Higgins Boat Quotes

Huge mammals surrounded us, any one of whom could easily overturn our stupid little boat. Tripod would drown. I would drown. Joe would undoubtedly be rescued by mermaids seduced by his beauty.

Insanity had been my foremost fear since the moment I had vaulted over the side of the Higgins Boat on Guadalcanal and seen those spiky fronds swinging overhead. To be killed — even to be taken prisoner by a cruel and vindictive foe — seemed preferable to madness.

No visions are ever rendered to us in the dead of night that we are incapable of pursuing at the break of dawn.

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

He has quite an array of T-shirts. This one is faded gray with faint blue letters spelling out Starfleet Academy. Such a dork. Then again, I know exactly what Starfleet Academy is, so I’m in the same dork boat.

The key to unlocking potential is to embrace your highest competitive advantage: you are the only one who has the full story of your life. YOU are the one subject about which there will never be a greater expert in the world.

The third boat was quite pretty, too...this one was an Adirondack fishing boat, and even though it was only half finished, I could picture Jay Gatsby in it, casting a line over the side while he yearned for that shallow tramp, Daisy.

So often, data is merely insurance against self-delusion. It won’t (and it shouldn’t) provide the green light. In fact, research too often ends up serving as a reason people give up before they start. Don’t let numbers hold you back when you know in your gut that you’re onto something, and don’t be afraid to go digging for the support you know in your heart must be out there somewhere.

Our relationship with risk is fundamentally inverted. We are led to believe that we must identify and develop the theoretical solution to a problem before we assume the risk. This is otherwise known as prudence. I believe the complete opposite. When we require we a fully based solution to a problem in order to pursue a goal, we deny ourselves a chance to prove the depth of our ability to perform under duress. Problems beget solutions. If you accept a problem with just a vague notion of how you will solve it, and if you always maintain a bias toward action, your primitive mind will do the rest of the work for you. And then, suddenly there you are. You're in the weather, and there's no turning back.

You’re not guaranteed a happy ending.

You have to be in the driver seat of your life. Justice will not be kneaded out on your behalf

try our best not to expose ourselves to people who will pick us apart and criticize the goals we’ve decided to chase. We need to harness every ounce of positive energy we can in order to pull off big ideas. Be careful who you consult with, who you let into your circles, and who you trust with the things you value most. I warn people who are incubating brand-new companies or ideas that these new ventures are very fragile in the beginning. Cradle your dreams with the utmost care. You need to create the right environment to stick with your nascent plans and keep your instincts from getting drowned out. Many of us have a predisposition for self-loathing, a secret feeling so shameful that we often conceal it even from our closest loved ones. So the last thing we need are even more negative voices to lend credence to the skeptics in our own heads—especially in the early, more tenuous days of a new venture.

Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, bears this out. Her research has demonstrated that positive emotions during crises do more than just help in the moment; in fact, they lead to superior long-term resilience, and an increased ability to cope and thrive in the future.1 Looking at college students’ responses to 9/11, Fredrickson found that those with negative emotions suffered lingering effects as compared to those who made an effort to concentrate on the positive. Thinking positively had a lasting benefit, helping subjects buffer themselves through future crises in their lives.

They came from twelve nations—the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Belgium, Norway, Poland, Greece, and Holland. They were divided into the Western Naval Task Force (931 ships, headed for Omaha and Utah) and the Eastern Naval Task Force (1,796 ships, headed for Gold, Juno, and Sword). On the decks of the LSTs were the Higgins boats and other craft too small to cross the Channel on their own. There were 2,606 of them. Thus the total armada amounted to 5,333 ships and craft of all types, more vessels—as Admiral Morison pointed out—“than there were in all the world when Elizabeth I was Queen of England.

By the end of the war, Higgins Industries had produced over 20,000 LCVPs. They were dubbed “Higgins boats,” and they carried infantry ashore in the Mediterranean, in France, at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and at other Pacific islands. More American fighting men went ashore in Higgins boats than in all other types of landing craft combined.I

As the ramp on his Higgins boat went down, Sgt. Clayton Hanks had a flashback. When he was five years old he had seen a World War I photograph in a Boston newspaper. He had said to his mother, “I wish I could be a war soldier someday.” “Don’t ever say that again,” his mother had replied. He didn’t, but at age seventeen he joined the Regular Army. He had been in ten years when the ramp went down and he recalled his mother’s words. “I volunteered,” he said to himself. “I asked for this or whatever was to come.” He leaped into the water and struggled forward.