Matt Higgins: Author of Burn the Boats & Co-Founder of RSE Ventures

Episode 353

You dropout of high school at 16, become the youngest press secretary in NYC history, basically run the Jets, guest shark on Shark Tank and become an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Our next guest Matt Higgins has truly done it all! Clearly his one driving ethos throughout his career is removing the obstacles of fear and doubt before crushing it! And he does just that. Matt’s new book, Burn the Boats, shares how to make it all happen. How to undue roadblocks and fears. No excuses. Matt also talks a bit about being the Co-Founder and CEO of RSE Ventures, what he has seen teaching in his Moving Beyond Direct-to-Consumer course that he teaches at Harvard Business School. Get ready for some BIG inspiration, plenty of motivating stories and lessons from an interview filled with takeaways that you won’t want to miss! On this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down but just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. It’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And we are here today with a very exciting guest. We have Matt Higgins, who’s the author of burn the boats. And he’s also the co founder of RSC ventures, we’re going to get into what Matt is up to. But first of all, this book burn the boats have got it right here is absolutely awesome. You have to have to have to get this book. He is also the co founder, as I said and CEO of RSC ventures, which is a private investment firm, which he co founded with Steven Ross, who, amongst other things, as a giant real estate developer and the owner of the Miami Dolphins. Prior to this, though, Matt served as a top executive with the dolphins, but was also with the New York Jets for many, many years. So if you’re familiar with the show Shark Tank, you may recognize Matt, as he appeared on Shark Tank series. I think it was season 10 If I got that correct. And finally Matt is an executive fellow at Harvard Business School where he teaches the course moving beyond direct to consumer, which is a must take for so many entrepreneurs and making out that school. So all right. I’m super, super excited about this. Can’t wait to dig in more. So without further ado, welcome Matt Hagen. Thank

Matt Higgins 2:04
you for that an incredible intro. I’m sorry, I’ve filled up so much space. Thank you.

Kara Goldin 2:10
Absolutely. Awesome. Okay, so before we get into the book and some of your career, I want to start in your early life. So I read you grew up in Queens, and what was what was your life like early on?

Matt Higgins 2:24
Yeah. Hello, everybody. Thanks for having me. On. I grew up in Queens, New York was the product of a single mother. And who just always struggled with a lot of issues around her weight. To be perfectly honest, she had thyroid gland disorder, so and was a high school dropout, but fiercely intelligent. So a lot of my early memories were sitting with her on the kitchen table and her writing poems and just just all this intellect trying to find a way out. And um, she actually got divorced from my father when I was nine years old. So my earliest memories were of her taking me to elderly, citizens homes and cleaning. She worked at Catholic Charities. So she’s making you know, eight $9 an hour trying to raise, you know, for rotten boys, there were four of us, which you can imagine how hard that is, but then going and got her GED, and going to Queens College. And it was the first time in her life that she ever felt dignity. And so my early my early My earliest memory was the transformative power of education. And so I watched her get a degree, and really try to make something of herself. She went on to graduate from Queens College and pursue two masters degrees. But while that was happening, her health was fading. There were a lot of psychological issues that she had to contend with a lot of depression. So the framework was watching my mother aspire, but meanwhile having nothing to eat, you know, we would, I said, I grew up on government cheese, and we would take a bus to another neighborhood an hour away to get boxes of food from a food pantry, a spike, aren’t there churches where we live, but you know, a lot, a lot of like, shame. And so it was a combination of being very close to my mother, and being very desperate to change our circumstances, and just selling flowers on street corners as a kid or scraping gum underneath table at McDonald’s just doing whatever it would take to survive.

Kara Goldin 4:12
That’s absolutely incredible. So you were Where did you fall in the four kids?

Matt Higgins 4:18
As usually happens, it’s that burden of the youngest you know, to go ahead and take on all the obligation all the the other boys were gone or you know, you know, stealing cars whenever, like, there was totally now my brother Todd, I’m very close to him. And he actually ended up being a lawyer as well, but but everybody was older. So they they could free themselves to be perfectly honest. And and I, I just realized, you know, when you’re a kid, you just hope somebody comes in and steps in, especially when you’re the product of a single mother, you kind of have a hero narrative, like where’s the man going to come in and rescue us? Right and at certain point, I became very disillusioned because it was getting more, more and more urgent. And I had the sense that I needed to make radical change in order to get out to poverty. And my mother, one of the greatest gifts she gave to me was a life hack. And I realized, you know, she went to college as an adult, she got a GED. And she did well enough to go to Queens College. I was like, why don’t I run that play on purpose? Because I would look at the Pennysaver ads, you know, my little local and local newspaper that was maybe 375 An hour and McDonald’s, but at the Pennysaver ad, it said, hey, you know, work for a congressman delivering flyers make like $8 an hour, I was like, wait, I can to x my income potential. If I just can get into college. And around seventh grade, I had an epiphany. I’m going to go and I’m going to drop out as soon as possible. Get a GED, and I’m gonna go to college, which is what birthed this book, burn the boats. It was that first crazy burned the boats move that set my entire career in motion. So that was in high school. Yeah. So when I you know, so when I, when i i so that, you know, it’s one thing to talk about this years later, and that was all smooth. Exactly. It was we drew it up. There are a lot of getting arrested by true true and police along the way, my guidance counselor, Mr. Barker, may he rest in peace would would say to me like this is your you’re never going to shake the stigma of being a high school dropout. This is crazy. So I realized early on in order for me, to defy the full weight of conventional thinking, I need to give myself no Plan B, I need to give myself no option to retreat. So I decided I was gonna get left back and fell every single class suffer typing because I type type of typing will be useful. But I failed every class for it sat in the same homeroom for two years, while everyone thought what is what’s going on with this kid? What they didn’t know, is at home, I had a mother who was slowly deteriorating, and was screaming and pain, and we couldn’t function house was filthy. You know, I never had a single friend over my home until I was you know, 26. So I realized no one has context into your life, especially when you’re hiding your shame. And and I gave myself no plan B in order to retreat. And at 16 years old, I dropped out of high school, took my GED, and started college when I was 16. So that single one unconventional chess move, pulled forward all my professional success by at least two years, and set in motion everything that I’ve benefited from today. I’m making it sound a lot easier. Right. But you know, that’s the genesis of my burned the boats book.

Kara Goldin 7:15
Well, and it’s always I think you and I were chatting about writing a book, I think that writing a book too, and sort of putting that it’s therapy, right, you’re connecting the dots of sort of what happened along the way as well, which, I mean, it’s an absolutely incredible story. But I also love the fact that, you know, is your mother, I mean that that’s a whole other piece that I think a lot of people are, well, you

Matt Higgins 7:40
could relate like, on the one hand I was thrown out to be honest, for any kid out there who feels like they’ve been parental FIDE, right, there was a degree of resentment, why are you putting it all on me to take care of everybody or rescue everyone, she would always say, you could be the president, you were meant to be something as like, I don’t want to be the president, I want to go to drink wine coolers in the park at night like or do whatever kids are supposed to be doing. But um, but but so there was a degree of dysfunction around that which happens in poverty. But at the same time, that she would always had limitless faith and that whatever I did, I would just figure it out. So even this radical decision, she never tried to talk me out of it never tried to get me to conform, she sort of recognized that there was perhaps something special and define about me. And that faith, despite everything we went through was the greatest gift she ever gave, because she stood by and watched me make that move. Which any parent out there when your children has a saying something unconventional try not to dismiss it because my mother died with $100 in the bank, but she bequeathed to me that unending faith and that I was going to figure it out.

Kara Goldin 8:40
Yeah. And she also figured it out. I think that that’s another, you know, great if she can figure it out, you can figure it out, which is a lot of what I got out of out of your book as well, which was incredible. So fast forward a few years. You hustled you did. You were the youngest New York City press secretary, is that correct? That was 2006. Yeah, amazing. And you went to law school, decided not to be an attorney. I’m married to a recovering attorney as well. He

Matt Higgins 9:12
can play he can relate to the wisdom of that choice. Right. I just made it a little bit earlier than he did probably.

Kara Goldin 9:17
Yeah, he didn’t realize that he had to do timesheets. That was no one ever told him.

Matt Higgins 9:22
I talked about that in the book. I’m like, wait, I used to work at McDonald’s and I had to clock it in. Now I’m gonna go to Skadden Arps sit in a basement with a yellow highlighter doing discovery. And you’re gonna you know, I’m gonna be measured by whether I did 2000 hours of that like total It’s just like being a nun. Yeah, no offense to lawyers out there. I have a degree and I used to love lawyers. I just didn’t want to be what?

Kara Goldin 9:43
No, absolutely. And and then you went on to run the business of the jets and which is absolutely incredible. I was loved connecting those dots. How you ended up connecting with Gary Vee and then you went to the dolphins. I was It’s just like, this is incredible. And obviously, it wasn’t so easy probably along the way, but it just seemed like it was definitely your journey. So tell me, you know, we mentioned Gary. So how did you meet Gary? Can you share a little bit about that

Matt Higgins 10:13
story? Yeah, yeah. Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk. For those out there he, he’s a huge Jets fan, which anybody who follows Him knows. And I was at the Jets, believe it or not, I don’t eat, breathe live sports. Everything I do, I always think what’s the best leverage out of the thing I’m doing now to what I want to do next. Right, I always ask myself that sequence of questions. Prior to the New York Jets, I was overseeing the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, I was Chief Operating Officer. So I went from being press secretary in New York to probably the third employee hired when that when the World Trade Center was still 2000 degrees. And for two years, helped put together a plan in place for the memorial, the the Freedom Tower, everything you see right now, the point of that story is though, rather than define myself, as a government employee, you know, a 25, or, you know, a specific type of employee, I said, the real skill here is taking complicated fact patterns, constituencies, bringing them together, and trying to forge consensus, while the Jets needed to build a stadium. So they were looking for somebody, that was my way to migrate into the private sector into sports. And so that’s how I started running the Jets. However, unlike Gary, I don’t eat breathe, and die sports. And I met him when he was wine library.com, we met at a bagel store in New Jersey, my staff was like, This guy’s gonna be a billionaire. And he’s gonna buy the Jets, I was like, He’s selling wine, he’s not gonna buy the Jets. But if you want me to go meet with Gary Vaynerchuk, to try to sell them this week, you know, I’ll do it. And we sat down in that bagel store. And I’m be honest, the first 10 minutes listening to him like this is out of his mind. It’s like gesticulating and talking about where the future is going. But it’s always the second 10 minutes that I’ve told the story before that I will remember for the rest of my life, his basic theory, and this is 2009, when Twitter is still, you know, relatively nascent basic theory was that social media is going to continue to compound which is going to turn every single person on this earth inch of both Comcast, you know, the the platform owner, it’s going to turn them into the Soprano’s, the time the TV show, right, it’s going to turn them into the star of their, of their own lives. And it’s going to do it through the phone. And so big corporations are not going to be able to handle that speed by which the world’s going to change, and they’re going to need to outsource it. So I’m going to create an agency with my little brother, AJ, who was still in college at the time. And, and I’m gonna take advantage of it. And while sitting there thinking, you know, he’s right, number one, number two sure would be nice to be the guy who gets that at sports. So maybe my relationship with Gary could turn me into that innovative sports. Exactly. I mean, that’s how I was inclined. And so we cut a deal over four jets tickets to launch what is now VaynerMedia. And I became the first client. And when I went out on my own with Stephen Ross, and started building this consumer empire, you know, right away, he got it, like how valuable data partners with Gary and I went back and acquired a significant minority stake in the firm. And we’ve been partners ever since. So anybody out there who sees somebody coming in unconventional package with profanity every 10 seconds, be careful not to dismiss them pay attention to the substance of what they’re saying, not in the package that it’s delivered. single greatest decision I made was to back Eric, because I’ve been stealing his ideas ever since basically.

Kara Goldin 13:23
Yeah, no, I can only imagine, well, I loved that story so much, and how that turned into a business. I also saw something a glimpse into you too. And obviously, reading the book, I saw this too, that, you know, there wasn’t a job, right? There wasn’t an idea, like, okay, Matt’s gonna jump in and take this thing over there was, you know, you just, you took components, and then you made it into something over and over and over again. And I loved that, because I think that that’s where the most we call it disruption. But that’s where the most successful entrepreneurs start.

Matt Higgins 14:00
Yeah, I didn’t write I had a very loose thesis and creating RSC, and it was basically at the epicenter of the Miami Dolphins, which is this great asset that gives you visibility into, you know, emerging trends. But it also gives you the ability to tap into them, if you want to, every nascent social media platform would have given up equity to like the NFL, in order to get the, you know, to supercharge it. Well, the same can be said for an individual team. So it gives you access to deal flow, but also the dolphins at the time, you know, we’re not in great shape. There were a money losing franchise, and I knew how to oversee a team. So I thought to myself, my leverageable asset is that I know how to oversee a team. My desire, though, is to be an entrepreneur writ large. So let me marry my leverageable asset, having this oversight role of the team, to working with Steve Ross to invest in great founders. So you’re 100% Right, like, there wasn’t I could I could make it up that there was some concrete thesis but that’s it. But then I went to work and the first place I started was to was tapping into the magic of great founder years and figuring out what is it they need to go to the next level? What is it they need to scale in the case of Gary back in the day it was for jets tickets to get started and some great clients in the case of Jesse Daris. Another story I tell in the book about it was a young Maverick and PR brilliant. But he needed the courage to make the leap to start his own firm. And that’s when I gave him. So I approach every situation where I meet somebody magical and think, what would it take to unlock you even more, and everybody has more, right? We’re always trying to touch the ceiling of our potential. That’s how any business or investment I have has been started really is, how can I serve you. And that’s the purpose of the book too.

Kara Goldin 15:36
So you wrote a fabulous book called burn the boats in which you recommend abandoning conventional wisdom. And you talked a little bit about this just now. But definitely you started that with your high school move, maybe even sooner than that, you were just kind of going against the grain just figuring it out as you went along. But why is trusting our instincts so important?

Matt Higgins 15:59
It’s because at the end of the day, you have, you will always be the greatest expert on you, they’ll never be a better expert on you. And life, the best decisions are made when you have perfect information are as close to perfect information, right? So we tend to overlook that which is amazing. And we’re conditioned in society to either to defer to experts, or to go to Barnes and Noble, frankly, read my book, right? We’re always looking for the answers to the test outside of ourselves. And there’s a great essay by Emerson, called self reliance. And I won’t deliver the phrase in Latin, but the first words in it are do not seek outside thyself right like that. So for me, I believe so much in your infinite capacity to just figure it out that I want it to be the best friend who would hold up a mirror and say, This is what just figuring it out. Looks like, I’m going to present to you so many case studies of people who did that, that by the end, you’re going to feel like, you know what I thought I could just figure it out. But this person in my life who was trying to sabotage my sense of self worth told me I couldn’t, this voice in my head, totally, I couldn’t like. So the whole purpose of the book is to convince anybody that number one, thinking about Plan D is so insidious, even contemplating it, it’s going to materially statistically limit the probability that you are going to be successful. So one, accept the premise that you cannot be meditating on backup plans all the time, people have a hard time that I’m going to pay the rent. It’s not what I’m saying, as a but number one, accept that premise, then let’s make provisions for the risks that you worry about at the beginning of the journey, let’s figure it out. While you’re stressed about contemplate the worst case scenario, and then, and then you can move forward peacefully towards full commitment. One of the frustrations I have about my life right now, because I’ve been on Shark Tank, and I’m presumably successful is that I show up in the world, you know, as a 48 year old white male, you know, you make all sorts of assumptions. Now I teach at Harvard, oh, he probably grew up in some rarefied air, right. And again, I couldn’t be further from the truth. So in the book, I share a lot of things that sometimes I actually regret, where I try to model what shedding shame looks like model with sharing vulnerability, modern model what impostor syndrome looks like. So that a reader could could see themselves anywhere in this journey, and hopefully believe, hey, he could do it, I could do it too. Or this person could do it. And I could do it, too.

Kara Goldin 18:16
I loved that, and how I loved the part that where you talk about breaking patterns? And and how do you do that? And I think that the first thing is to really own what is holding you back. And, you know, like, how do you actually just break those down? So it’s, it’s definitely one I

Matt Higgins 18:35
think, in business, we tend to want the answers to the problems to be in an Excel sheet. And they’re not in the Excel sheet. The Italians have a great phrase, the fish rots from the head, with peep businesses are all about people. And because these are cliches, but on the jockey, we tend to dismiss cliches as we want to break new ground, but it is about the people. And so the number one hack in business, and in your personal life is cultivating self awareness. So as an investor, how do you identify self awareness and a leader, as a leader? How do I cultivate cultivate self awareness. And so the whole book is designed to give you permission to look within and not be afraid for what you might find, if I go ahead and tell you that the world brought me to my knees in the aftermath of divorce. It’s not something I love sharing. The purpose is to say, I looked within I faced, you know, my own demons at the end of the day, and I’m better for it. Right. So again, these stories are meant to imprint those ideas. I find a lot of business books you can relate to this. They over index on trying to make it reference material or lecturing you, you know, or just like telling you sunny Instagram posts that aren’t actionable. People assimilate information through stories that they can then emulate. So I find successful hopefully my book reads like a novel to anybody out there listening, that it’s an enjoyable read. That leaves you with just an emotion more than knowledge, which is I can do it. Right like yeah, infinite possibility that feeling is going to stay with me even when you forget the information.

Kara Goldin 20:00
I love that you said that. And obviously with RSC, you’ve invested in a lot of founders who have stories there. Why? And you teach this core set out Harvard Business School as well? What is the value that you see in and the founder stories? Like? How long should a founder story be part of a brand? You know, all of those kinds of questions that I think, at times people are at odds with founders are at odds with maybe some investors about that topic as well. And I’d be curious, and also, has that changed over time? Such a

Matt Higgins 20:41
great class such a great and complicated question. I think there there are these inflection points, right, where founders should always be assessing? And asking one simple question, am I the best person objectively in the world to be doing this job at this moment in time to achieve the result, and I find founders often struggle with mission creep. They, they broadly define the role of founder as being able to do every job and be the best CEO, where the job of the founder is actually an equity holder. It’s the first among equals, it’s the designated proxy of the investors to run the entity. And when you are no longer the best person to unlock the value, then you shouldn’t have the job. But that creates a crisis and self esteem with a lot of founders. Well, I have supposed to be the best person to do the job. It’s like who said it? Why would the person who’s able to create the business be the one that’s able to turn it into a, you know, a multinational corporation, if that’s what the business calls for? It’s not logical. So I think the biggest breakthrough moments I’ve seen happen with founders is when you peacefully accept, you don’t have to be good at everything. It’s actually not right, you have to be good at one thing, which is identify who’s the best at all things. Right? That is the ultimate founder skill, because you’re a catalyst, who is trying to deploy people in different capacities. So it’s a long way of saying, I do think off more often than not, protecting the founder in the role is important, because no one’s going to be more motivated to make this baby grow up than a founder, they have more on the line, right? Their entire self image is associated with the company. So so long as they’re generally the best person to do that job, including the intangibles like I just said, then they should continue. It’s when a founder is not self aware to ask those questions and just says like, This is mine, or I have a right like, the minute you take on money from outsiders, like you were the first among equals, representing you are the designated proxy. But nobody has a right to run a company even when, even when you create it.

Kara Goldin 22:34
Yeah, so, so, so interesting. And I think it’s, it’s interesting. I mean, it varies, obviously, by business. I mean, there’s some founders that, you know, sort of, are only the CEO for for a year, there’s others that are there for a period of time and scale the company and then decide that they want to go back to ground zero and build again. So definitely, I mean, Gary’s probably a great example, and go and do different things in different categories. To

Matt Higgins 23:01
one point before I forget this, like, yeah, oftentimes, keeping the founder in place is a defensive move, because what would happen in the absence of a founder, sometimes when those cap tables get real messy, and then you have the the the investors running the place, there tends to be a regression to the mean, regression to safety, right, despite what everybody says, We want to be innovative. We love being dynamic, when things get rough, investors always want safety, right? And that safety isn’t always the right decision. So a lot of times when I’m thinking about that founder dynamic, I’m also thinking about how to protect the business against who would write it in their absence, you know, and the second principle I always begin with, and I tell my team this, we believe this at RSA, you take the founder as they come, and you can’t cherry pick people and be like, I really love how dynamic you are Gary, and but I wish you were an on social as much like you take people as they come. And it’s our job as enablers to try to help mitigate the downside impact. But like, Yeah, I hate when people are trying to cherry pick magic be like, I want you to be great here. But I want you to be like as if we’re robots and automatons. So I always start with a bias towards it’s my job to mitigate potential downsides is route and then cherry pick somebody’s personality.

Kara Goldin 24:06
Yeah. Now and I think that that’s a great position to be in as an investor for sure. So burn the boats. How did you come up with the title?

Matt Higgins 24:14
Great. I love talking about this. So well, I kept, I kept encountering this freezing at different points in my career. And I would always be you know, would always get my attention. And then when I was working at the New York Jets for an amazing coach, Rex Ryan, colorful, dynamic coach, and we were in the middle of an improbable playoff run. But we had lost two games in a row. And the team was about to play the Pittsburgh Steelers. And Rex gave a speech, which was written about by the New York Times it was that it was that compelling and full of emotion. And he was basically telling the story of Cortes which a lot of the players haven’t heard, Cortes was a nasty person, so don’t emulate his behavior but emulate the principal. And he was telling the story of Cortez about how when he was taking on the Aztecs and 5019. He burned all the boats so that his soldiers knew they had no way home. And, and so Rex gives this speech like He burned the boats, I’m just asking you to win one game, you know, like it is ours, we’re Jad animating. A job was we’re animating and like it, he was crying. So emotional, yeah. And at times wrote an article about how they walked out of that room, and they were ready. And they won. Of course, the story wouldn’t be told if they had won, it ends, well, they win. And that moment that was like a head stuck in my head, say one day, I want to write a book about why we hesitate. And I want to use this idea that keeps coming up. Because when I left racks over the years, I would, I would go back in time and keep reading Wait, this phrase is in the art of war. Sun Tzu says, when an art when an enemy is you know, when armies outnumbered you burn the boats and break the cooking pots. Caesar used it when he crossed the Rubicon, it shows up going all the way back to the Old Testament. Why is it that military leaders know intuitively what we refuse to accept rationally, which is that humans perform better when they have no safety net? And so this conventional wisdom, so let us let me see if this point has been proven in science, sure enough, multiple studies one out of warden in 2014, that if you simply tell somebody, they have permission to think about another way to achieve the result, they’re like, I’d rather do that that sounds easier. Next episode. So in my so I’m appropriating a military concept to use in peacetime number one, but to be honest, the word boat and mine is not about necessarily escape and backup plan. It’s more a metaphor for the things in our lives that we must burn down in order to finally commit to what our is our God given potential, I use in the cover an image of a boat that’s actually meant to be a paper boat floating in a bathtub, because I found the first boat that most of us need to burn are where are those issues that originated in childhood? And there are for me, and maybe that’s a degree of confirmation bias, because that’s how I see the world. But every one of us has, like I was trying to make my dad happy. And now the world I built is not my own. It was built for him or, you know, we all have those things. And so that’s why I start there. But boat is not just backup plan boat is anything internal and external that you need to burn in order to fully commit to your potential.

Kara Goldin 27:10
Now it’s it’s so so good. So last question, What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? You’ve worked with incredible people. You have lots and lots of connections. You’ve seen people do businesses, you’ve done your own businesses, what is the best advice that you’ve ever received along the way? Oh, my

Matt Higgins 27:31
God, I have to distill 48 years into like, one question. Now I’m actually remembering a conversation I had at a party with Peter Guber, who’s the owner of the warriors, Golden State Warriors. mazing human being just like, feels like a dad figure and a brilliant businessman. And I was lamenting a situation that maybe it was using slight victim language, which I don’t normally do, I never feel like a victim or sorry for self, maybe I had a tinge in it. And he said, he’s not be an agent in your own rescue. Basically saying, never be a victim and be intentional, take custody of the situation, and figure your way out. And it was like a kind of harsh because it was looking for like a hug. But realize like, you’re right, be an agent in your own rescue. And I have let that repeat my head all the time. I generally follow that as a principle by life whenever I stray, and I feel like I don’t have the answers. Or I feel a degree of defeatism, you know, overwhelmed. I said, No, no, no, no, be an agent in your own rescue. We always have the last word until our last breath. And that is how I lived my life. That’s why I wrote that book.

Kara Goldin 28:35
God that speaks to me a lot. So well. Thank you so much. Matt will have everything in the show notes how to get the book, How to reach out to you as well. But I really appreciate you all thank you for

Matt Higgins 28:46
having me. It’s so fun to talk about. So fun. I love talking about the psychological stuff way more than that. It’s all about what’s going on in our heads, not necessarily, you know, at our data, our job, so I appreciate you give me a chance to talk about the book.

Kara Goldin 28:58
Absolutely. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review. And feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my book undaunted, which I share my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week. And 2023 and good bye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on I in order to move forward, this is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time, you’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight? Send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening