Think Like a SHARK: Matt Higgins on Why Playing It Safe always FAILS

0:00Start engineering your breakthrough with the burn the boats mindset. In this high-octane episode of Right About Now, I sat down with Shark Tank investor and RSE Ventures co-founder Matt Higgins to reveal why your backup plan is the very thing holding you back from exponential growth. From dropping out of high school at 16 to winning massive government defense contracts, learn the growth hacker secrets of extreme ownership and how to leverage your greatest asset, compounding time and building a legacy that outlives you. The sooner you put your ambition into production, the more years you have to reap the exponential gains.

0:37I was early on Matt Higgins and I was early because I burned the boats on this one crazy radical idea. When you try to figure out how does this all hold together, all these companies, these different careers, it's just this pattern playing out over and over again. I see something, I believe in something, and then I figure out how to overcome my anxiety and just go all in. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes.

1:10You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always getting right. We're always talking about what's now, what's next, what's interesting. And look, he is the co-founder of RSCA Ventures. He is Matt Higgins. What's up, Matt? How you doing? I like that. What's next? Not what's last. Exactly. We want what's now and what's next. Line them up. Knock them down. Let's go. That's what we're here to do, Matt.

1:42You've been involved with NFL teams. We're talking Bitcoin. We're talking land and Abu Dhabi. What makes Matt Higgins tick? I got a book behind me, wrote a book about it, this idea of burn the boats and commitment. The simple answer to that is when I was very young, I had to make a really radical decision in order to escape out of desperate poverty. I grew up on nothing, selling flowers on street corners and eating government cheese and taking care of a sick mom. Anybody out there who's had to deal with the desperation of having a sick parent understands how that just changes your brain chemistry, to be honest, and your decision making.

2:13And when I was young, I made a radical decision to drop out of high school at 16 to get my GD so I could go to college so I could get a job making eight bucks an hour. Literally, none of this is hindsight bias. That was my decision making. And everybody had told me at the time, you're going to be branded a loser for the rest of your life. And I had to come up against conventional wisdom to make that decision. And it was the single greatest decision I ever made in my life. That single decision to drop out at 16, start college at 16, pulled forward my entire career. And Warren Buffett talks about this all the time in the context of money about compounding.

2:43but he doesn't talk about it in terms of career. The sooner you put your ambition into production, the more years you have to reap the exponential gains. We were just talking about being early on Bitcoin and all these other things. I was early on Matt Higgins and I was early because I burned the boats on this one crazy radical idea. When you try to figure out how does this all hold together, all these companies, these different careers, it's just this pattern playing out over and over again. I see something, I believe in something, and then I figure out how to overcome my anxiety and just go all in.

3:08When I think about what you just said, And I think about burning the boats. If you have a plan B, you don't have a plan A. And the risk and the reward that comes from sticking to your gut starting production on something, you got to go all in. It's not because it's careless or reckless necessarily, but there's a certain chutzpah and grit that I think comes from your background that I think probably drives you to that space. But I think we got a little bit of nature and nurture going on, don't we? We do. There's a great YouTube video. If you want to Google it, anyone out there listening, or there's a Navy SEAL.

3:40I don't remember his name and I should find it out. But he asked the entire audience, everyone stretch your arms up as high as you can. Everyone in the room stretches your arms up, right? And you watch in the video, everybody's stretching. Now stretch an inch higher. And everyone stretches one inch higher. I thought you were stretching as high as you can. And the point of that is we all have another level of effort, energy, and determination that we can only harness if we cut off our backup plan. And this idea of burn the boats, a lot of people probably know it from Cortez, this idea that he burned the boats and he conquered the Aztecs.

4:07I'm appropriating this war metaphor in a slightly different way. The boats that I'm talking about are the things that we all carry inside of our heads or in our past that make us hesitate when we have a vision for our own future that maybe isn't being validated by people around us. In my case, it was that I didn't know which spoon to use at the dinner table because I grew up so dirt poor. I was embarrassed by my background. That shame would make me hesitate. And so I wanted to write a book about to really prove exactly what you said. The mere presence of a backup plan is exactly the thing forcing you to need one.

4:35And that there's tons of science and psychology around what happens when you fully commit to your plan A. I always say just burning the boats doesn't guarantee you'll achieve your dreams, but not burning the boats guarantees you never will. The thing I hacked into, and it's against my nature, I am the most paranoid risk taker you'll ever meet. This doesn't come effortlessly to me, but I do think the thing I hacked into is I put myself in situations where I don't have the answers. And I reverse engineer the outcome by figuring it out. It's how I got onto Shark Tank when I had no business being there as a shark.

5:04It's how I ended up at Harvard Business School on the faculty as a person with a GD to a JD. It's not because I'm so special. It's just because I had no choice. I had a gun to my temple. My mom was dying in the room next door. And the day I became press secretary of the mayor of New York, she died that morning at 10. Like it was a gun. And that gun though made me hack into something I never would have discovered on my own because we're conditioned to believe that to play it safe is better than to play bold. And because my mom, God bless her, who always believed that anything that little boy set his mind to, he could figure it out.

5:32I landed on this burn the boat strategy. And ever since I've been sort of running the same play over and over again. You had a very specific thing that I think unlocked it for you. It's a tough thing to know exactly what that formula is that makes someone get to where they do those things. Right. Where they fully commit. It's because we're so comfortable, right? Yeah. It's interesting you said that because when I wrote the book, part of me has this geeky academic brain that would love to write like a treatise on neuroscience. But that's not going to resonate with people. So instead, I chose to take a different approach.

6:01I did it through storytelling. In my book, I tried to dissect these moments where people had to sort of overcome their own objections and sort of fully commit. The number one piece of advice I always have for if you're not fully committing to what you know is true about yourself or the universe, it's usually because you have an enemy within or without. Somebody in your foxhole, it could be a spouse or it could be somebody who's trying to hold you back or something is happening within that you're afraid to face. The dad who never said, I'm proud of you. The incident that you're trying to conceal.

6:27For me, it was the shame of poverty and lack of refinement. But maybe for you, it's you did something wrong and you're afraid to confront it. I always think focusing on the enemy within without identifying what's preventing you, when you face it fearlessly, you're like, that wasn't that big of a deal. Then I feel like you can fully commit. It's usually somebody being blocked by something in my experience. In my book, these little vignettes of trying to say how the person was blocked. I always talk so openly about my anxiety and imposter syndrome so I could let people know it took work. I wasn't born this way.

6:53How was your experience on Shark Tank beyond Kevin? It was amazing. Getting through, I tell the story in the book too about imposter syndrome, because it's a great proxy. Damon John is on Shark Tank. Damon grew up like a mile from me. A lot of similarities. He's black. I'm white. That's a big difference. But he worked at Red Lobster. I was at McDonald's. So we kind of connect on this like who's poorer than who thing. And then I went to the dressing room and I was just honest with him. I was like, man, I'm so freaked out going on this show. And he was like, why? And I was like, I don't know. I just kind of feel like, what am I doing here?

7:19And he first MF'd everybody else. He's like, look what we did. Look where he came from. And then he told me the one greatest piece of advice I love sharing to this audience is you belong here because you are here. And I always say it's like, oh, Plato or Socrates. Like, you belong here. I think therefore I am. I belong here because I am here. Anyone here ever feels out of place. There is no final arbiter of belonging. No one's going to let you know you've arrived. It's for you to realize if you're in the room, you're meant to be in the room. So after that little pep talk, the experience was amazing.

7:45Everything you see on the show, oddly, is the way it is on the show. I thought there'd be way more scripting. And it's like lights, camera, action. And also everyone is so rude, steps on each other because it's real money at stake. And when I say rude, I'm being kind of playful. There's no like chivalry. Everyone's trying to win the deal. And as a mental exercise, it's fun because when you're home, you're like, I would do that deal. And you're like doing the math. When you're like trying to sell somebody and make you thinking that you're the one who should take your money. But at the same time, you're assessing whether you want to do the deal.

8:11There's a lot going on in your mind at the same time, which I think is really interesting psychologically. And most fundamentally, how do you determine if somebody is truthful and worthy of backing in 40 minutes? Summarize for me the common attributes of the sharks. What are things that come to your mind, even though they're all different personalities, different things? But like you said, all working harder, all more vested than you realize. But those are all very successful people, yourself included. What's the common thread for all of them? For someone that's been on the show behind the scenes, you know what it is, maybe.

8:39What comes to mind? It's optimism. Each one of those people is fundamentally optimistic that anything is possible and anyone can do anything. I didn't say Pollyannish, which would have been another word, right? or naive, but they are fundamentally optimistic. And I'm going through Lori and Barbara and Margaret. That's number one. And then two, fearless. I've done deals with all of them when shit's not going right. They don't panic. I hate investors, even though I can be an investor too, but I'm fundamentally a builder and a founder. Investors, they get so panicky and the first one to freak out and they have a very myopic view.

9:11Wait, I'm going to lose all my money. I was like, what about that guy who's going to have to go home and face his wife and kids that he squandered the 401k for the business that didn't work out. What I've found is when things go poorly, they become more fearless and working with all them. And then three, I'd say everyone's a grinder. I'll give you an example of what I mean by that. Sometimes when somebody doesn't have money and they're climbing up, they imagine when you get money, you're like, I'm not going to work. I'm going to be in the Caymans and other people are going to do shit for me. It's not true.

9:33The most successful people I have are shockingly tactical. Mark Cuban is the single most responsive person I've ever met on email. And in general, I don't know how he does it. And usually the response is the word no, but at least it's responsive. And each one of them gets involved in a level of work that I think if this audience heard, that would be surprised how granular and the takeaway from that is if you want to be successful, you got to grind out the details. There is no presiding at any level. There's no set it and forget it. Unless we're talking about Bitcoin compounding over the next 15 years.

10:03And those are the three. So optimism, grinding it out and fearless would be the three qualities that come to mind. You know what's interesting about that? The first one, you got to believe to achieve. It's really easy to be a hater and to not believe and to doubt and to critique. It brings me back to that state. It might sound cliche, but we all hear no one who's getting shit done at a higher level than you is sitting around talking shit about you or where you are or how you do it because they're too busy believing in what they're doing themselves. And optimism, belief, I put all that into the same thing.

10:35I think it's just they've got a vision. They got a belief in something, whether it's investing in something, whether it's doing their own thing, whether it's taking it forward. If you're a believer, you ain't got time for the bullshit. I never met a wildly successful pessimist. And people will say, oh, what about short sellers? I was like, that person's optimistic. It's going to go down that day. They won't optimistic at anybody. They're going against the grain and they're willing to risk everything with unlimited downside because they believe that they're right. That's pretty optimistic. Pessimism is somebody who thinks the deck is stacked against them.

11:07The system is rigged, all that crap, like, please, like some of that may be true from time to time. But at the end of the day, we all have the power to change our circumstances. And the reason I love why we're drilling down on this, I talk about this in this book, this one phrase to always anchor me to what I believe in and what I'm doing, opportunity arrives before the tipping point of evidence. And that's a simple way of saying like lightning and thunder, you always see the flash of light first, that's the opportunity, it travels, light travels many times faster than the speed of sound And evidence is thunder.

11:36It's unmistakable, but everybody hears it. And so if you want to be wildly successful, you first have to be an optimist or else you won't even believe you saw the light. You'd be like, ah, it's in my head, you know? And then the ability to act on it is the thing that sets winners apart. And back to your point about belief, it's why burn the boats is so important because the time to burn the boats is when the opportunity arrives before the tipping point of evidence. When you burn the boats, when everybody knows about it, it's too late. That being said, if you're an innovative and dynamic and optimistic person, when you think it's too late, it's still OK.

12:05Like we were just talking about Bitcoin, having a fun conversation. It's not too late at all. It's actually quite early. You have to have consistency doing tactics and strategies without the proof of definitive success. And it is exactly that. You keep grinding, you keep doing, you keep stacking it. But once you have the proofs of success, it's obvious, but they need that reassurance. They need to see it. They need evidence at all times. We're conditioned to need immediate feedback. The ones that really get there are the ones that have the tolerance. We're not exactly patient people, probably, but at the same time.

12:42I'm urgent, but I can be patient. Yeah. And you don't, you have to be willing to throw the chips in without knowing exactly what you're buying, but you have belief in it. When I get objections to my book, which I love, right? I mean, there's a lot of things to object to. It's not safe or whatever. Yeah. Reckless. I have to pay the rent. And I have answers for all that, by the way. Anybody here who wants to object? But read the book first. But one thing I do get, it always tugs at me a little bit when somebody's like, look, I hear everything you're saying, but I got no resources. I got no autonomy.

13:10I got no power. I'm just trying to survive. I have no opportunity to burn the boats. Burn the boats or believing in your potential, your ideas doesn't require you to act on them when you have no power. Just practice. flex your potential for being right just by acting as if you did move on. If you saw Bitcoin seven years ago and you didn't have the money to invest in it, so what? It's the fact that you saw it. I'd say anyone out there who's not in a position because they're making$18 an hour and they're in a situation that they don't want to be in and they feel like they have no power to express their ideas.

13:37Just practice identifying patterns of the universe and write down what you would have done if you had the power to do something about it. Those reps count. As long as you're being honest, like you would have done it. And I think sometimes people dismiss when they don't have the resources to go all in as if those ideas don't count. When I was at the darkest days and I had no power to act on things, I would still keep score. Damn, if I had some power or money, I would do this. And then the day came when I did. And it turns out, by the way, you make even worse decisions when you do it because you can handle the loss, which is very corrupting.

14:03Million dollars a year on a ship going, oh no, stupid NFC. But anyways, anyone out there who's listening who feels like they don't have the power of the autonomy, the reps still count, even if you don't have the capacity to do anything about it. Matt, can you talk that contract with the government, what it's ultimately, what the value of that contract is over three, five, ten years? We had done a million dollars of revenue after six years of work. But then in the seventh year, we'll probably do$50 million of revenue this year. And we'll eventually end up doing half a billion dollars of revenue in another seven years.

14:34The thing about this work, it's called the Valley of Death, for those who don't know how hard it is to build a defense tech company. And the reason it's called the Valley of Death, There's such a long delta between when you first make a prototype and you have all these early signals like, oh, this is necessary. Government is great at like encouraging you. But the problem is a program of record, which is the thing that sustains you, takes years and years and years to go there. There's this big value of death where it's very hard to raise money. But once you get a program of record, you kind of get to the other side.

14:58What I love about our product is called the C-100. It was reverse engineered specifically for what does the warfighter need to call on their own air support? How do we make something that really is responsive? Whereas I think a lot of things out there are like science projects where like, oh, it'd be really cool if it could do this. It's like, OK, that's great. What happens when it rains? All these practical things. We've created an incredible company that marries operators and engineers under one roof. And so the product is designed with the warfighter in mind. That gives you some context of it.

15:25But it was no fun when the revenue was zero and you don't really know what the future holds.

15:34talk to me about where people can learn more about what you're doing find your book all that stuff i'm on instagram m higgins i'm on linkedin a lot for those who are on there i'm on twitter same handle my book is on amazon if you read it you like it dm me i burned the boats when i started it back to being very tactical what's a way for this to be an enduring classic and i decided i'm gonna dm every single person that ever comments publicly on this book for however long it takes to get to a thousand reviews. And I am 27 away from that. Please put me out of my misery. It's been two years. If you read that book, DM me.

16:05And my theory back to doing things other people won't do was that if somebody were to write a review of the book, they're probably more evangelical and they're more likely to pass the word. Books become classics because word of mouth. And so my theory is if I could get more people to review it, it would eventually be an enduring classic and outlive my life. That was the goal I set. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Hey man, you know where to find us, ryanisright.com. You know why we're right? Hey guys like Matt, Matt Higgins coming on the show. Check out his book, Burn the Boats. And you'll find me on Instagram at Ryan Alford.

16:33We'll see you next time on Right About Now. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanIsRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.