'Shark Tank' investor Matt Higgins went from selling flowers on NYC street corners to a $150 million net worth. Here are the 4 most important investing rules he lives by.

Eric McCandless/Getty Images

• Matt Higgins, a "Shark Tank" investor and CEO of RSE Ventures, eschewed conventional wisdom to pull himself out of poverty at an early age.
• His success snowballed through the strict adherence of time-tested principles and an unconventional, differentiated mindset.
• Today, Higgins is passing along his business acumen to others at Harvard Business School, where he co-teaches "Moving Beyond Direct to Consumer" with Len Schlesinger.
• Higgins' net worth hovers near $150 million.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Matt Higgins, a "Shark Tank" investor and CEO of RSE Ventures, lives a life today that's diametrically opposed to his upbringing.

"We literally had no money," he said in an exclusive interview with Business Insider. "When you grow up poor, you live a life of shame. You don't want to share what is really happening in your life, you're actually trying to disguise it."

In the early years, to help support his single mother, Higgins sold flowers on NYC street corners, worked graveyard shifts at delis, and even scraped gum off the undersides of chairs at McDonald's for $3.75 an hour. Anything to make ends meet.

Although his circumstances were bleak, Higgins found himself developing a keen business sense during this time - and he'd soon put that knowledge into practice.

At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school, took the GED test, and started college two years earlier than he was scheduled to.

That first, unconventional maneuver doubled Higgins' salary overnight - and paved the way for his future success. Eventually, he'd parlay this unorthodox way of thinking into a $150 million net worth.

Today, Higgins is passing on his business acumen at Harvard Business School, where he co-teaches "Moving Beyond Direct to Consumer" with Len Schlesinger.

Here are four of investment pillars that Higgins has leveraged to find success throughout his life.

1. Opportunity arrives before evidence

"I liken it to lightening and thunder, "he said. "Lightening travels, and the speed of light is about 1000-times the speed of sound," Higgins said. "So you see that flash of light, that hint of an epiphany, and then it's gone. But something inside you tells you that the opportunity is real. Thunder arrives - makes itself known, un-mistakenly - but everybody else heard it too - and by that point, it's too late to act."

"Just make little decisions to act on opportunity before evidence," he added. "The universe gives us the ability to cultivate pattern recognition."

Higgins continued: "We all have a data-set that we sit in the stream of, and we watch data go by - and through that watching and learning we develop pattern recognition, which then enables us to act on signals earlier than other people because we've seen it play out before."

2. When you don't know, do nothing.

"Hit pause for a bit," he said. "Mark Cuban says it best: 'When you don't know what's going on in the markets, do nothing."

He continued: "I think that's generally true for a period of time. You want to watch, learn, and listen."

3. Challenge conventional wisdom

"The way you find them [investments] is you look for the group-think," he said. "Anywhere you have unchallenged group-think and conventional wisdom, there is a sleepy TAM [total-addressable-market] looking to be disrupted."

Higgins added: "I sit around and just meditate on that topic."

4. Aim high

"Small opportunities and big opportunities take almost the same amount of work, interestingly," he said. "You get tremendous economies of scale going after bigger opportunities than you do going after small opportunities, because the problems are the same."

"The same amount of effort is going into the same type of problems - only slightly more amplified with the big project - but the return on the big project is exponential. And yet they almost took the same amount of time and the same amount of headache," Higgins said.

He continued: "We tend to erect barriers to our own progression. We say: 'I'm not ready to be a $100 million company, because first I need to be a $1 million, then a $5-million," he said. "You're going to look back one day when you run that $100 million company and realize 'oh, those were generally the same problems I was dealing with it was $5 million."

NOW WATCH: Head of NYC Prepper's Network explains how to prepare for a self-quarantine