An Excerpt from Mission Driven: The Path to a Life of Purpose
Former Navy SEAL commander, White House Fellow, and nonprofit and business leader Mike Hayes offers an inspiring playbook for understanding and achieving your most rewarding and purposeful life.
Mission Driven offers a practical guide for transition points: young people, recent graduates, professionals shifting to new roles, or people shifting to find new balance in their lives. It is divided into two sections: The Long Game (figuring out who you want to be, how you define success, and what kind of impact you’re looking to have in your own life and the world) and The Short Game (moving readers from the who to the how, taking the learnings they’ve gathered in the first half of the book and applying them toward building their lives and finding their next great opportunities).
Whether someone is at the beginning of their journey or, at any stage, looking for more, Mission Driven is a roadmap for discovering what drives you, and a playbook for translating those drives into opportunities. It is a book to help us satisfy our ambitions and our souls, filled with smart, empathetic guidance.
Its lessons include:
- Not What You Want To Be, But Who You Want to Be
- The Most Powerful Secret I Know: Helping Others Helps Us More
- Getting Comfortable Making Decisions
- Finding Enough In The Ways You Spend Your Time
We were recently given permission by the book's publisher, Grand Central Publishing, to post the Author's Note at the beginning of the book.
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When I set out to write my first book, Never Enough, I had a very specific aim: I wanted to offer readers inspiration to live their greatest lives by sharing stories from the battlefield and the boardroom in the hope they would add up to the message that by focusing on excellence, agility, and meaning, you could achieve just about anything. I also wrote the book with the goal of earning money to pay off mortgages for Gold Star families—the spouses and children of brave teammates who died while fighting for our nation or by suicide post-combat.
With the help of readers like you, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit I founded, The 1162 Foundation, has paid off twelve Gold Star widows’ mortgages to date, vastly improving the lives of those families and freeing those spouses and children to make their own impacts on the world. I’ve heard from so many readers who were motivated and moved by the book, but I’ve also heard from readers who were left with a more tactical question: “I want to do more—I know I can do more—but how?”
“How do I get,” they ask me, “from where I am now to a place where I am making a tangible difference for myself and for the world? How do I achieve what I’m hoping to, what I’m dreaming of, what I was put on this planet for?”
“How do I make the greatest impact? And how do I wake up every morning excited to start the day, knowing that my work and my life are aligned with who I believe myself to be, who I want to be, and who I know I am?”
These are hard questions, and they’re hard questions whether you are eighteen years old and looking for your first job, you’re forty-five and contemplating what matters most in the decades ahead, you’re sixty-seven and transitioning from a full-time role to what might be next for you, or you’re ninety-nine and reflecting on your legacy. We are all in search of guidance, and it is almost surely the case that the most ambitious, most motivated, and most talented of us need guidance most of all. We all need guidance because we all have choices, in some form. Choices require choosing. And choosing is fraught, complicated, and difficult.
I don’t have all the answers—and people who say they do are deluding themselves—but I do know that I’ve learned over the years a lot of the right questions to ask. I know of no one else who has served at my level in the military and the White House, and then made it to the C-suite in Fortune 500 corporate America. I’ve worked on the for-profit side at a number of outstanding companies, and on the nonprofit side, helping to lead the largest museum fund-raising campaign in history as the founding board member for the National Medal of Honor Museum and through my own foundation. As a leader in both the finance and technology industries, I’ve interviewed, hired, and trained hundreds of individuals, and taught my teams how to nurture the rising stars that surround them. Between the public and the private sectors, I’ve worked with thousands of high achievers and helped guide many of them in shaping their careers, including counseling hundreds of SEALs—some of the most gifted, talented, ambitious individuals there are—looking for their next step after leaving the military. I’ve had college basketball and football stars call me for advice on whether they should leave school for the draft, and coaches ask me similar questions about whether to stay where they are or move to the next level. I’ve witnessed how some of the most accomplished organizations on the planet make their most critical decisions. I’ve learned from leaders, young and old, every step of the way.
Given all of that, when someone comes to me for advice, it’s pretty easy to come up with what I would do in their situation. I’ve learned what’s important to me, what moves me, what motivates me, what excites me, what skills I bring to the table, and what impacts I’m able to make on the people around me.
But what I would do, in someone else’s shoes, does not matter, not even a little bit.
And that’s where virtually all advice we typically receive runs aground. The best choices for me have no relevance unless they’re also the best choices for you. Something one leader told me when I was talking him through his job search is that everyone was telling him what they thought he should do, but no one was asking him the questions to help him discover it for himself.
The only way to know the best choices for yourself is to start asking questions.
This is the book that asks those questions and operationalizes the conversations I have every day trying to help people make the right decisions for their lives. If you ask yourself the right questions and map every aspect of your life back to those answers, back to the kind of person you want to be and the life you want to live, then the choices become so much easier.
By diving deep into how we can each define success as individuals, and then providing tools for how to reach that success in our careers, in our lives, and for the world, this book is designed to help you discover who you want to be, and what you need to do to get there. I’ve written it in many respects so I can scale myself and make a positive impact on far more individuals than I’d ever be able to talk with one-on-one.
Whether you’re just starting out, already an established leader, or in the midst of a transition and don’t quite know how to figure out your next step, there is never a moment when digging deeper to ensure alignment with your core goals is a bad thing. My desire is to push you—and this book should force some serious thinking, and hopefully some hard work. I bring to the pages a bias in favor of action and of service, informed by my own battle-tested lens on human potential and the practical application of that potential in a wide range of fields. In short, while I’ve built up an arsenal of stories that I hope will provide inspiration along the way—whether from my own journey or the journeys of others I’ve contributed to or witnessed—this book is about so much more than inspiration. It’s about a concrete framework I’ve been able to build from decades of leadership experience, aimed at helping you personally find and achieve your mission.
Are you ready to become Mission Driven and embark on a path to a life of purpose? If so, there’s no time to waste.
Excerpted from Mission Driven: The Path to a Life of Purpose. Copyright © 2025 by Mike Hayes. All rights reserved.
About the Author
MIKE HAYES is the former commanding officer of SEAL Team Two, leading a two-thousand-person Special Operations task force in southeastern Afghanistan. In addition to a twenty-year career as a SEAL, Mike was a White House fellow, served two years as director of defense policy and strategy at the National Security Council, and has worked directly with both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Beyond his military and government service, Mike is the founding board member of the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, and his own 501(c)(3), the 1162 Foundation, which has paid off twelve Gold Star widow mortgages to date. In the private sector, Mike has served in several C-level roles and is currently managing director at Insight Partners, a software investment firm with $90 billion of assets under management and 600+ portfolio companies. He lives in Sunapee, New Hampshire, and Westport, Connecticut, with his wife and daughter.
