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.