Matt Higgins

“In ancient times,” writes Rabbi Naphtali Hoff, “Israelite armies would besiege enemy cities from three sides only, leaving open the possibility of flight . . . They understood that so long as the enemy saw that they had an escape route available, they would not fight with utmost earnestness and energy.

Breakout success means training your mind to pursue
opportunity before the tipping point of evidence, in the interstitial space between intuition and data

You can’t achieve a goal that you haven’t defined.

What qualities make me someone I can respect and admire?
Do I want to spend my days creating from scratch, or executing someone else’s vision?
Can I tolerate the risk of an uncertain future, or do I need predictability to thrive?
Would I rather be thinking or doing?
Do I feed off of human interaction, or does it drain me?
When have I been happiest, and what would it take to feel that way again?
What do I want my epitaph to read?

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before

The best leaders make decisions that masquerade as data-driven choices when they are actually what I call gut sandwiches: data sandwiched between insights and intuition that we can’t justify with numbers alone.

“You can’t argue with your feelings. And that can ultimately give you a great sense of peace about whatever the decision is.

The law of compound interest applies as much
to ideas and achievements as it does to money. The faster you secure new accomplishments, the more time you have over the course of your life to reap the fruits of exponential growth.

Opportunity is not an inexhaustible resource, and when you see an opening you have to take advantage.

What do you do when it would be so easy to fall apart? You keep on going.