Burn the boats, toss plan B overboard, and unleash your full potential. In this gripping rags to riches instant classic, Matt Higgins provides the blueprint he used to go from a desperate 16-year-old high school dropout caring for a sick mother in Queens, New York, to a shark on shark tank and the faculty of Harvard Business School.

Told with raw emotion and radical transparency, Higgins writes the definitive tome on the oldest life hack in history, burn the boats. From Sun Tzu to Julius Caesar, the ancient Israelites to Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky, there's a bold and highly effective tactic seen throughout history when leaders want to motivate their troops for success, they destroy all opportunities for retreat and fully commit to the mission, they burn their boats, its win or perish, and the clarity of sheer desperation propels them to victory.

Skipping ahead here, the book jacket says, "Burn the boats is the manifesto for anyone looking to level up their life while navigating risk. Each chapter includes clear, actual advice that readers can immediately start applying to their own lives. This book will give you the courage to confidently go all in on your life's true purpose." So Matt is a very impressive guy and has a very cool story, really came out of a hard situation to a lot of success and he used this idea and he's been telling this idea a lot and has been getting a lot of play.

So I wanted to talk about this because a very similar concept came up as a major theme when I was working on my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. So, So Good They Can't Ignore You was a book that was looking at career advice. And so the idea that I was engaging with from the world of career advice in So Good They Can't Ignore You, one of the big ideas I was engaging with is what I called courage culture.

And at the time, so this is the 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s when I was working on this, courage culture had a really big footprint in the career advice space. And the theory behind courage culture was straightforward. It said the most important thing in terms of transforming your work into something that you're passionate about is having the courage to go after that thing you love.

So courage culture prioritizes courage as the key issue. So look, I'm going to draw a picture here. And again, my apologies for people who are actually seeing this, but in courage culture, I'll draw this rough picture. What it's saying is, okay, the path, all right, so I'm drawing a squiggly line here.

At the end of the squiggly line is a person smiling. Jesse will tell you for the listeners, expertly drawn, holding their hands in the air triumphantly. And what is the obstacle here is you have this obstacle up front, this big, drew it as like a red squiggle, and it's fear.

So this is a great illustration on the screen. So courage culture said, here's the issue is if you can overcome that fear, which is built, and there's all sorts of sources of it, parental expectation, conformity to society, you can overcome that fear, you have a pretty easy path to being very happy.

So we have to build up courage to find happiness. I pushed back on this as I went out there and I studied people who were very passionate about their careers, and I studied their actual lives, not just what they said. And what I saw was a different picture. So the path that they took, if you're looking at the screen now, you'll see this, the path they took was uphill.

So now my picture, it's a pretty arduous uphill path, right? So it's like going up a mountain. And so what is stopping them here? So what's in the way of this uphill path is an expertly drawn brain. Oh God, I'm getting creative here, Jesse. An expertly drawn brain that is seen, oh man, changing colors, I'm really impressed by my drawing, is seen as drawn by these orange dots, the hardness of this path, and saying, okay, I'm going to preserve energy.

Pretty good, right, Jesse? - Yeah, it's great. - All right. So if you look at these two different interpretations, you get two different ways to go forward. So courage culture says this first picture is what's happening. So you got to just get really inspired. So you can have this moment of courage and overcome your fear.

And once you leap over to the other side, you have this easy path. There's waiting there all along, just going to get you to happiness. This other approach, which I said was more realistic, is the reason why you're hesitating to get going is that often it is really, really hard to get to this success with something really cool.

And your brain recognizes that and it sees how hard it is. And it says, hey buddy, I like the guy at the top of the mountain with their hands in the air, but you're not ready to do this. You don't really understand how to hike this long. You don't know how your compass works.

You don't have enough water. I checked your boots. They're pretty bad. You haven't checked the weather. Do you have a jacket? And so your brain says, we're not going to engage on this long-term plan until I'm more confident that you know what the hell you're doing. Now, last week on the show, we got into the neuroscience of this.

This actual process is called episodic future thinking or EFT. It is your brain actually trying to project into the future and understanding of what's going to happen based on your experience and expertise that you already have stored in your hippocampus and seeing what it projects. And if it likes what it projects, then it's going to give you motivation.

And if it doesn't, it's going to withhold it. So if when your brain, the centers that are working on the EFT, the episodic future thinking are looking at what you understand and your plans and your past experiences and says, you don't know how to get up that proverbial mountain, you're not going to get motivation.

So my approach was, it's not about getting the courage to just go for it. It's filling up that hippocampus with enough evidence-based expertise and understanding of what you want to do that your brain, when it projects in the future, says, yeah, I see how this is going to happen.

That's cool. We're going to get up that mountain, that guy's hands in the air, that's going to be us, that ties to our values, let's get after it. And you're not at war with your brain. You're co-opting your brain to get on your side. I think we over-emphasize this idea of part of ourselves being afraid and we're trying to overcome that.

I think we've given that too much power and we have not given in our culture enough power to how effective EFT really is at helping us make decisions about what to do in the future. And when we switch our attention from the courage culture to the episodic future thinking approach, it really changes the way we strategize to go after something cool.

We don't burn the boats. We say, how quickly can we learn enough about this, make enough little bets, get enough expertise, talk to people who know what they're doing? How quickly can we convince our brain that this is something we can do? There's still a little courage after that, that might be required.

If what you want to do is quite different than what's expected, people are correct to point out as they did when I was researching my book, that it could be hard. Don't leave your law job. Don't leave your tenure track position. Don't become an artist when you should become a doctor.

That is hard, but not nearly as hard as we think when your mind is on board with a plan that leads to something that's true to its values. It takes a little courage to tell your parent, I'm not going to med school, but it's not as much as you think.

If your brain is really on board with the alternative that you're going to do. So this idea that you're going to burn your boat so you have no plan B, that that's going to motivate you. Motivation doesn't get you up the hill. Equipment does, skill does, training does. So you should not be looking to get rid of plan Bs.

You should be looking instead to build better plan A's. A little bit of courage might still be involved, but it's not going to be that hard if you've gotten your mind on your side. So see your mind not as an arbitrary obstacle, but as your ally. It is really good at saying, Hey, do we have a good plan for what we're doing?

That's why humans are so successful as a species. It's why we can invent things and build the pyramids and everything else we've done. Trust the human brain. Don't avoid plan B, write a better plan A. That's what I have seen to be successful. I don't know if you remember that rhetoric from like the 90s and 2000s, Jesse, but man, it was everywhere.

You see it a lot in sports too. Yeah, just have the courage to go for it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's okay. I'm going to bring up an old man rant. Nothing makes me seem older than this. I've said it before on the show, but I'm going to bring it up again.

Cars three, the Pixar movie cards three, because the whole plot line of cars three centers on the fact that the one car anthropomorphic car who's helping whatever his name is, lightning McQueen, lightning McQueen train for his return because it's a lightning McQueen's an old style stock car. And now they have these new sort of computer design cars.

They're just faster. It's better technology. And he's going to train, like, I want to train to like overcome these technologically more superior calls cars. The whole plot line is the person training, you know, lightning was someone she always wanted. I don't know how you gender a car, but whatever it's a, she in the show, she had always wanted to be a race car driver, but had, you know, didn't have the courage to do it because, you know, I guess she was a girl car.

I don't know how this, I don't know how car gender works. So that was kind of the plot line. Like, okay, that's, you know, that's interesting, right? There's this interesting dynamic of like, this is something she always wanted to do, but couldn't. And now she's helping this other person do it.

The way the movie ends is they're on the racetrack and they had these super computer design cars or lightning McQueen, by the way, like was one of the top stock car racers, like top of the heap before this new technology came in. So like whole life training to do this.

And at the very end, the, the, the trainer gets the courage to say, I'm just going to get on the track. I don't care what people tell me I'm going to race. And she beats all the high-tech cars, no training. No, like how does, how did her old technology overcome it?

No, like, so it was the courage culture personified that the only thing that was holding you back from beating these like super precision cars that had been trained this really well, it was just having the courage to compete for it. And they were completely missing the part where you actually have to become good, good at the thing.

So it was like courage culture personified was the trainer from cars three beating the high-tech hyper cars because she had the courage to actually get on the track. Like what message are we teaching? What message are we teaching kids? It's like rookie of the year, you know, like the secret you could be pitching in the major leagues.

It's if you broke your arm in a weird way, then that's it. And then you're going to, you can't throw a hundred mile per hour fastball. It's like, where's the training. So I'll tell you, I mean, I stood up and gave that room full of kids in that theater near full.

I'm like, let me tell you about deliberate practice. You know how many hours it took on average for a chess grandmaster to get there. It's not just about overcoming fear. You have to learn like how to be the world's best race car. Like most people can't be. I think if you want to be your whole life has to be dedicated to it.

And while you're at it, let me tell you about Dr. No and Fleming's like misplot. Yes. And it's like, and let me tell you about the torture channel and Dr. No. All right, kids, I got a problem with that as well. So they stake this broad to the, to the volcanic rocks.

So the crabs would eat her, but crabs don't eat people. You see what I'm saying? I'm not a welcome back in that theater again. Yeah. That's the, that's the moral of that story. I'm not welcome back in that theater, nor have my applications to join the writing staff at Pixar been responded to or approved.

I want like dark gritty movies where they train really hard. And in the end, just like you really, you gave it your best, but like, you don't have the right VO two max for the sport. And that's kind of the ending of it. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.

Check it out.