A few things I took away from Burn the Boats

I finally finished Burn the Boats by Matt Higgins.

The title pretty much gives away the main idea: at some point, if you really want something, you have to stop keeping one foot out the door.

Obviously, I don’t think the takeaway is to literally remove every backup plan you have and hope for the best lol. But I did like the question underneath it: how committed are you really if you’re already planning your way out?

That ended up being the part of the book I thought about the most.

There’s always a reason to wait

One thing the book does really well is show how easy it is to make fear sound rational.

You need a little more money first.

A little more experience.

Maybe wait until things calm down.

Maybe wait until you’re more confident.

Maybe get someone else’s opinion first.

Individually, none of these are bad reasons. That’s kinda what makes them dangerous.

You can keep coming up with perfectly reasonable reasons not to do something forever.

I’ve definitely done this. Sometimes I’ll spend more time thinking about whether I should do something than it would’ve taken to just start and find out.

The book made me think about how often I’m actually being cautious versus how often I’m just scared and giving the fear a better-sounding name.

I still don’t know where that line is all the time.

Burning the boats

I expected the book to basically be 200 pages of “take risks and believe in yourself,” but Higgins’s argument is a little more interesting than that.

Burning the boats isn’t really about being reckless.

It’s about what happens after you’ve decided something is worth doing.

If you’re constantly preserving an easy escape route, then every difficult moment becomes another opportunity to reconsider the entire decision.

And anything worth doing is probably going to have a lot of those moments.

That’s something I recognize from building things.

There’s usually a fun beginning where the idea is new and I can imagine what it’ll eventually become. Then there’s the much longer part where something breaks, nobody cares yet, I don’t know how to do something, or I realize the original idea wasn’t nearly as good as it sounded in my head.

That’s where commitment actually matters.

Not when you’re excited.

When you’re kinda sick of it.

I liked how he talked about fear

Another thing I appreciated is that the book doesn’t really treat fear as something that disappears once you become successful enough.

Higgins has had successes, failures, lost money, made money, and still talks about fear as something that’s there.

I think I used to assume confidence meant eventually reaching a point where you just stop doubting yourself.

I’m increasingly convinced that’s not real.

You can be scared that something won’t work and do it anyway.

And sometimes… it won’t work.

I also liked the distinction the book makes between celebrating taking a risk and celebrating failure.

I’ve never really understood why people romanticize failure so much.

Failure sucks lol.

You can spend months on something and nobody cares. You can lose money. You can make the wrong decision. There’s no reason to pretend any of that feels great.

But that doesn’t mean taking the risk was necessarily a mistake.

Those are two different things.

If I make a reasonable bet with the information I have and it doesn’t work, I’d rather figure out what I got wrong than teach myself that I shouldn’t make bets anymore.

Some of the leadership stuff surprised me

There was also more about leadership in the book than I expected.

A lot of it doesn’t directly apply to me right now because most things I build are solo. I’m usually the designer, developer, product person, and occasionally the one wondering why I decided to do all of those things myself.

Still, I liked Higgins’s idea that a good leader shouldn’t need to be involved in everything.

If everything depends on you being there, you haven’t really created something independent of yourself.

I don’t have some profound personal lesson from that yet. It’s just something I want to remember if I ever find myself building something with an actual team around it.

Being needed for everything probably feels important.

It also sounds exhausting.

The part I disagree with a little

The obvious danger with “burn the boats” is sunk cost.

There are absolutely things you should quit.

Sometimes an idea is bad. Sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes you learn something new that makes your original decision wrong.

I don’t think continuing purely because you promised yourself you’d continue is admirable.

That’s probably my biggest disagreement—or maybe just my own caveat—to the philosophy of the book.

I want to be able to quit something because the evidence says I should quit.

I don’t want to quit something because I’m uncomfortable.

Those can feel annoyingly similar in the moment.

Maybe experience is just getting slightly better at telling them apart.

What I’m keeping from it

I don’t think I finished Burn the Boats wanting to burn every boat in sight.

I think I finished it wanting to pay more attention to why I’m keeping the boat there in the first place.

Is it genuinely protecting me from a stupid decision?

Or am I keeping it close because I’m scared I’ll need it?

There’s probably no universal answer.

But I like the idea of deciding that some things deserve a real attempt. Not a half-attempt where I’m already thinking about what I’ll do when it fails.

Try it.

Let it be uncomfortable for a while.

See what happens.

And if it eventually becomes clear that it isn’t working, fine.

There are always more boats.