Lessons - Why Great Investors Burn the Boats | Matt Higgins - RSE Ventures CEO & Shark Tank Investor

In this lessons episode, explore why defiance rather than bitterness often fuels extraordinary success and sustained growth. Discover how high performers cultivate self-belief to reject mediocrity, understand why eliminating a safety net sharpens focus and decision making, and uncover how confronting internal and external obstacles creates momentum without leading to burnout. The burden the boats is a great concept, but the chip on the shoulder makes it possible, and you had this environment that forced you to not have an anger, but just have a little bit of unhappiness with the situation that you were in. So I always like to pull out that origin story, but then I also like to ask you, how does somebody manufacture that feeling? Because that's what it takes to be successful. I love this question, by the way. I talk about it in the book, you know, The Burn the Boats, when I break down these common patterns of successful individual, successful leaders, and you isolated one of them, which is defiance. I actually, I use an industrial psychologist way too much, everybody's always you and the psychologist, but like I think the fish rods from the head, right? So I always try to get the head right and look under the hood when I'm making writing a check, but one of the qualities that she identified that repeats over and over again is defiance. That when you're overly deferential to the status quo or to others, you can't have breakout success. So while, you know, I like the way you distinguish it. I don't really have a chip on my shoulder, I'm not bitter. I left that experience incredibly empathetic and I retain that empathy, but I am defined. And I have found the worst decisions I've made of when I've tried to outsource my judgment to supposed experts because a exceptional generalist will have much better judgment than a mediocre specialist, specialist all day long. And so defiance is a critical thing. So how do you manufacture it a bit? One, you had to believe it that it's necessary. And two, honestly, it stems from self from self worth. Like if you really believe in yourself and believe in your destiny and believe that there's better for you and you're not entitled to better for, but deserving of better for you will seek it out and you'll be defiant when somebody's trying to force you to accept mediocrity. We see it manifest all the time in the relationship context when I see somebody tolerating a partner who's putting them down, putting them in their place, you know, or is just unhappy. It's usually for one of two reasons. One, you don't believe you deserve better or two, you don't believe better exists, right? And they're very, their nuance and are different. But if you approach every situation with a degree of defiance, where your base case is, what's the best I can have in this situation? You will always be a little bit wary of accepting mediocrity for yourself. That's a great, that's a great answer. I love that. And I've never heard Chip on the shoulder reframed his defiance, but it's a much more positive way to look at it. I've never. Yeah, because people will say to me, I still got a chip. I'm like, actually, don't have a chip. I have like cry and like a heartbeat when somebody, when I encounter somebody else's pain, I have the opposite of a chip, you know, I have defiance and insistence and unrelenting energy, but, but I'm not bitter. So, okay, so let now, 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, and I think it's good to frame a little bit what the phrase mean, why I became obsessed with this idea. Actually, because I think we've heard some of us have heard this before, but I've never heard somebody go so into the weeds on it, yeah. Yeah, no, it's funny. I remember I was with Mark Cuban at an event and I made this burn, you know, burn the boats reference. And he's like, burn 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 and memorial, 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 one, 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 appropriated this military doctrine and decided to use it for the rest of us in peacetime. So let's forget Caesar, you know, Sunzu 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 into 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, when a lot of folks here, the title of this book, they reflexively say, well, I can't take on rest. 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 a book, one of the first steps is to synthesize and recognize what's the worst that can happen if this big move I'm about to make goes wrong. And by doing that, you can now can peacefully accept the risk because you've already processed, you know, the downside. So one, I want to approach it from science and history and psychology. But the other is I want to provide actionable case studies, illustrations so that you wouldn't distance yourself from the individual. What do 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 me. 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 and the journey. And you could say, Oh, you were high school dropout. Oh, you have imposter syndrome. You were divorced and you're a barrispy and you went through a lot of pain. You suffer from anxiety. You have a degree of lingering PTSD. You're not over your stuff, right? Like I'm very important to me 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 and 14 and thinks her life is better off for it. An activist who was who was the victim of sexual abuse when she was a child from her 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, burn 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 provide an actionable blueprint to 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 it is probably something do 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 striving. 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 the joy was the climbing 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 an authority 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 imposter 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 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 say. 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 tried to put into words things we all feel and I'll make it a little abstract. They're 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 I tried to in the book deconstruct these unsaid things that operate upon us and hold us back that prevent us from going 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 mention this to people with, 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 and two, I'm sad that I need it. And so I think what 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 and one thing you mentioned, you mentioned perpetual growth. And then when you adopt this mindset, it's 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 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 to 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 app in my phone call We Croak. Five times a day, this sounds actually crazy, but five times a day, 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 a 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 of. It makes us 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. I talk in the book about consolidating gains. You achieve a new milestone, you can solidate 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, melancholy 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 a next. 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 absence 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 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 melancholy like every Olympian, a marathon runner who finishes the race and you will want another race. And so the, 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.