on. It's, like, so absurd to recount, but at the time, it was. It was actually really stressful and aggravating, embarrassing for Rex. And we had a really close relationship. And I remember talking to him, and I am that person because of my background as press secretary to the mayor. Running crises, 9, 11. I've been through everything, and people tend to call, you know, when the crap hits the fan. And so I remember going to his office, he was pretty upset. And I said, rex, you got it all wrong. Something to affect, like, you're gonna go on Oprah. Like, we're gonna do it, like a 10 book deal about how to still maintain love for your wife after 25 years. Like, it's an interesting story. And he, like, laugh. And to this day, when he sees me, there's Oprah. The moral of that story is a couple things. One, when you shed your shame, even though this is absurd, that it was shameful, but when you shed your shame, it gives permission for everyone around you to do the same. Two, all the catastrophization that you had about what would happen when you did it never materializes. And then you regret that you spend so much energy anticipating what might happen. Cause it never, ever, ever happens. And third, when you're there for somebody who's going through the act of shedding shame, and you could stand beside them, they will never, ever forget that. And so Rex, to this day, now he owns it. Now he tells a joke, like, even. Like a decade later, it'll still come up on tv. He'll make a funny joke when somebody's foot will come up. And he realized by him. By him owning it, it made the players realize that he was human. So throughout this book, now when I read my own book, I'm like, I really I shared that. But throughout the book, there's attempts for me to model what shedding shame looks like and show by virtue of the fact that I'm still standing, still writing the book, still achieving new things, and it didn't matter. I talk about my GED when I can, instead talk about my honorary PhD. I talk about Cardoza high School and government cheese when I could talk about Harvard Business School in Boston. Right. I don't want to airbrush the end. I want to show the beginning so that you could see this journey of shedding shame. And that's exactly what happened to Rex Ryan.
- [31:04]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
You do a great job of that when you share your cancer story and getting divorced. For me as a reader, relating that back to empathy and understanding and how it helps you with leading people and connecting with people you work with. And I couldn't agree more from my own experience, getting divorced, having a baby and getting divorced made me the best and strongest leader I'd ever been in my career because I finally could understand and empathize with people.
- [31:32]
Matt Higgins
Yeah, I talk about that in the context of before I got divorced, if I'm perfectly honest. I discussed this in a book because I don't want to come across as a hero that I. Because I supposedly powered through everything in my childhood. Now I'm a hotshot 26 year old press secretary of the mayor. I have all these supposed accolades. I'm healed, by the way, Mom's in the rearview mirror. You know what I mean? I'm fine. And when somebody would go through something, I'd be like, what are you talking about? In fact, when I had cancer, testicular cancer, my first reaction was that of being discovered, which is so crazy. I was so worried that people were gonna judge me as now walking dead, that they were gonna take everything that I had earned from me in a very, like, tribalistic way. And my whole objective was to cover it up. And I remember how day after surgery, I guess I have surgery, you know, remove my testicle after finding out, you know, 24 hours earlier that I have to. I'm like, what? That takes a while to process the loss of that part of your anatomy. Like, really? Like, what does this entail? But it ha. You have to move quick. And then I went home. And then immediately, once the pain meds wore off, I was like, I'm going to lose my job. Somebody's going to take my spot. I'm going to be back eating government cheese. I'm going to be back in landlord tenant court on Queens Boulevard. And then I went the next night there was a dinner with the coaches. And I showed up at the dinner with an ice pack in between my legs. You know, no one really talked about it. And then I made a joke, a little toast. I'm like, hey, everybody. I was like, let me roll out my new moniker. And I said, from now on, I want to be known as Half the Balls, Twice the Man. Now, I thought that was really tough. They probably were like, what is the matter with this kid? I did get dog tags made with that. But my point is, if I could show up to the office having just had testicular cancer and had this surgery, then you better suppress your divorce. All these other things that I thought were secondary that you should have gotten over. So what I. The reason why I bring this up, it's kind of a little convoluted, contradictory. I bring that up in the book to say, number one, that is not something to be admired when executives, you know, act like they could shoulder everything because now you're telegraphing to your team, we cannot accommodate whatever it is you're going through. And then two, the hypocrisy that I wasn't able to extend embassy to other, other people, especially around, you know, divorce until I went through, When I went through it, it crushed me and brought me to my knees. The fear of loss of children and all these other things. But also I had been known as the kid who was always doing better, faster. I was Doogie Howser TV show from the 80s, about a 14 year old doctor. I was that kid. That was my nickname. So suddenly my identity had become enmeshed with this notion of doing things faster. And now I was taken away from me. And I talk about how fragile we are when we allow our identity to be associated with our track record of success as to who we are. And so I wanted to be honest in the book about these things we don't talk about, like as an executive, just how corrosive it is when you try to adopt the hero status and what you're really modeling. And after I went through divorce and had a bit of an, you know what I believe, like an apparition one night. I'm spiritual, but not particularly, you know, one religion over another. But I really felt like I heard the voice of God say to me in the middle of the night, matthew, you are okay. It was the first time I began to realize that we are born whole and we're not dependent both on my track record or both on being validated by another human being. And began to reconstruct My identity and self worth based upon its own merit and the fact that I have everything I need. But the overall point of that chapter is be careful what you're modeling to your team. When you think you're being a stoic and heroic, you might be actually forcing everyone to push their pain down.
- [35:08]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Oh, it's so true. And now in hindsight, looking back on the leaders I've worked with and who I showed up as the closer I became to my people, were those moments that you actually were vulnerable, you become so much more. People are pulled towards you when they see when you share your pain, when you share your shame, like you said, because they finally know they're not alone and it's acceptable and that you're going to help be there to encourage them. So thank you for sharing that. I love this idea of acting on lightning, not waiting for thunder. Can you break that down for us?
- [35:38]
Matt Higgins
So it's a nice way to package up how to identify opportunity as a metaphor. Right? So there's a great, great essay, if anyone out there hasn't read it, by Emerson. It's a piece of writing I return to constantly. It's called self reliance. And the big theme of the essay is that we all have these spontaneous insights that are rendered to us by providence and divine, but because we lack respect for ourselves and our insights, from time to time we reject them. And then we wait till they come back to us and we are forced to take our own ideas from another. All of us have seen this. Maybe it's you're watching an infomercial at 2 in the morning, like, damn, I had that idea. Or you're watching Shark Tank and you're like, I had that idea, but I didn't have the courage to pursue it or the respect of myself to value it, right? So I talk, okay, how do we identify a proprietary insight that's worth pursuing? And you have to, I believe, cultivate your mind first by developing that self respect and then understanding what opportunity is. So, opportunity, it appears like a flash of lightning. Not everybody saw it unless you were looking for it, but you distinctly saw that flash. What do you do next? You either begin to pursue it because you value that insight and value you, and you start taking steps in that direction, or you raise the bar to action and you wait for validation from others. Thunder. But by the time you hear thunder, which is a five second delay, right? Then it's obvious to everybody else. So I'm trying to make the point that true opportunity arise before the tipping point of evidence and you have to get comfortable if you really want to have breakout success. Figuring out, how do I act on the lightning and not need the thunder. So it's my way of. I 100% believe this as a life philosophy. It's the exact reason why I am where I am. But it's very lonely when you have to act on lightning. There's nobody to talk to. And the mere fact that if opportunity and lightning was obvious to everyone, there wouldn't be any arbitrage, right? Everybody would be acting on it. Everybody would see.
- [37:26]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Reminded me when I was reading that part, so much of faith, of just having this faith, the unseen, this belief and. Or another way to look at it would be through this idea of manifestation and belief before seeing, feeling before seeing. Is that how you see it?
- [37:43]
Matt Higgins
Yeah, I think it is. It is really faith. And I tried to package it in language that isn't necessarily about a religion or spiritual in case people reject that. It's just fact, right? Like when you hear those words, you realize, oh, that is right. It's an opportunity because not everybody's acting on it. Well, there would be no delta anymore, right? Everybody would have all exactly the same information. And so. And then training yourself to realize, like, it doesn't matter if others validate it. Why would they Same Going back to my burn the boats moment, why? How does it tie into high school and the steps of Cardoza? Well, they didn't have perfect information that I had. Number one, I had the strangest model of my behavior, which was my mom. Here I have this brilliant person who inadvertently got a GED, which she didn't intend at age 38. But by seeing that and modeling it, it opened up a portal to another world where saying, wait, I could deliberately get a ged, right? The loophole that I was taking advantage of is fundamentally a rejection of everything. They bought into this idea that I need four years of high school to perform at college, where I was like, well, I don't really think that's probably true. I think I could learn it on my own and fill in the gaps. And then they would have to accept the idea that subsistence and survival is more important than this principle of finishing the four years where that survival and taking care of my mother was more important than the idea that I would have a stigma of being a high school dropout. Like, they would have to subscribe to all that. And then why would I put all that energy when the decision I was about to make was hard already? Right? So I talk about this in a book and in life generally. When you're lobbying for the approval of others or lobbying to bring others along, you always have to ask yourself, why am I doing that? Am I doing that because their buy in is necessary to advance my insights? Or am I doing that to assuage me that I might be wrong because I'm nervous, right? And the end of the day, most of the times you don't need their approval. You're doing it because you're insecure.
- [39:32]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Meet a different guest each week.
- [39:38]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [44:28]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
to try to find your passion. Okay, there's one other example that you shared in the book that I thought was so eye opening. It was research around being blindfolded and taking a basketball shot and people encouraging or not encouraging you. Can you Break that down. I had never heard it before, and it was so interesting.
- [44:48]
Matt Higgins
Yeah, there's a show out there called Brain Games. Didn't last very long, but I love this show, and it's always looking at these different topics and trying to understand the psychology of motivation and whatnot. So one of the episodes they had, they were trying to understand what's the empirical impact of people cheering for you or rooting against you. And so in one of the experiments, they had a woman come along who was terrible at basketball. And she went ahead and she tried to do a couple of 10 free throws. I think she got zero of them. She was awful, right? Just air balls everywhere. And then they put on a blindfold and there was a crowd around, and she knew it. And the crowd was instructed to cheer multiple times. When, even though she got an airball and she was so, like, enamored with her own performance. I can't believe I did that. And then they went ahead and they took the blindfolds off. She shot 10 more times. She shot four baskets. This is a person who couldn't shoot a basket if her life depended upon it. And she was able to get a 40% hit rate. I just thought that was, like, so incredible in an empirical way. And then they do the reverse. They had somebody who was a great free thrower, threw a bunch, whatever, like that. Then the crowd did. They booed, even though they were hitting them when they were blindfolded and their performance degraded. And then they actually did an elite athlete. And the elite athlete's performance didn't change, which I thought was incredible because they had trained their mind to be able to handle both situations. And so it's a way of simply saying that the internal and external inputs do affect your performance. Like, I'm not immune. The work I put in is not in spite of me being, you know, immune actually is in spite of me being subjective to all these forces. I have to work on it. Right. It's not because I am intellectually curious if somebody gives me feedback or is trying to tear me down. It's not like I dismiss it outright. I want to make sure that there's something to extract that I could get better, but then I need to immunize it from making me suddenly a very bad free thrower. Right. So it is a balance. And I talk in the book about how to strike that balance, how to take feedback, how to process information, how to process failure, but not let it cripple you.
- [46:43]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Oh, it's so good. You definitely break down haters in A way that I hadn't seen it as more useful and how you can turn it it into a useful exercise for you, which I had not done before. So thank you for doing that. And one other thing I wanted to highlight a key takeaway for me personally. I love you shared that when you do have a plan B, research shows that you are actually not as motivated to pursue with that primary goal. I'm not sure, I don't remember what school. Maybe it was in Wharton, maybe it was Wharton Business School. And you gave the example that they had two different test groups. One said, they said here's your plan, go after this one goal. And the other one, they said here's your plan, go after this one goal, but you also have a plan B in case you need it available and how demotivated and quickly they wrapped things up and gave up on that second team. However that first team delivered on their initial goal.
- [47:32]
Matt Higgins
Yeah, I love that study because I think people could understand if you have a real plan B when you're pursuing something hard like it's a really fully developed backup plan, how that could actually erode some of your ability. That's an intuitive thing we could all understand. What this study showed was that even contemplating it because all they said to the students, you can think about your plan B, you could think about the possibility that you don't get it. There was no efforts to take to go in that direction. It was purely theoretical. And that materially impacted their motivation and their likelihood of being successful. Their performance materially degraded. So the point of that is the mere presence of even a backup plan affects your performance. Now when I talk about this, a lot of people, and I'm sure the reviews will say it will reflexively recoil and say this is irresponsible. Like you're basically saying that you should just go all in. And what about people have to pay the rent, People have children, you know, what if it fails? I talk a lot in the book about going burning the boats doesn't mean burning the boats with you on means actually what does it take to you to fully commit under the circumstances and a framework for you to go ahead and do that. One of the core elements of it is to process risk factors. The reason why we don't fully commit often is because it's not because we are necessarily afraid of what's going to happen. It's because we haven't processed the worst case scenario and assimilated that information and realized, all right, I'll be all right, I'll get another job or whatever the rationalization is. And so I think most people bypass the act of processing the risk because they don't actually want to be confronted with a decision. So part of the Burn the Boats philosophy is, yes, mid at great risk, yes, think through the worst case scenario, yes, make provisions so that you could feed yourself and your family, because once you've done that, you'll perform better. You won't have the same anxiety. So Burn the Boats is not a blueprint for irresponsible risk. It's a blueprint for synthesizing risk so that you can go all in without worrying about the downside because you already processed the it.
- [49:33]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Oh, I love that. And so true. I have so lived that. And I couldn't agree more. Who did you write this book for?
- [49:40]
Matt Higgins
I love that question. I really do. Because I feel like I. I feel like when you see the title, somebody will think, oh, it's jingoistic. You know, it's not for me, it's belligerent. It's, you know, some. Some white male businessman, you know, telling me about what to do. I wrote this for, hopefully, first and foremost, the unseen, for somebody out there who says, the Diest caste, who thinks because of the circumstances I was born into, because of some of the bad decisions I made that put me into circumstances I regret, you know, it's too late, right? I wanted to strip myself bare to give anyone any entry point to my journey and the journey of 50 other people to say, all right, well, he dropped out of high school and got there, or he had cancer or he got divorced. You know, again, it's not an autobiography because I'm not as interested in my own story as I am interested in me as a vessel to transmit this idea. I wrote this book for anybody out there who frankly thinks it's too late or it's not for them. And you'll notice, I don't know if you noticed, but I begin with a female entrepreneur, I end with a female entrepreneur. My life has been guided by strong women. The first was my mother, who have been inspirational. So I hope when someone reads this book, said, this is a more thorough compendium of success than I've seen in a long time. And there's somebody in there that I could grab onto. One of my favorite parts of the book was at the end of my harbor class. I was talking to two students, black women, and they were making a really interesting nuance point. We had an entrepreneur in the class, and he was talking belligerently and gesticulating and using a Curse word every two seconds, kind of breaking the decorum of the august Harvard Business School. And I thought it was theatrical and entertaining. It's just in style. And one of the students says to me, you know, I could never talk like that in this class. And I was like, well, why? She said, a couple of reasons. One, I'm a woman. Two, I'm black woman and I would be judged. And I'm not only concerned about me being judged, I would then therefore be ruining it for every woman who comes after me in the same. And I said, wait, tell me more about that. And she says, I carry the entire weight of my race and gender on me when I come into this room. And it made me realize, wow, despite what I've ever been through, right, you know, all the poverty and all that, I'm still born as a white man with the advantages that come into it, right? And I never had to represent anyone but Matt Higgins, like, there is no stakes, you know what I'm saying? And here's somebody who not only has to break through, has to burn the boats, but also has to make sure in doing so, she represents her community. I put that story in there for a reason. To say, I hear you and I see you. And that is true. And it is a way to distinguish yourself from me nonetheless. You wish to break through. You wish to burn the boats. You don't want to hedge and hesitate. You want great things for yourself. So let's see you and let's hear you and let's acknowledge you and then let's do something about it. So that, to me, is one of my favorite parts of the book. Because it is easy to say, to remove yourself and say, well, that's not for me. You were able to pull that off for whatever structural advantage. Like, of course I have structural advantages, but at the same time, we still both want the same things. So that's who the book is for.
- [52:42]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Well, I will tell you, being an avid reader, I love the book. Book was so eye opening for me, so helpful. If you are going through any period in your life where you're questioning things, you think it's too late for you or you want to make a leap and you're not sure how or what next step to take. Get burn the boats. Matt Higgins. Where can we get burn the boats? Where can people find you? How can people catch up with you?
- [53:02]
Matt Higgins
Burntheboats book.com is my website. It's on Amazon. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. I feel like it's like a warm bath. You know, I'm on Twitter and everything else, but if I'm honest, I'm on everywhere else, reluctantly. And LinkedIn is amazing. So find me on LinkedIn.
- [53:17]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
All right, burn the boats, guys. It's by Matt Higgins. Matt, thank you so much for writing the book, and thank you for being here.
- [53:22]
Matt Higgins
No, thank you for having me. This was amazing.
- [53:24]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be. I decide to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.
- [53:44]
Matt Higgins
You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.
- [53:48]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Come on this journey with me.