Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Why Great Investors Burn the Boats | Matt Higgins - RSE Ventures CEO & Shark Tank Investor

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Lessons - Why Great Investors Burn the Boats | Matt Higgins - RSE Ventures CEO & Shark Tank Investor · Success Story with Scott Clary

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