Lessons - The Framework for Evaluating Investments | Matt Higgins - CEO & Co-Founder of RSE Ventures

In this lessons episode, discover the transformative power of the Burn the Boats mindset, and why eliminating Plan B can drive unparalleled success. Learn how to overcome internal and external obstacles, embrace perpetual growth, and find joy in striving all while staying present and consolidating your gains. So now you've moved yourself out of this really destitute situation that you're in. Burn the Boats at later stages in your career. What does that actually look like for you? So I think it's good to frame a little bit what the phrase mean. Why I became obsessed with this idea. Yeah, because I did we've heard some of us have heard this before, but I've never heard somebody go so into the weeds on it yet. Yeah, no, it's funny. I remember I was with Mark Cuban at an event and I made this bird, you know, burn the Boats reference and he's like, bird the Boats, what are you talking about? And I was like, oh, I thought I thought this is sort of like in the vernacular and I realized it's not entirely. So what where's the phrase come from? Throughout recorded history from time immemorial, you'll see military strategists will invoke this idea that they weigh the way they got their army to overcome improbable odds. They were outnumbered 10 to 1, whatever the cases that they literally burned the Boats. They eliminated their escape out their scape hatch art of war. They referred to burn the Boats in the cooking pots. And the reason why is that humans perform better when they have no plan B. They have no, you know, escape route. Now these tend to be some pretty nasty people in history. So I've I've appropriated this military doctrine and decided to use it for the rest of us in peacetime. So let's forget Caesar, you know, sun zoo and Cortez and pull it forward for our own life. So I got obsessed with this idea and then when I work for the New York Jets for those who don't know, I used to oversee the business of the New York Jets back in the day and I work with Rex Ryan as a coach and you know, Rex is an animated individual wears his heart on his sleeve and can fire anybody up. And we were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs and the underdog and Rex gave a speech about this idea of burn the Boats. I'm just asking you to go all in for one day and don't worry about what happens if we fail. Don't worry about the consequences. Just give me everything you got for one quarter or one half. It was I think it was a halftime speech. No, it was the night before for one day and the team won and you could feel it was palpable in the room how catalytic this idea of just surrender to the goal submit let it go. And so I said, okay, that I want to prove to end of to people that humans perform better without a safety net. And I want to approach it from two different angles. One, I want to approach it empirically. So I want to survey history, psychology and science to prove that humans actually perform better without a plan B. And the reason why is when they went a lot of folks here, the title of this book, they reflexively say, well, I can't take on risk. This is irresponsible. It's called burn the Boats. Not burn the Boats with you in it. And it's not called blow up the bridges, right? So the idea is eliminate your plan B that doesn't part of the process of doing so is actually processing the worst case scenario. One of the I talk about this in about one of the first steps is to synthesize and recognize what's the worst that can happen if this big mode I'm about to make goes wrong. And by doing that, you can now can peacefully accept the risk because you already processed, you know, the downside. So one, I want to approach it from science and history and psychology, but the other is I wanted to provide actionable case studies, illustrations so that you wouldn't distance yourself from the individual. What I mean by that? Like, I'm on Shark Tank. If you met me and I look well dressed, you can make lots of assumptions about it. I teach at Harvard Business School. You could assume that I was born on third base, right? I want to deconstruct who I am. So you see the origin in the journey and you could say, Oh, you were a high school dropout. Oh, you have imposter syndrome. You were divorced and you're embarrassed by it. You went through a lot of pain. You suffer from anxiety. You have a degree of lingering kitties teeth. You're not over your stuff, right? Like, I'm very important to be to manifest in this world as a representation of how I got there, not where I am. And I then broke down 50 different individuals that from every different angle, founders, billionaires, actresses, Scarlett Johansson as a friend of mine, an Olympian who became a paraplegic at 14 and thinks her life is better off for it. An activist who is who is the victim of sexual abuse when she was a child from a nanny, every angle so that those who reflexively say, I can't afford to burn the boats and I can't afford to let go of my plan B. And those people are different from me. I want to offer so many different case studies that it would be hard, not to identify with something. And the second part, Instagram is full of so many, you know, empty platitudes, you know, sunny, sunny advice like, we're the boats, you know, get out there. Like that stuff is useless. It doesn't last more than 30 seconds, a little adrenaline hit. I hope what I've done with the book is provided an actionable blueprint to for to embrace a growth mindset and to just let go, like, shed your shame, shed the things that are holding you back and move beyond the rhetoric into actually actionable advice. And okay, so let's so let's lay out like a little bit of this framework so people can understand it. So what is what is the framework that you actually teach over? Because obviously this is probably something that you've seen again across all those leaders that you just mentioned, you've probably seen it with I'm assuming some of the successful investments you made on Shark Tank, obviously in your own life as well. So what's what are the main points of that framework? Okay, great. It's all well, one number one. The whole concept is promised on the idea that the true joy of living is in the striping and the, you know, when you go to the top of the mountain top and you look around, you realize there's nothing to see that that joy was the climate when you were looking up trying to get there, not looking down and looking around. So that's number one. So I think I think that's true for like 99% of the population. So we begin there. So how do you live a life of perpetual growth and how do you? And the things that stand in our way are either internal obstacles and external obstacles. So I say any journey of transcendence across the threshold to make that bull move begins by unlocking the greatest arbitrage entirely within our control, which is self-awareness, right? It's figuring out what is it in me that's preventing me from making that bull move. You know, it's in whether it's in posture syndrome and I talk about how to overcome it, whether it's shame, I think a lot of the reasons why leaders underperform is because they haven't gone through the exercise of shedding shame. So how do you create a place and space for you to go ahead and let go of your vulnerability? It's how do you retrain the voice in your head to be your greatest ally rather than your greatest enemy? I talk a lot about sabotage. And so let with it's a little bit similar to what I do when I'm assessing an investment is I analyze and look under the hood because the fish roach from the head is the Italian side. So you need to undertake that own exercise for yourself. My book takes you to the journey of how I did it myself and how other leaders have reflected upon what's holding them back and overcome those internal obstacles. And then they're the external obstacles that stand in your way. I go through the the corporate saboteurs, you know, and I try to put into words things we all feel and I'll make it a little abstract. They are these archetypes that manifest in a corporate setting as leaders, CEOs, managers, and they're either victims, their martyrs, their corporate gaslighters. The one that I think a lot of people can relate to is this idea of a withholder. So what's a withholder? A withholder is someone who recognizes that an employee or a partner in a relationship context is a pleaser and is dependent upon validation and affirmation in order to sustain themselves, right? And they understand that if they, if they withhold that recognition, that praise, they destabilize that individual, that pleaser, and they'll work that much harder to go ahead and over and get that approval, right? So there are, I tried to in the book deconstruct these unsaid things that operate upon us and hold us back that prevent us from going out that destabilize us so that if you can identify it, you can deal with it. And I, I love the withholder one because when I mentioned this, people go, Oh, I feel that I feel like somebody is denying me the praise that I need, and I'm, and one, I'm sad that I can't get it into them, sad that I need it. And so I think when you find when you read the book, again, that's pretty abstract stuff. We're talking about, but you know, you can reduce these things that are operating on us that are holding us back into words, articulate them, and then manage them. And so for each of these ideas, I come up with strategies for how to, how to move beyond them and talk about how I did it in my own personal life. And one thing you mentioned, you mentioned perpetual growth. And then when you adopt this mindset, it is almost a forever mindset that you apply to your life. So for people listening, this could be very stressful because now they're thinking, Oh, if I really want to make it, I always have to be uncomfortable. I always have to be growing. I always have to, you know, I, I got the next career advancement, or I launched the side hustle, turned it into a company, and now what do I have to burn next so that I take it to the next level? So I get that you have to enjoy the journey. But does this not turn into perpetual stress, perpetual discontent? How do you mitigate that so that you still enjoy what you're doing if you're always putting yourself into this position of high stress, high growth? Such a great question. I talk about this in a book too, because if position the wrong way, you'd be like, stop, like, I'm good. So, so a couple of thoughts on that. It is only stressful if you live in a perpetual place of anticipation. If you're never present, if you're always worried and thinking about, you know, what's going to happen the downside, I talk a lot in my book about how to reach, how to retain your group grip on the moment and how much contemplating my own mortality factors into this philosophy. I have an ab in my phone call, We Croak, five times a day, well, this sounds actually crazy, but five times a day, and in different ways, it reminds me that I'm going to die. It's a different philosophical message from Socrates or somebody else. It's a little bit of stoicism built into that. That's right, a little bit of a lot of bit of stoicism, right? On the simple idea that when you're reminded of your mortality, the number one thing that we all fear, it actually does the opposite of what we're afraid. It makes this peacefully locked in on the moment. So number one, in order to have a joyful life of perpetual pursuit, you actually have to stay present, which is, you know, counterintuitive. The second thing is it's okay to take a break. It's okay to, I talk in the book about consolidating gains. You achieve a new milestone, you consolidate it, you go ahead and you lock it in, you don't want to be a grasshopper where you're jumping from one team into the next. The point is, sooner or later, if you're like most people, Mel and Collie will set in because you don't feel challenged. So my, the point of the book is not you have to perpetually jump in a frantic way from one thing to an ex. The sequence is burn the boats, achieve what you previously thought was unachievable, consolidate your gains. Because what's the point of achieving things and then the accomplishment is eroded because you didn't focus enough to make it scale, scale yourself, right? So that it works in your apps, apps, or with less energy, right? I talk in the book how I taught at Harvard Business School was really, really hard the first time, the second time less hard, third time, every time you, we repeat something through habituation, you unlock more energy for you to allocate to something else. So again, I want to make very clear to be listening. I'm not arguing that you have to live a life of perpetual discontent. I'm, I'm asserting that eventually you will feel Mel and Collie like every Olympic and a marathon runner who finishes the race and you will want another race. And so the thing that holds us back are these internal and external obstacles. I try to deconstruct them so that you could figure out how to one burn the boats to consolidate the gains and then three continue on. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.