How To (Quickly) Make Progress In Life & Achieve Any Goal

00:00:00.000 | Burn the boats, toss plan B overboard, and unleash your full potential.

00:00:06.080 | In this gripping rags to riches instant classic, Matt Higgins provides the blueprint he used to go

00:00:19.680 | from a desperate 16-year-old high school dropout caring for a sick mother in Queens, New York,

00:00:24.800 | to a shark on shark tank and the faculty of Harvard Business School. Told with raw emotion and radical

00:00:30.800 | transparency, Higgins writes the definitive tome on the oldest life hack in history,

00:00:34.400 | burn the boats. From Sun Tzu to Julius Caesar, the ancient Israelites to Ukrainian president

00:00:43.440 | Vladimir Zelensky, there's a bold and highly effective tactic seen throughout history when

00:00:50.080 | leaders want to motivate their troops for success, they destroy all opportunities for retreat

00:00:54.480 | and fully commit to the mission, they burn their boats, its win or perish, and the clarity of sheer

00:01:00.560 | desperation propels them to victory. Skipping ahead here, the book jacket says, "Burn the boats

00:01:07.600 | is the manifesto for anyone looking to level up their life while navigating risk. Each chapter

00:01:11.440 | includes clear, actual advice that readers can immediately start applying to their own lives.

00:01:15.520 | This book will give you the courage to confidently go all in on your life's true purpose."

00:01:21.520 | So Matt is a very impressive guy and has a very cool story, really came out of a hard situation

00:01:25.920 | to a lot of success and he used this idea and he's been telling this idea a lot and has been getting

00:01:30.400 | a lot of play. So I wanted to talk about this because a very similar concept came up as a

00:01:37.600 | major theme when I was working on my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. So,

00:01:46.720 | So Good They Can't Ignore You was a book that was looking at career advice. And so the idea that I

00:01:51.440 | was engaging with from the world of career advice in So Good They Can't Ignore You,

00:01:56.240 | one of the big ideas I was engaging with is what I called courage culture.

00:01:59.520 | And at the time, so this is the 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s when I was working on this,

00:02:05.040 | courage culture had a really big footprint in the career advice space. And the theory behind

00:02:10.880 | courage culture was straightforward. It said the most important thing in terms of transforming

00:02:17.920 | your work into something that you're passionate about is having the courage to go after that thing

00:02:24.480 | you love. So courage culture prioritizes courage as the key issue. So look, I'm going to draw a

00:02:32.320 | picture here. And again, my apologies for people who are actually seeing this, but in courage

00:02:37.280 | culture, I'll draw this rough picture. What it's saying is, okay, the path, all right, so I'm

00:02:44.000 | drawing a squiggly line here. At the end of the squiggly line is a person smiling. Jesse will tell

00:02:51.280 | you for the listeners, expertly drawn, holding their hands in the air triumphantly. And what is

00:02:56.960 | the obstacle here is you have this obstacle up front, this big, drew it as like a red squiggle,

00:03:04.720 | and it's fear. So this is a great illustration on the screen. So courage culture said, here's the

00:03:11.600 | issue is if you can overcome that fear, which is built, and there's all sorts of sources of it,

00:03:16.720 | parental expectation, conformity to society, you can overcome that fear, you have a pretty easy

00:03:22.000 | path to being very happy. So we have to build up courage to find happiness. I pushed back on this

00:03:28.320 | as I went out there and I studied people who were very passionate about their careers,

00:03:33.520 | and I studied their actual lives, not just what they said. And what I saw was a different picture.

00:03:39.360 | So the path that they took, if you're looking at the screen now, you'll see this, the path they took

00:03:46.080 | was uphill. So now my picture, it's a pretty arduous uphill path, right? So it's like going

00:03:54.000 | up a mountain. And so what is stopping them here? So what's in the way of this uphill path is an

00:04:01.920 | expertly drawn brain. Oh God, I'm getting creative here, Jesse. An expertly drawn brain

00:04:08.640 | that is seen, oh man, changing colors, I'm really impressed by my drawing,

00:04:15.760 | is seen as drawn by these orange dots, the hardness of this path,

00:04:22.240 | and saying, okay, I'm going to preserve energy. Pretty good, right, Jesse?

00:04:28.720 | - Yeah, it's great.

00:04:29.680 | - All right. So if you look at these two different interpretations, you get two different ways to go

00:04:34.880 | forward. So courage culture says this first picture is what's happening. So you got to just

00:04:38.560 | get really inspired. So you can have this moment of courage and overcome your fear. And once you

00:04:42.880 | leap over to the other side, you have this easy path. There's waiting there all along,

00:04:46.240 | just going to get you to happiness. This other approach, which I said was more realistic,

00:04:51.440 | is the reason why you're hesitating to get going is that often it is really, really hard to get

00:04:56.480 | to this success with something really cool. And your brain recognizes that and it sees how hard

00:05:01.680 | it is. And it says, hey buddy, I like the guy at the top of the mountain with their hands in the

00:05:07.120 | air, but you're not ready to do this. You don't really understand how to hike this long. You

00:05:13.520 | don't know how your compass works. You don't have enough water. I checked your boots. They're pretty

00:05:16.800 | bad. You haven't checked the weather. Do you have a jacket? And so your brain says, we're not going

00:05:21.840 | to engage on this long-term plan until I'm more confident that you know what the hell you're

00:05:27.280 | doing. Now, last week on the show, we got into the neuroscience of this. This actual process is

00:05:32.800 | called episodic future thinking or EFT. It is your brain actually trying to project into the future

00:05:39.040 | and understanding of what's going to happen based on your experience and expertise that you already

00:05:43.280 | have stored in your hippocampus and seeing what it projects. And if it likes what it projects,

00:05:47.840 | then it's going to give you motivation. And if it doesn't, it's going to withhold it.

00:05:51.680 | So if when your brain, the centers that are working on the EFT, the episodic future thinking

00:05:56.720 | are looking at what you understand and your plans and your past experiences and says, you don't know

00:06:00.320 | how to get up that proverbial mountain, you're not going to get motivation. So my approach was,

00:06:06.880 | it's not about getting the courage to just go for it. It's filling up that hippocampus with enough

00:06:14.320 | evidence-based expertise and understanding of what you want to do that your brain,

00:06:17.920 | when it projects in the future, says, yeah, I see how this is going to happen. That's cool. We're

00:06:21.520 | going to get up that mountain, that guy's hands in the air, that's going to be us, that ties to

00:06:25.120 | our values, let's get after it. And you're not at war with your brain. You're co-opting your brain

00:06:30.960 | to get on your side. I think we over-emphasize this idea of part of ourselves being afraid and

00:06:39.680 | we're trying to overcome that. I think we've given that too much power and we have not given in our

00:06:44.880 | culture enough power to how effective EFT really is at helping us make decisions about what to do

00:06:50.560 | in the future. And when we switch our attention from the courage culture to the episodic future

00:06:55.760 | thinking approach, it really changes the way we strategize to go after something cool.

00:07:02.720 | We don't burn the boats. We say, how quickly can we learn enough about this, make enough little

00:07:08.960 | bets, get enough expertise, talk to people who know what they're doing? How quickly can we convince

00:07:12.880 | our brain that this is something we can do? There's still a little courage after that,

00:07:16.240 | that might be required. If what you want to do is quite different than what's expected,

00:07:20.880 | people are correct to point out as they did when I was researching my book, that it could be hard.

00:07:26.960 | Don't leave your law job. Don't leave your tenure track position. Don't become an artist when you

00:07:32.480 | should become a doctor. That is hard, but not nearly as hard as we think when your mind is

00:07:38.880 | on board with a plan that leads to something that's true to its values. It takes a little

00:07:42.160 | courage to tell your parent, I'm not going to med school, but it's not as much as you think.

00:07:47.200 | If your brain is really on board with the alternative that you're going to do.

00:07:51.040 | So this idea that you're going to burn your boat so you have no plan B, that that's going to

00:07:56.640 | motivate you. Motivation doesn't get you up the hill. Equipment does, skill does, training does.

00:08:01.280 | So you should not be looking to get rid of plan Bs. You should be looking instead to build better

00:08:07.840 | plan A's. A little bit of courage might still be involved, but it's not going to be that hard

00:08:14.640 | if you've gotten your mind on your side. So see your mind not as an arbitrary obstacle,

00:08:18.960 | but as your ally. It is really good at saying, Hey, do we have a good plan for what we're doing?

00:08:24.160 | That's why humans are so successful as a species. It's why we can invent things and build the

00:08:28.640 | pyramids and everything else we've done. Trust the human brain. Don't avoid plan B,

00:08:34.160 | write a better plan A. That's what I have seen to be successful. I don't know if you remember that

00:08:43.040 | rhetoric from like the 90s and 2000s, Jesse, but man, it was everywhere.

00:08:47.120 | You see it a lot in sports too. Yeah, just have the courage to go for it.

00:08:51.840 | Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's okay. I'm going to bring up an old man rant.

00:08:57.120 | Nothing makes me seem older than this. I've said it before on the show, but I'm going to bring it

00:09:01.280 | up again. Cars three, the Pixar movie cards three, because the whole plot line of cars three centers

00:09:10.160 | on the fact that the one car anthropomorphic car who's helping whatever his name is, lightning

00:09:17.440 | McQueen, lightning McQueen train for his return because it's a lightning McQueen's an old style

00:09:23.360 | stock car. And now they have these new sort of computer design cars. They're just faster. It's

00:09:29.040 | better technology. And he's going to train, like, I want to train to like overcome these technologically

00:09:34.320 | more superior calls cars. The whole plot line is the person training, you know, lightning was

00:09:41.920 | someone she always wanted. I don't know how you gender a car, but whatever it's a, she in the show,

00:09:47.120 | she had always wanted to be a race car driver, but had, you know, didn't have the courage to do it

00:09:52.080 | because, you know, I guess she was a girl car. I don't know how this, I don't know how car gender

00:09:56.880 | works. So that was kind of the plot line. Like, okay, that's, you know, that's interesting, right?

00:10:00.880 | There's this interesting dynamic of like, this is something she always wanted to do, but couldn't.

00:10:04.720 | And now she's helping this other person do it. The way the movie ends is they're on the racetrack

00:10:10.960 | and they had these super computer design cars or lightning McQueen, by the way, like was one of the

00:10:14.880 | top stock car racers, like top of the heap before this new technology came in. So like whole life

00:10:19.920 | training to do this. And at the very end, the, the, the trainer gets the courage to say, I'm

00:10:25.200 | just going to get on the track. I don't care what people tell me I'm going to race. And she beats

00:10:29.120 | all the high-tech cars, no training. No, like how does, how did her old technology overcome it? No,

00:10:35.920 | like, so it was the courage culture personified that the only thing that was holding you back

00:10:40.720 | from beating these like super precision cars that had been trained this really well, it was just

00:10:44.960 | having the courage to compete for it. And they were completely missing the part where you actually

00:10:48.480 | have to become good, good at the thing. So it was like courage culture personified was the trainer

00:10:54.480 | from cars three beating the high-tech hyper cars because she had the courage to actually get on

00:10:59.760 | the track. Like what message are we teaching? What message are we teaching kids? It's like

00:11:04.000 | rookie of the year, you know, like the secret you could be pitching in the major leagues. It's if

00:11:07.840 | you broke your arm in a weird way, then that's it. And then you're going to, you can't throw a

00:11:10.960 | hundred mile per hour fastball. It's like, where's the training. So I'll tell you, I mean, I stood up

00:11:15.840 | and gave that room full of kids in that theater near full. I'm like, let me tell you about

00:11:20.640 | deliberate practice. You know how many hours it took on average for a chess grandmaster to get

00:11:25.760 | there. It's not just about overcoming fear. You have to learn like how to be the world's best

00:11:30.000 | race car. Like most people can't be. I think if you want to be your whole life has to be dedicated

00:11:34.000 | to it. And while you're at it, let me tell you about Dr. No and Fleming's like misplot. Yes.

00:11:39.600 | And it's like, and let me tell you about the torture channel and Dr. No. All right, kids,

00:11:45.360 | I got a problem with that as well. So they stake this broad to the, to the volcanic rocks. So the

00:11:52.480 | crabs would eat her, but crabs don't eat people. You see what I'm saying? I'm not a welcome back

00:11:58.240 | in that theater again. Yeah. That's the, that's the moral of that story. I'm not welcome back in

00:12:03.120 | that theater, nor have my applications to join the writing staff at Pixar been responded to

00:12:09.440 | or approved. I want like dark gritty movies where they train really hard. And in the end,

00:12:14.000 | just like you really, you gave it your best, but like, you don't have the right VO two max for the

00:12:18.640 | sport. And that's kind of the ending of it. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll

00:12:23.680 | really like this one as well. Check it out.

How To (Quickly) Make Progress In Life & Achieve Any Goal | Cal Newport

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