And welcome everyone to another Smart Money Circle episode.
I'm Adam Sarhan. With me today is Mike Hayes,
who's a managing Partner at Insight Partners with
approximately 90 billion in regulatory assets under
management and about 600 portfolio companies.
Mike, thank you so much for taking the time and welcome to
the Smart Money Circle. And I'm such a thrill to be with
you, my friend. So First off, I know you have
several books. I'm going to ask you about
these. Mission Driven is the most
recent one. Thank you, by the way, for doing
this. I'm very excited for today's
conversation. So before we dive into the book,
I want to ask you you, Mike, what is your origin story?
How did you get to where you are today?
Wow. Well, great, great.
Such an easy question that it gets hard.
The where do we take it? I'd say, look, I'm a person who
grew up in a family of service and I've lived a life of, of
what I described as hundreds of once in a lifetime experiences.
20 years in the Navy Seals and retired for in 2013, moved to
hedge fund for four years, a technology services company for
four years, a technology product company for four years and now
currently at Insight Partners as you note.
So I like to say I'm a master of nothing.
I've I've really a very broad eclectic background and I'm
really passionate about sharing and giving back.
Well, thank you very much for your service, number one.
Number two, I'm very interested about the defense side and
switching over to the money side of the investment side.
So how did that come about? Well, look, after 20 years in
the Seals and having the privilege of, of also running
defense policy and strategy for President Bush and President
Obama, my last role in the Seals was commanding officer of a SEAL
team. And I ran everything in
Afghanistan. You know, I've really seen lots
of different facets of, of, of the public sector.
I felt like the, the, a lot of people know the public sector or
the private sector, but very few people know both.
And I was very passionate about being able to speak multiple
languages, both public and private sector.
And so, you know, I, I, I'd say really for me, the, the
transition after running a SEAL team and everything in
Afghanistan and leaving my wife and daughter for six months or
more 7 times during my career, I, I was ready to hang up the,
the proverbial skates and, and move into the private sector
and, and follow the kind of the, the dream and the path.
Understood. So, OK, let's talk about Insight
Partners. Please tell us about your
business and what you do, your investment strategy, anywhere
you want to go, please. Sure.
I'm proud to be 1 of several partners at Insight Partners.
That is an enterprise, an organization, an institution
that's been around for 30 years and invest in software.
It's, it's B2B software and for the most part, the, my role,
just like all the partners, is to just go out and do what you
think the best thing for the firm is, which means simply, you
know, going to find the best deals, funding the best deals,
helping our companies scale and then exiting and returning
capital to shareholders. And so it's, it's really fun
because it's a little bit different every day.
And I get to work around the absolute best and brightest.
And I get pulled up and learn from all of my teammates that,
that I work with. And hopefully on on some days,
every once in a while I'll help pull them.
I love that. So let's talk about the the
business in more detail. So you invest in the software
companies as a private equity or you said mentioned earlier hedge
fund as a public markets. Please speak a little about the
actual investment strategy, what you're looking for, all that fun
stuff. Sure.
It's all private markets and it's stage agnostic.
So generally it's a it's a growth oriented shop.
So what we'll look for is metrics like high gross
retention, meaning that, you know, we generally think that a
software company has great product market fit when it's not
churned earning and losing customers.
And and then of course, growth, we're looking for things that
have hit their inflection point. So we're, we're not investing in
the seed round, but but post that, you know, we can come in
when we see some of that really hefty, you know, 3050100300
points of growth and then and then enter and then really get
passionate, not about just like writing a check, but saying
what's our unique advantage to help an organization scale?
A lot of times it's, it's just thinking about having been a
large enterprise person myself is to be able to put that
enterprise lens on and say, Hey, here's what these young
companies need. Because I've been that CEO of VM
Ware where we, we, I constantly had small companies approaching
me. I, I have the ability to kind of
put myself in their shoes and say, gosh, what's it like to, to
try to land that first really big logo, the big enterprise
partner that's gonna really help you scale.
Because ultimately, I think, you know, technology is really a
means to an end. A lot of people look at
technology as the thing. I think technology is really the
best way to elevate societies. And so that's what we're really
passionate about is creating value in the world.
And then the economics follow. I love that.
So let's talk about risk management.
How do you handle risk and what are some mistakes you see people
make with respect to risk management?
Well, I think, look, let me actually draw from my SEAL days
to think about risk management. You know, when I'm a commander
of a SEAL team and I'm running everything in Afghanistan, first
of all, we've prepared really well.
And so before we even go overseas, I've worked with a
group of people that know how to think about risk and say what is
a very simple framework? What's the outcome you're trying
to achieve? Then how do you determine all of
the different paths that can get you to that outcome and mitigate
away as much risk as possible along those paths and then
choose one of the paths? How do you have a decision
making process to choose a path and and then just go execute
really well to make it happen? So I, I think the first decision
in decision making isn't it, it actually isn't the decision
itself. It's when do you make a
decision? Because a lot of people get that
wrong. Decisions that you need to make
in two seconds might actually could be made in two weeks or
vice versa. And I think a lot of people in
my career I've seen get that when wrong.
And it's really an important part of the framework.
No, I'd love that. OK, thank you for that.
And then before I go into some more questions, I'd like to
speak about your book, by the way.
So thank you for writing it. Please let us know a little
about it and what we just can expect from it.
Oh, thank you for look, I never aspired to write one book.
I had a book never enough come out in 2020.
I've, as mentioned, been consider myself super privileged
to live this life where I've had all of these amazing experiences
and some really, really terrible and hard experiences as well.
I've as a seal of 20 years, just like every seal of my era, I've
been shot at, I've been rocketed.
I've, you know, jumped out of a building rig to explode.
I've amputated a teammate's leg on an operation.
I could go on and on. And, and that's not different
than anybody really who lived through some of the Iraq and the
Afghanistan experiences. And so, you know, from all that
I'm really passionate about giving back.
And so I, I felt after a lot of like near death experiences and
whatnot, like I, I have something that can offer people
a way to think differently and to help.
So that's really why I wrote the book.
And then I donate all the profits to a charity that I
started that pays off mortgages for Gold Star families.
Those are families of, of military members who were killed
in action or who died by suicide thereafter.
And, and I'm really proud to say that I've paid off my foundation
has paid off 12 Gold Star family mortgages to date.
And and so then coming off of the first book, I had so many
people ask me things like, Hey, Mike, I love the book, but like,
help me understand how do you really think about mission and
meaning and purpose and impact? And what is that?
And so I, I I find in life, and I'm sorry, I'm droning on.
My wife and daughter will confirm I'm really good at one
way conversation. So please, Adam, cut me back
off. You're.
Doing great. Keep going.
You're doing great. All right, the, the I'll, I'll
stay on the on the roll here. But the, you know, as you're,
as, as you're thinking about advice, generally speaking, when
people give advice, their advice is that you should do what I did
because I'm the smartest person I know or like I, I didn't make
any mistakes. I'm all one big success.
Therefore what I did is what you should do.
And I'm really like, that's just not the way to think about life.
There's bias that gets entered into there.
And so I think about how do you transition in, in, in different
jobs or trying different things that, that really are meaning
and impact and purpose. And so because I've had so many
of those conversations, I just decided it was easier and, and
way more impactful to write book #2.
I was privileged to have three months off.
But after the sale of VM Ware into Broadcom for $69 billion, I
had three months and I put my head down and, and really wrote
Mission Driven. Proud to say it was came out on
September 2nd and it his first week debuted as #4 across,
across all books. And, and so it's, it's been
great. But I'm, I'm really the, the so
proud of being able to hopefully help people who read it and then
of course, to pay off more mortgages.
I absolutely love it. Well, thank you very much for
the donation, thank you for the charity, thank you for the work
you're doing, and thank you for sharing your knowledge with the
book. So in that vein, we want to
continue with the timeless lessons here, which is the whole
point of the show. Let's talk about some timeless
lessons you've learned, Mike, in life and Navy Seals and in
markets and business. Anywhere you want to go, please,
that you'd like to share with the audience?
Well, gosh, Adam, that's another really good broad one to make,
making it so easy that it gets hard for me because there's so
many different directions we could go.
But I think, you know, you just really put your finger on an
important thing, which is risk. If you think about risk and
opportunity are both very similar because usually in an
organization, all of the risk or all of the opportunity lives in
kind of that classic unknown, unknown quadrant.
Like when I speak to executive teams and I walk into a large,
you know, Fortune 515 person executive team and I say, you
know, who here is in charge of what you're not doing.
No one raises their hand because we're all so busy.
We've got all kinds of emails flooding our inbox and pulls on
our time and people who want mentorship or that letter of
recommendation and blah, blah, blah.
So to be able to slow down and think about how organizationally
do you get into that unknown, unknown quadrant and pull things
into the known and put them in front of you and understand
risk. And so I think that the the best
organizations systematically have people who who are whose
job it is to figure that out and think through that as the
commander of a SEAL team, you know, when I was in the
operation center, I would walk in and I was the person to
decide when we drop bombs from an aircraft onto the ground and
what operations we went on, etcetera.
These are decisions you cannot get wrong because you can't harm
people who shouldn't be harmed. And so you know, the, the, the
framework, I think one of the things that your audience might
find helpful is to say, well, gosh, how what's the framework
for that kind of decision making?
And so I would share that that it's important as a leader to
separate being the input and being the decider because out of
1000 plus times that we dropped ordnance from a fighter jet down
or any sort of an aircraft onto the ground, if you know, if that
decision was me 100% of the time, we, we, we, we would have
been wrong some number of times because no single human is
perfect. And so you're designing a
system. And so if my decision is always
the equal to my input, you've now you've now introduced
absolute error into the system. So what that means though, is
that sometimes your decision needs to be different from your
input. And how does a leader be able to
say, you know what, my final decision is different than my
original input? And that takes humility, that
takes getting into that. You know what, we just talked
about that. What are you missing?
What are you not thinking of? So I'll tell a quick story.
This is 2012, when I'm running everything in southeastern
Afghanistan. And there was a SEAL platoon who
was getting shot at and rocketed and all kinds of heavy machine
gunfire and, and they chased these, I don't know, I would say
it was roughly 6 Taliban fighters into this building who,
who had just tried to basically kill these Seals.
And so the Seals called in for, they, they had the, they called
in for an air strike. And in order to minimize risk,
why go into a building and expose yourself to risk when you
don't need to? And, and, you know, it was, it
was an example of a decision that I, with all the information
that I had, would say, have said yes.
Now I also turned to my public affairs officer and my, my
lawyer who was in, in the operation center with me in the
headquarters. I was not on the mission itself.
I was in the headquarters 20 kilometers away.
And I said, hey, you know, what do you think?
And these are not 2 roles of people who SEAL commanders
typically say, hey, Miss public affairs officer or Mr. you know,
lawyer, what do you think? This is a SEAL decision, You
know, so it takes a bit of like humility to say what, what do
you think? And the, the answer was, I
wouldn't do it because of XYZ. And the other person said I
wouldn't do it because of, you know, ABC.
And ultimately I said, you know what, let's not approve this
particular air strike. And I radioed that information,
had the, the, the, the information radio back to the
SEAL platoon. They, I'm sure weren't happy,
but they followed orders and walked away from the, the
building and came back home. But about 10 minutes after the
SEAL platoon pulled away from the building, Adam out walked.
Must have been 12 or 15 women and children along with those
fighters. And I just like even to this
day, even retelling the story, I can feel it right now of having
like the relief of not having harmed innocent civilians.
Like what if my decision was the same as my input?
I would have failed. Yeah, I think that is extremely
powerful and brilliant, by the way, where we all have the, I
guess, strengths, weaknesses and then blind spots as well.
But we have an input capacity and we have the information in
front of us and we don't, we can't see everything and the
perception you can, it's limited.
So for you to get outside input is extremely valuable and
intelligent because you can't. You're human.
We all have flaws, strengths and weaknesses.
So very well done. Hats off to you.
I love that explanation. All right, other side of that
coin, like risk and opportunity, lessons and mistakes.
What are some timeless mistakes you've learned or you've seen
people make along the way? How do you learn from them so
you don't repeat them? Let's let's continue with the
SEAL example. I mean this also applies to any
business investment decision. This could be a portfolio
company that we didn't do as well with.
This could be a SEAL mission, identical, identical process
here. First of all, clarity of the
outcome is, is like I said earlier is really important.
If I handed a three by 5 card to those top 15 people from that
Fortune 500 and said I want you to write down the vision of your
organization, the 1st 50% would converge, the next 25% would
start to drift a little bit and the last 25% would be all over
the map. And so the best organizations,
elite organizations, elite people drive convergence around
the goal. And so, you know, being able to
finish each other's sentences on what you're supposed to be
doing. So we do that pre mission.
But then after the mission to the heart of your question,
Adam, is we spend time debriefing really, really
thoroughly what went wrong. And so, you know, we, we, we, if
I would take you and pull you into our team room after one of
those missions that went exceedingly well, but you didn't
know the outcome. If I said, you know, you don't,
you don't get to know if it went well or poorly.
And you just listen to our two hours, Adam, you'd be like Mike,
you know, you guys are are are a three ring circus.
You're just missing the tent. You know, because we spent all
of our energy and our effort going after the parts of what
can be better. And so the you you need an
exogenous pressure, an exogenous force to come in and say, all
right, here's what I would do differently.
And The thing is to understand that No2 situations are ever
going to be alike. So you really have to be at that
deeper Y kind of level. You know, you're never going to
have, you know, the exact same macroeconomic conditions or the
same like moon illumination of the moon on the seal mission.
And so like everything, do you get in there and say, OK, here?
What are the timeless things that you can reapply later?
And, and you say, well, don't just tell me what you think,
Tell me how you thought about it.
You know, working at Bridgewater for four years, one of the
things I took away from there was really a, a framework that
my friend Greg Jensen uses. He's the chief investment
officer at Bridgewater. And he, you know, said, Mike,
this is like when I asked what you think about something.
Don't just tell me your opinion. Frankly, I don't care about your
opinion. I want to tell it like, what
data are you looking at? What's your logic you're looking
at? And then what's your opinion?
Then we can have one of, you know, three different
conversations and Mike, you're looking at the wrong data.
I disagree with the data you're looking at.
We might, we could hammer that out and say, no, I'm right,
you're right. We can, you know, get on the
same page there or you say, Hey, I think my, my logic's different
than yours. Like I, I actually think you're
thinking about the logic the wrong way.
Or the third thing is when you apply your logic to your data,
it and it, it doesn't, I don't think lead you to A, it leads
you to B. And let's have that
conversation. And so being able to separate
and be surgical about the, the, you know, the success or the
root cause of a, of some of the failure, I think is really
important. And then ultimately where that
leads you is at the end of a meeting, at the end of a mission
or meeting or or an investment, and you look in retros and do
that retrospective, you can say who should have done what
differently. You know what, what, what would
I have done differently if I could have?
If you do a debrief and everybody in that meeting walks
out and wouldn't have done everything, anything
differently, you've just failed as an organization because you
haven't had the right conversation or you haven't had
the humility to actually intellectually say, oh, I, I
would do something different. Because a lot of us think like
the, the, the bad outcomes are because Adam, you're a dummy.
Like I'm the smartest guy I know.
You're the dummy. You should have done something
differently. No, start with yourself.
I don't care. I'm either 100% wrong or 1%
wrong. I'm never 0% wrong like I, I
grow and I benefit if I can be really honest about my 100% of
the of the error or by 1% of the error.
But getting underneath that is what we do as seals really,
really well. And that's one of the things
that I think coming to the investment world, a lot of
organizations take very seriously, and then the best
ones do that really well too. Yeah, I think that's that's
very, very smart. It's the why, right?
Not just the what's happening, but why you think, why did you
come to that decision? And let's find those blind spots
like Dalio talks about in the strengths and weaknesses, so on
and so forth with the humility too that you've mentioned
multiple times. And it's been a, a common theme,
Mike, over the years now I've interviewed over a trillion
dollars in AUM on the show and hundreds of public, you know,
money management, publicly traded CE OS, all this fun
stuff. And I've noticed that it's just
a common theme, the optimism, the humility, knowing that
they're wrong, they're foul, they're going to make mistakes
for humans. And that's OK.
I think it's just a huge, huge game changer for me.
That's just jumped out of me. So I love the fact that you're
repeating these themes. So let's talk about leadership.
If let's go there, let's you know what makes a great leader.
What are some lessons you've learned about leadership that
you'd like to share with the audience?
And anything else you want to discuss about leadership,
please. Well.
One of the things that I think is that leaner leaders gain
authority by giving it away. You know, and, and so if you
think about like if I'm running Seal Team 2, the best thing I
can do is help everybody in the organization feel like a leader.
Leaders don't need to make the best decision.
They need to make sure the best decision gets made.
Those are very, two very different ways to think about
leadership. So when you like, if, if the
organization's success is my success, all I need to make sure
is that the the organization collectively makes the best
decision. You know, sure, I'd love to
stand up on stage and beat my chest, chest and say how cool I
am. And when I'm younger and, and
like, oh, I'm so smart. Like the sooner you don't need
any personal credit or any sort of personal, you know,
recognition, the faster your path and trajectory to success
that like your organization needs that.
And so I think that I like to say leaders need to know how to
lead and how to follow, but the most important is knowing when
to do which. I think that leading from the
rear is really the mark of a great leader.
Then you get the opportunity to step in and course correct your
organization when you need to. But but by and large, your your
ultimate success is stepping back and not needing to
intervene. You know the So I really think
you know, Adam, the most important thing is that that as
that leader, do you have the ability to see somebody else's
success and praise him or her? A corollary to this is that, you
know, I think the world thinks of success and failure as
binary, but you have to go down the failure node one more the
the failure leg of the tree, one more node and say, did you learn
or not learn? Because if you failed and you
learned, you just succeeded. If you failed and and learned
and brought that that knowledge back into yourself and to your
organization, that's ultimately success.
So, and the reason I think a lot of enterprises or organizations
don't encourage that behavior is because the individuals in these
larger, you know, places are afraid to assume a little bit of
what they perceive as career risk.
If you classically fail, you know, like the and you don't go
down that node one more time. It's like, why am I going to go
try the hard thing when I can stay on the easier path and, and
all of the growth, all of the learning, all of the compounding
of your organization's knowledge only happens if you fail and you
learn at VM Ware when I was doing, you know, town halls for
a 40,000 people or whatever, I would remind people that we can
lose any million or $10 million deal.
We can't. Like we don't want to, but we
can. And The thing is, if we lose a
deal, that's OK as long as we, we learned why did we lose it?
And then we, we recompound, reintroduce that knowledge so
that the next salesperson or the next person developing the
product, you know, it like thinks about how you're, how
you're ultimately serving your customers and you fix what just
happened. Yeah, this way you don't repeat
it, right. So I think that's that's really
fantastic. So I love what you said.
Leaders don't need to make the best decision.
They need to make sure the best decision gets made.
Did I say that correctly or did I miss something?
Love it. All right.
And then of course, learning from your mistake, because if
you make a mistake and you learn from it doesn't happen again.
That's not really a failure. In fact, that's actually a
lesson. That's a, that's AW, it's a win
because you learn from it. It's not going to happen again
and you can make better decisions going forward.
Totally. But what you need to do is is
culturally encourage and celebrate people who classically
fail and learn. Because that's why that's what
most people and organizations get wrong.
Yeah, beautiful. I love that.
All right, so after leadership, let's talk about adversity
becoming successful. Another common theme I've
noticed over the years, leaders and successful people overcome
adversity. They handle it differently.
Lots of other folks. So how do you handle adversity
and what are some obstacles you have to overcome along the way?
Well, look, the beauty of going through SEAL training is that at
age 21, my my SEAL class started with 120 guys and 19 graduated.
All 120 had the physical prerequisites or to to get
through training. It's 100.
Adversity and resilience is 100% mental.
So when things get really hard, do you have the ability to focus
on others before yourself in SEAL training, when you're at
the absolute edge of a human misery, you're in the cold
water, like shivering in your body temp.
You know, it's not 98.6, it's it's probably, you know, 9394°.
And you know, you're just jackhammering, shivering so
hard. And you have no idea when you
get to get out of the ocean. Do you have the ability not to
feel sorry for yourself, but to look at the guy next to you and
say, hey, how are you doing? Are you OK?
And there's a saying team, teammate self and, and can you
think of that team first and foremost, your teammate next and
then yourself last. That really to me is the special
sauce of, of, of being awesome together.
You know, our, our daughter's 24 years old, but when she was
younger and in school, I remember speaking actually out
of veteran's day in like 7th grade social studies.
And the, the, the teacher said, or excuse me, I asked the class,
Hey, you know that when 2 of you are paired up, how much of each
to do a project? How much of the project do you
each need to do? And of course, all the hands
went up. I called on the first student
and then they said 50%. And I said, Nope, sorry, no,
that's not right. I'll explain in a second.
The rest of the hands came down. And the, the, the answer is when
two people need to get something done, the amount that I need to
do is as much as humanly possible.
Because then when two people come together and they have that
mindset and that mentality of I'm going to do as much as I
humanly can, that is when you really become elite.
And that's what a lot of, you know, people and teams miss.
Yeah, I absolutely love it. It's it's not even how much can
I do. The bare minimum is 50% if not
less than that. Let the other person do 80 or
90. This is the exact opposite.
My instead of how do I go the maximum, what's the most I can
do? And the other person does a lot
and then 1 + 1 = 5 or 3 or 50 or whatever the case is and it
compounds there. Yeah, that like the parallel in
the white I was in both the Bush and the Obama White House.
Is that at a senior level? And you know, the the common
theme across both of those administrations is whenever
something needed attention, there were like you say, who's
responsible for this? There wasn't, there were like 5
or 10 hands going up for that one thing because everybody
wanted to have their hand in the hard thing that was needed to be
done. And so that's really a that
that's, it's a real special, special when you get to work
around people like that. Yeah, no, I absolutely love
that. So let's talk about that elite
supreme, top of 1% kind of mindset, because I'm all about
mindset, you know, psychological analysis.
Love it. What other things that you can
speak about or share timeless lessons about elite performance
that you'd like to share with everybody else?
I love what you just said about the fact that you come out of
the water. It's at the university.
Whatever that adversity is, it's freezing, whatever.
Hey, ask your teammate or your team first the team, OK, then
your teammate, are they OK? And then yourself and that takes
you out of that, you know, getting stuck in your head and
and that bubble, if you will. And then you're serving others,
you're helping. You can overcome that obstacle
so much better. What other you know?
What else can you share with along those lines please?
Absolutely I would. I would offer you the the the
the my book mission driven. It has.
The next line is the path to a life of purpose.
When I think about purpose like that really is what transcends
like this noisy world. I don't care what side of any
issue, you know, half the world's on one side of an issue,
half's on the other. Like purpose transcends all of
that. And you know, all of us, I'm,
I'm sure at this point of your, your esteemed audience have,
have done, have hired people. And The thing is, what I've
found in hiring, I don't know, dozens and dozens, hundreds and
hundreds, whatever of people over my, my time is that you
can, there are really three circles that matter like what
gives someone energy? What are they good at?
And what is the business need? You see, I know what the
business needs like because I'm there hiring for it.
The, the person on the other side of the table always knows
what they're good at and usually 30% more.
The thing that people really wrestle with is, well, what
gives you energy? What drives you, what motivates
you? And so the, that explanation and
that description is the hardest. And so when you can align
someone, what gives someone energy with what their role is,
it is a lot less like work. So you know, you, the closer you
can align purpose with, with your, your day job, the, the,
the less, the less it feels like work.
And you know, our daughter, I was just talking about her when
she was growing up. My wife and I never said, what
do you want to be when you grow up?
I always said, who do you want to be?
And that's actually the first half of the book, kind of a
weaves through it a little bit. But The thing is, you know, what
is an identity that is associated with a job?
That's not who you are. What's your character, your
values, your ethics, your morals, your you.
How do you want to treat people? How do you want to stay calm
when things are hard? Like that's your who.
Like those kinds of traits are your deeper things.
And so when you say, who are you?
If there's one thing I could change in the world, it's people
to be able to say, like Adam, who are you?
Or Mike, who are you? And be able to answer all of us
to be able to answer that. Because I think then that's the
unlock for being able to align the things that we we try and
that we choose to do. Absolutely love it.
OK, I can go on for the different tangent, but I know
that we're we're getting short on time here.
So final question for you today, Mike, which is absolutely
fantastic so far. Thank you so much for everything
you've shared. What is the best piece of advice
you'd like to give the audience or your 30 year old self?
Oh, wow, this is an easy one because, you know, my
grandfather was my hero. He he was at Pearl Harbor on
December, December 7th, 1941, just did an incredible American
hero. And he told me a lot of things
growing up. But the one that just came to
mind was, you know, when you're having a, what he said to me was
Mike, whenever you're having a hard day, go find someone who's
having a harder day and help him or her.
Like that's the path through it. That's what resilience is.
That's what success is. And you know, I can seem like
semi normal, but I carry a ton of weight with all these people
who aren't here and these families and, and, and you know,
one of the, you know, I've had lots of really hard days, as
have many of my, my team mates. And, and so I think that that
lesson, that advice from my grandfather about just going in
to help people is really super important.
You know, when I was growing up in the SEAL teams pre 911, it
wasn't it was a culture of you only showed strength or
perceived strength. You never talked about weakness.
You know, you never talked about needing help.
That really did change after 911.
It took several years past that, but you know, we lost 11 Seals
on June 28th 2005. Eight, eight were shot down in a
helicopter, 3 on the ground and became a movie called Lone
Survivor. And, and, and I had just
finished grad school in Cambridge, Mass in 05 and I flew
overseas right away and took over for the group that was,
that survived that, you know, and, and, and I knew all the
guys that were shot down in the helicopter and whatnot.
And so like, like that happened. And then we had another mass
casualty in the community a few years later.
And so the, the ability to kind of go in and say, Hey, you know
what, I need some help is really important.
Even to this day, Adam, I am not great.
I'd love for mission driven, excuse me, mission driven to, to
make it far and wide out into the world.
I'm extremely biased, but I, I, I would offer a money back
guarantee. Like I'll say it right here.
Somebody reads the book and genuinely reads it, like like DM
me on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever and say, Hey, I read
your book. It's it's not good and I'll send
you your 20 bucks back. You know, I probably shouldn't
say that publicly or something like that.
But but the truth is, I'm so positive and optimistic and up
about it that, that I think that the way to really help people to
have that purpose and that energy is to also be able to
have them reach in and understand that helping others
helps us more. A lot of people will say, hey,
Mike, thanks for your service. I, I love that.
I love that when people say that and recognize that at the same
time, honestly, Adam, I cringe a little bit because I don't feel
like my service is any more important than your service or
the next person service. You don't have to have been in
the military to serve. We all serve each other.
And that's ultimately why I wrote Mission Driven is to help
all of us to find out how should, how can or should we
serve each other with the different gifts and abilities
and interests that we all have. You know, sure, they make movies
about Seals and things like that.
And but, but, but The thing is, the real movies are about your
everyday person who is out in the world who can slow down and
help the person next to him or her or to get plastics out of
the ocean or teach for America or whatnot.
So I know I'm on a little bit more of a of a one way diatribe
here, but but for me, if we could give that, hopefully your
audience here is the the energy and the the purpose and the
passion that I have really is to help give others the same in
their own ways. And I do I would love I I, I
will raise my hand now and say I'd love for the audience to
please help me jump on Amazon or wherever you get books to, to
grab a copy of mission driven. I read the audible again, I
don't make a penny here on any of these sales.
They all go to the nonprofit that that I just described.
And so, you know, following me on Instagram, this is dot Mike
Hayes or finding me on follow me on LinkedIn or, or any of these
ways to kind of help this mission of helping all of us
have our our own missions of purpose and, and really is what
I'm about. Absolutely love it.
Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time.
The book is here, Mission driven.
I'll have the links and to your social links to Amazon, your
other book Never Enough as well. So we'll get both links and
descriptions if you don't have to worry about it.
And this was fantastic. Hopefully we'll have you on
again soon. And Congrats on all your
success. Well, Adam, thank you for all
your success and having such incredible impact, building this
incredible foundation that you have and having all of the the
positive influence and inspiration that you have, my
friend. Oh, absolutely.
My pleasure. Thank you kindly.