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Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am excited you're joining me today for a conversation with Mike Hayes, who happens to have one of the most impressive resumes I have ever seen.

He spent 20 years in the US Navy SEALs serving around the world, including the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. His last job in the Navy was the commanding officer of SEAL Team 2, overseeing a 2,000-person special operations task force in southeastern Afghanistan. Before that, he was a White House fellow and served as director of defense policy and strategy at the National Security Council.

And after his military career, Mike spent four years at the investment firm Bridgewater before moving into the tech sector, where he's now the chief digital transformation officer at VMware. And just last year, he published his first book, Never Enough, which is about living a life of excellence, agility, and meaning.

Oh, and if that's not enough, he's also fluent in German and Spanish. In our conversation, I want to unpack everything he's learned about leadership, decision-making, handling difficult situations, manufacturing discomfort, and what it takes to embrace the principles of excellence, agility, and meaning. I am so excited for this conversation, so let's jump in.

Mike, thank you for being here. It's an honor to speak with you. Thank you for your service. Chris, the honor's mine. It's so awesome to be around people who have made this great nation greater. Thanks for having me here today. I'm just going to jump in. In the intro to your book, you laid out these three principles, excellence, agility, and meaning, and you say they cover the spectrum of what we need to aim for in everything we do.

So first off, thanks for boiling the entire ocean of life down to three principles. But more importantly, what led you narrow the world of potential principles down to these three? Well, man alive, I think if you understand me, the famous words of a pictatist, the Stoic philosopher, he said, when somebody criticizes you, the only correct answer is to say, clearly you don't know me well enough, or if you knew me better, you would criticize me for my far greater faults.

So anyways, the three things, excellence, agility, and meaning, I have to start with the last one. I've recently gone over the half century mark, and all that does is means that I've messed some things up in life and got wisdom from things that I could have done better. One thing I'm very confident in though, that is the world is about meaning.

It's how do you find purpose? How do you have impact? How do you make a difference? I've been very, very fortunate in my life to be around a bunch of people who the world would deem and define as ultra successful. And from all of these conversations, I will tell you that every single person will, no matter how much money or how rich and famous they are, they will tell you that their life is the richest when they're giving back and they're making a difference for others.

And the seals are in two white houses. I've been very privileged to be able to give back. I've been through some hard days also, many hard days, like every seal of my era has, but I have to start with the meaning aspect of that because everybody has to find their own reason for being here.

That's number one. And then you say, how do you do that? So meaning is kind of the what, the how is really focusing on excellence and agility. The excellence, I've often said, we're only excellent if we know we're never excellent enough. And please don't mishear me. It's like the title of the book, Never Enough can get interpreted as not positive enough or not good enough.

And no, no, no, no, no. It's about always striving to be a little bit better, but at the same time being satisfied with who we are. I know that sounds a little bit paradoxical, but really the point is excellence is about drive and determination to continue to get better.

I spent a whole third of the book on that. The third one, I would say agility, look, that's about dropping into a situation and understanding that you need to be different things and have different tools in the toolkit and be able to approach life different ways in order to, to create that meaning and impact.

So the first is the what and the other two are the how, Chris. That makes so much sense. I've been fortunate to read the book. Got it right here. Thank you for sending me a copy. What I will say is. Now that I've read it, I understand it, but I think some people might read the intro, read the beginning and think, wow, so many of these principles that you share involve these wild life and death situations, and they might not feel relatable.

Do you think that those lessons can still be taken in and used when stakes aren't as high? A hundred percent. Yes. If there's any way to judge whether the book has been successful or not, it is the question of relatability, because look, we all choose different paths in life.

I've gone to seals and worked in white houses, and now I'm a senior executive in a public company. And so that doesn't mean my path is the right path. Everybody's got different passions and abilities and interests. And if I wrote something that only pertained to people who have followed similar paths to mine, then I wouldn't be achieving the goal of the book, which is to try to make as positive of an impact in as many people as possible lives.

So that's really what I've aspired to do. I think that no matter where you are, the principles that engender and cause the success in the seals or the white houses or wherever you are, are really the same thing. No matter what somebody chooses to do in life, whether you're being a better father or a husband or a better neighbor or a better person on your town board or a nonprofit board, like it just doesn't matter what path people choose.

In fact, it's very important. And what I write about this is to celebrate that we all are motivated by different things. We all have different passions and interests and abilities, and people who choose different paths than us should be celebrated because that's what takes the world to go around.

And so I've really aspired. I leave it to the readers. You can skim through the Amazon reviews, but I think you'd come to the conclusion that there's a lot of positivity around making the book relatable. So I do hope people find it that way. Before we jump in, maybe let's just take an example of your first life and death experience in Peru and what that taught you about doing the right thing and what people can take away from that.

Absolutely. So, like I said, I'm, I'm 51 years old when I was 26 or so, 25, 1996. So I was 23 years old. I was leading a group of seals on my first overseas assignment in Peru. There were six or eight of us. And honestly, it was just an evening where six of my teammates had flown forward.

They were out in a Quito's actually, which is an offshoot of the river Nanai, which feeds into the Amazon in the rainforest and myself and a friend of mine, Ken, we're just getting a meal together. And when we were driving back home, these two police cars pinned us in six guys jumped out heavily armed right away.

And Ken and I were like, okay, these cops, they just have us mistaken for somebody else. But we were wrong. They were either heavy criminals or terrorists. We still, to this day, don't know which they were, but they drove us around. They threatened me with execution and torture and really bad things.

And fortunately I'm fluent in Spanish and I was able to communicate and just say, Hey, look, we're just desk workers. We're economists. Your brain in these life and death situations becomes a supercomputer. Everything just slows down. And you're just thinking, okay, how do I maximize the probability of living through this situation?

We weren't armed, et cetera. I could have jumped out of the car and saved my life. But I remember very vividly, Chris thinking, if I jump out of this car and save my life, they're probably going to shoot Ken. And I could never, ever live my life knowing that I caused harm to a teammate like that.

So we stuck it out, ultimately lived through it. I learned a couple of things. Number one is when I was very near death, all I did was think about the time, my fiance, now wife of 25 years. And you just think about the people who you care about in life.

And honestly, this will sound weird, but like death for yourself isn't that hard. I have had several near death experiences. And what I have found is that you think about the people who you are closest to. So number one is first and foremost, it's cliche for a reason, but live every day like it's your last.

Leave nothing unsaid. Make sure you never miss an opportunity to tell people how important they are to you and to be the best person you can be. Quick to forgive, patience. Look, I'm imperfect like we all are, but aspire to be as least imperfect as we can be every day.

That's one set of learnings. The other is more, I'll say tactical, if you will. Like in these situations, how do you very simply think, okay, what's the outcome that you want, what's the strategy that's going to get you there, and then how do you perform in the moment? And that's very simply what life as a SEAL is, and that was foreshadowing for decades of conflict.

When things get really hard, how do you stay extremely calm and see the outcomes and say, what needs to happen here in this hard moment in order to maximize the safety and success of my teammates and myself? So lots of learning from a very hard situation at a young age, Chris.

Wow. Is there any training you got for slowing down in those moments that you could share that might be helpful to people? I know some people get a little anxious when things are distraught. It takes practice. There's another question behind your question, which is people can hear me sometimes and think, wow, this guy's really got it together.

He knows how the world works. I'd say look false. I'm figuring it out just like everybody else. But what I would say is that the nature versus nurture question, how much of ability is nature and just, hey, you were born with a certain ability, and how much of it is nurture, how much is trained and learned and improved.

And look, I think that way more of life is the nurture, the training than the nature aspect, because it's just a matter of how good do you want to get at something and then what's the work that it takes to get there and are you willing to pay the cost of that work to get there?

In SEAL training, my class started with 120 guys, 19 graduated. Now all 220 who came in the front door had the physical ability to be a SEAL. And the 19 who graduated also had the mental ability to be a SEAL. The mental aspect of these situations is really what determines the great outcomes and the success, Chris.

What you need to do is put yourself in hard situations, ideally in training, and then afterward, don't spend time talking about what went well. Spend time talking about what didn't go well enough, because the next time you do something, inertia will keep that goodness remaining good. What you need to do is arrest or change the direction around the things that aren't going well enough.

Let me use an example, a SEAL platoon in the States training to go overseas and deploy. It's not training if we're just go out every night and we succeed and do everything perfectly. As a commanding officer of a SEAL team, if I just see people succeeding night after night after night, I'll say, "Hey, your training's not hard enough." So that failure and the coming up short is where all the learning comes from.

So then in that, and I'm sorry, this is a long answer, but I'm passionate about this topic, Chris. The learning comes from the after action review or the hot wash or the debrief, we call it, where we go around and say, "What could have been done better?" And what's really important, and I wrote about this in the book, is you don't teach people what to learn.

You teach people how to learn, not what to think, how to think. The how is what's replicable. You know, when you're in a village in the middle of Iraq or Afghanistan, which I and many SEALs have been in the dark of the night many, many times, you're never going to see the exact same situation twice.

So to say that you came out of a building and turned left and say, "Oh, you should have turned right," and think that that's the debrief, false. What you want to do is get the logic underneath it and say, "Why did you turn left? What did you see? What was going through your head?" And unpack that because that lesson at that level, at that deeper why, will absolutely be used again on an operation in the future, and that's where you can say, "Hey, you know, you turned left and here's why, but did you think about the other side and maybe you should have thought about it a different way, or maybe I should have thought about it a different way?" And being in a culture where that behavior is celebrated as trying to make each other better, not tearing each other down, but making the team stronger is really the reason that all of the greatness happens.

You're now working in a technology industry that I've spent a lot of time in. Have you used that same principle to the way you debrief situations there? And is there a similar example using what you learned in a different professional environment? Absolutely. I will say that the corporate environment, the delivery of the feedback has to be rangier, if you will.

We've got a wider variety of backgrounds and people in the real world. And I don't mean that just from your classic dichotomies that we have in the world. The corporate environment, what we think about is how do we deliver the message so that it is the maximum probability of growth happens?

And that really is one thing. It's do you care about the person you're giving the feedback to? All of us, whether it's you or me or anybody listening, if we get criticized, well, let me not even use the word criticized. If we get feedback, we have a really good radar and a detector to be able to tell whether the person delivering the feedback is coming from a space of make me better or tear me down.

And we tend to respond really well when we genuinely feel like somebody is trying to make us better. We don't respond well when somebody is just trying to tear us down. So if you think about that, on how do you deliver feedback, it has to come from the space of caring and helping the team.

And look, I haven't found many people in the corporate world who don't want to be better. Nobody wakes up and says, what can I screw up today as a society become a little bit better with a lifelong of learning? Absolutely. In the book, you talked about an experience where how to think actually was all that mattered.

And you kind of had to, in a more professional environment, use only how to think because you didn't really have much context on what was happening. Is that fair? That's fair. I was privileged to be selected as a White House fellow. I served the last six months of the Bush administration and then served into the Obama administration and as the director for defense policy and strategy.

So I reported to the National Security Advisor and I've either run or attended hundreds of meetings in the White House Situation Room. And I've seen the best our nation has, the brightest minds solving the hardest of problems. But, Chris, there's an inverse of that, which is also egos and desire for credit, lack of humility or having the meeting after the meeting, you know, those kinds of cultures getting in the way of progress.

And so on day seven, I wrote about this in the book, a little bit of spoiler alert. But day seven or 10 or something like that in the White House, I had to unstick the START treaty that the interagency could not agree on. So Department of Defense and Department of State and Energy and the intelligence community, they all want a different language in our text for the treaty.

And all I had to do was get everybody in the sit room and say, all right, we got to come to an agreement here. And that's the how that you just described. Like I stood in front of the room and I said, look, there's 15 minutes of Washington, D.C.

standing in front of you running this meeting. And there's 150 plus years of Washington, D.C. experience in this room. And what I can tell you is that I'm really good at keeping these doors shut until we figure this out. And my other observation is that everybody in D.C. wants to play the my dad can beat up your dad game.

Let's not agree at the table here. We go back to our home organizations. We tell our boss that nobody wants to agree with us and we think somebody else is going to sort out our problems. And so my response was simple. I said, hey, if you think your boss is smarter than you on this topic right now, please raise your hand.

And of course, nobody raised their hand. A little bit of a logic trap there. Right, Chris? I said, OK, great. So we've got the smartest people in Washington, D.C. in this room to go solve this issue. It's our responsibility as a nation to go solve it. And so on, I don't know, day 20 or something, I was privileged to fly overseas with White House delegation and be part of the leadership negotiating across the table from the Russians in 2008.

So the how they're like you said, matters way more than the what. Absolutely. You just talked about the Situation Room, and I think it's something that everyone has seen in a show, in a movie. Any fun tidbits of information you can share of what's it actually like to be in that room?

Is it what we all expect from watching whatever TV show we've seen? On the one hand, the electronics and the communications is always state of the art. I haven't been in that room in a couple of years, but it's always getting better. And just even from when I was in there, I've let a couple of things in there where we had different places from around the globe plugged in.

And you've got people on the nerve center, if you will, of the nation. And it's super cool. In fact, actually, here's a good way to say it. My swim buddy from SEAL training later became an astronaut, Chris Cassidy. He's one of my greatest friends on the planet. Chris flew the second to last shuttle mission and then also did two deployments to the International Space Station.

When Chris went on his first shuttle mission, I flew down with my family to go watch it launch live. It was delayed a couple of times. And we couldn't stay down in Cape Canaveral any longer. I went back to D.C. His blast off was during the workday. There was not a meeting in the room.

And I talked to the people on watch. We call it and I said, hey, can we just get the launch up on one of the screens? And they were like, absolutely, sir. Once the shuttle's up and in orbit, would you like us to patch a call into your friend, Chris?

And I was just like, oh, my God, this is incredible. No way would I possibly do that. That'll be like some national story of a misappropriation or misuse of authority or abilities. But the ability to go from White House sit room to space shuttle with two SEAL training friends from age 21 would have been super cool.

Wow, that's great. I want to go back to what you were talking about earlier, about trying to put yourself in training. Now, I would argue that maybe the SEALs Buds training is one of the hardest, if not the hardest training programs that exists on the Earth. How do you think mere mortals like me can, without enlisting in the SEALs, create some of that training and kind of bring on this practice you described as like manufacturing discomfort in their lives for people who've grown up in really hard situations?

They know it for people who maybe have grown up a little bit more privileged. Maybe they haven't had that discomfort and want to, but maybe don't want to go run through Buds. I think it starts with being really clear what your goals are in life. You know, a lot of us just kind of tend to drift a little bit and say, I'm just going to go do these things to step back from time to time and say, why am I doing what I'm doing?

And what is the impact that I want to have going back to that meaning conversation we had at the beginning? So then you say, OK, I want to achieve a certain thing. What's the work that it takes to go do that? And a lot of times we don't try the harder things because we have this subconscious like fear of failure or, hey, I might look bad if I try something really hard and fail.

Chris, I think the reframing in the brain that has to happen and to some degree cultures in an organization has to say, if you fail and learn, you have just succeeded. If you fail and don't learn, you've totally failed. And so it's easy to celebrate what is clearly success.

But do we celebrate failure and learning enough in society? That's where I think that we as humans who don't try the hard things tend to not recognize that if we try really hard things, the people who are around are probably going to celebrate the fact that we tried something really hard and we learned.

If they don't, then we're around the wrong people. So thinking forward in a hard situation and saying, OK, really, no kidding. What are the people who actually matter to me going to think if I try this and it doesn't go well? Like, do spend that mental energy and you'll find out that, oh, my gosh, you know what?

My family and friends are going to think less of me. Great. Let me go try to build a podcast with a million or 10 million followers or whatever it is that people choose to do. So that I think is really important is to be comfortable. I also wrote about the concepts of confidence and humility.

A lot of people see those as a point on a single line when in reality you have confidence and humility are two different axes and you have to try to aspire to live in that highly confident and highly humble quadrant because those can simultaneously coexist. I believe ultimately, Chris, it's about not being worried about fear of failure and leaning into the harder path.

On an episode recently, we were talking about health, completely different conversation, but Liz Moody, who I interviewed, said she liked manufacturing discomfort in her life. And so for her, every day before she gets out of the shower, she just throws it on the coldest it gets and stands there for 60 seconds because it makes her feel like she did something hard and she thinks that's a good skill to have.

Is there anything you think in your experience that you could tell someone listening that they could try today or tomorrow in their life to manufacture just a little bit of discomfort, maybe that isn't a cold shower, to try to just build that tolerance for it? Awesome. Yes. And I've got a couple of things to throw at you.

Some things are super simple. How long can you do a plank for? Just think whatever that number is. I don't care if it's one second or a minute or 10 minutes. Go do it for 10 percent longer or 5 percent longer than you think you can. And live in that struggle.

It's funny because in SEAL training, one of the parts of the physical fitness test are how many pushups can you do in two minutes? And most SEALs do about 120 pushups in two minutes on average for these tests. The thing is, I see some people get to 120 and then be like, OK, I'm fine and kind of like mail it in.

But I also see people get to 100 and struggle super hard. What I will tell you is that I learn more about the person in the way that they do their last pushup than you'd ever imagine. You know, whether your last pushup is your 80th or your 100th or your 120th or your first or your fifth, for that matter, think about the struggle when you can't do any more.

Whatever that is, push harder. I often say like, you know, SEALs, when we give us a backpack, we'll fill it and then take 10 percent more than it's supposed to take. Fill your life up with 5 percent more weight than you can carry. So whether it's a plank and doing more minutes, meditate for 10 minutes.

I find myself thinking 17 things at once. I've got my Headspace app like we all do or Calm. And for me to try to create the solace and the focus is super hard, super hard. That's my equivalent. How do you plank or you meditate or your thing? Pick something and do it beyond exhaustion.

I like that. I have a Peloton bike and it's funny. I had this DIY version of it, which was like build your own bike, get an iPad, mount it, put some sensors. And then I got the real one. And the difference between the real one and not was very subtle.

And it was just tracking how much you were doing on the bike in the app. And that subtle difference was what made me go and say, I can do a little bit more the next time. And I can't tell you the number of times that because of that one difference in feature that unfortunately costs like $1,000.

I get to the end and I'm like, oh, I'm within spitting distance of what I did last time. And this is probably oversharing. But and then I get to the point that I'm like almost going to throw up to try to beat my last record, which I'm sure a health expert out there will say that's maybe not the best thing.

But I like being in that discomfort. And that's the only thing in my life that really makes it forceful to do is trying to beat a record in some sort of physical activity. Chris, I love what you're saying. And let me bring this to life in a different way.

In SEAL training, you heard me a couple of minutes ago, if I haven't lost you already in this, 120 people start, 19 finish. What we do in training is we stretch young trainees beyond what they perceive as their limit. And then we let them get comfortable again. And then the next day or the next hour, we stretch them even further and then we get them comfortable again.

And we keep doing that over and over and over. And it sounds like an exercise in stretching your limits, in learning that the human can do more and more and more. That is true, but it's also not the biggest lesson from that. The biggest lesson from that is when you're repetitively stretched beyond what you perceive as your limits, what you realize is that they actually are not your limits.

And so a common trait that SEALs have is this high confidence that I described before, which is every single SEAL has been in many situations where they think it's going to be beyond a limit and you realize it's not. And then what you do is you unlock the brain in a way that lets you realize there is no such thing as a limit in life unless you place that limit on yourself.

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That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y.com today. Must be 21 plus, not available in all locations. Is there maybe an activity or an exercise you put SEALs through in that training that someone could do at home or test out and try to build that themselves? It's the push-ups, sit-ups. It's what we described before, just pushing yourself beyond the limit.

Sure, there's a lot of crazy things in SEAL training. You get pushed in the deep end of the pool, 14 feet deep. You have your ankles and your wrists tied, your wrists are behind the back and you've got to survive for an hour. There's a lot of stuff that don't try at home.

But honestly, Chris, the great majority of SEAL training is no secret. It is like just as simple as a human and his or her body weight to take yourself beyond that limit. If you can't manufacture that on your own, then just get your favorite fitness app and whatever it says to do, do it.

Don't hurt yourself, but take it to that point that you're describing. I like it. I think a lot of people in the workplace, and I've put myself in this situation many times, get in trouble for kind of not following the rules. But you talk a little bit about how to use your instincts and how to think about rules and making a practical sense of that hard choice where there's rules and you think there might be consequences, but you know what's right.

How do you make those decisions and hone those instincts and feel free to give an example of it as well? Absolutely. So look, if the whole world were just rule followers, we'd never advance anything. You know, we would just all go follow the rules and we wouldn't have the innovation and the entrepreneurship that the world needs.

That said, as a society, we are more productive when we together do harmonize and live with laws and customs that help us build each other up and help us respect the fact that we're all different. And so that's a balance that has to happen in the world. First of all, what's the intention?

Is the intention good? And then what's the likely cost or harm of the action, the rule that you're going to break? And then you just think it's really not more complicated than a simple cost benefit analysis. Do the overall benefits outweigh the costs? If they do, go do the thing.

Don't cross any red lines of morals and ethics in the law. As long as you're on the right side of morals and ethics in the law, go push, go push. Don't be afraid to push, make great things happen. It takes energy and momentum in new directions to try new things.

How many of us in 2000 thought we'd need to walk around with one of these smartphones either, you know, pegged to our ear or being stared at 20 hours a day in our hands? We couldn't imagine a world with an ecosystem of the application development that we hold in the power of our hands.

Now, what's that going to be in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years? We don't know right now, but the only way we're going to figure that out is by people continuing to have vision and then go after the things that pursue the dreams and the visions that they have.

It takes a combination of smart rule breaking is the way I would phrase it. As a manager, I am really frustrated when people just completely ignore what, you know, you ask them to do. But I'm actually not frustrated when they come back and say, "Hey, actually, I heard what you said, but this insight led me to think that this might be a better path." Maybe it's good to flag that as early as is possible, but I do think that what you said, I've seen play out in the workplace well, but it's when you don't have that intention behind your deviation from the task that I think things really fall apart.

Totally agree with you. I've never met somebody who wakes up and says, "I'm going to go screw something up at work today." You know, it's really ultimately about that drive and that determination to go make positive change. So I net out the same as you do. That's great. You've said that asking for help is actually a sign of strength, not weakness.

I think that's, you know, a big shift in the military in recent years. I know maybe 20, 30 years ago, that wouldn't have been the way people think about it. You think that's a good shift? How did that come about and how can we use that in our own lives?

Yeah, look, it's a necessary shift. I, like every SEAL of my era, have buried way too many friends. I've got about 70 friends killed in action or perished during the last decades of conflict. And ultimately, that's why I wrote my book. I forgot to mention in the beginning that I donate every penny from Never Enough to a 501(c)(3) I started that pays off mortgages for Gold Star families.

And I think the most important thing to recognize is that when you're doing things for others and you're connecting back to that mission and the meaning and the purpose, then it makes it very, very much easier. But you have to start with the outcome based thinking. At the end of a six month deployment overseas, you get somebody who says, "Hey, I wrote 3,000 intelligence reports." And I'm like, "That's an output." What did those intelligence reports do?

What did they lead to? Or you get your logistics teams that say, "Hey, we spent 1.1 million dollars on this thing." And like, "OK, great, but what did we get for that 1.1 million dollars?" The number of missions that you go on are irrelevant. What's relevant is the outcomes from those missions.

And so, Chris, I think that what we need to think about in life, and this is what I think about in business, is we have a certain amount of investment dollars that we can make choices with on how we spend them within our firm. Where do we invest and where do we work to take the business?

Do we invest in new capability? Do we try to open new markets? What do we do? How do we think about that? You have to think about what's the outcome that you're after and then what's the efficiency, the most efficient way to go achieve the outcome. So you have to look at like a return on invested capital or an IRR, internal rate of return.

Not to sound too mathy, but if I have a dollar and I can turn it into a dollar ten doing one thing and a dollar eleven doing another thing, go do the thing that's going to make you a dollar eleven. Think about the path of least resistance there. I want the person that didn't write 3,000 intelligence reports.

I want the person that wrote one and that one intelligence report led to the biggest success ever. I joke around. The L in SEAL stands for lazy. We find the easiest path to the goal because then after that, we have more time, more effort and energy so we can go either do more missions or rest more for the next mission and whatever's around the corner.

But in all cases, we're always better off being as efficient as we humanly can. And that's why bringing it back to the business world, when we're in a meeting, the first thing that I do is say, what do we want out of this meeting? We're only doing one of a couple of elemental verbs in a meeting.

We're either deciding something, we're teaching about something, we're informing and giving people information, or we're brainstorming a problem and trying to think about creatively come up with a set of solutions. Maybe there's another verb or two, but those four verbs are basically the reason to have a meeting. If you are not doing that, then what are you doing and why?

If we're just hearing people talk to hear people talk, we are wasting the company's resources because we can be letting people go do work on different things. So at the end of the meeting, the acid test for me, Chris, is to ask who is going to go do what differently after the meeting?

If we leave a meeting and nobody can answer that question, we didn't just need to have that meeting. It's funny, I look back at all the episodes I've done. I have a lot of personal beliefs about meetings. And David Marquet is another former submarine commander who wrote a book.

We talked about meetings. And now I think my answer is if you're running a meeting in your company, the best thing you can do is find anyone that's been in the military and have them run the meeting, because I feel like the best meeting advice I've gotten is from people in the military.

So I think that's great advice. We really waste a lot of times with meetings. Can I say make one more point on this, which is a culture point, Chris, which is if we're running a meeting, say you and I are in a meeting with 10 other people and somebody starts talking and creating an avenue in the meeting that is not productive to the main goal of the meeting, what do you do?

Do you cut the person off or do you let them keep going? The polite thing, the easy thing is let them keep going and be like, OK, they'll be done in four minutes. It'll be done in six minutes. Six minutes is 10 percent of a 60 minute meeting. Like, do you want to lose 10 percent of a meeting letting somebody ramble?

No. Like you want to cut that person off politely, of course, but that takes a certain culture where that's OK. Do you have an example of how you would cut someone off politely in a meeting? I think anyone listening might have that question. Well, yeah, when somebody gets the real answer, let me know.

I've been trying to politely cut people off for years and often people, there's no way around it. People are going to feel slightly overcorrected when you do that. Just tackle everything head on. You talked a minute ago about, in essence, passive aggressive versus direct. There's no room for passive aggressivity.

Just say what you're thinking, but do it in a respectful way. I talked in Washington, D.C., when we were doing the START treaty. You get all these people who, after the meeting, start wanting to grab another person and do the whisper campaign. And, oh, what about this? What about that?

No, if we have something to say, let's do it at the table and out in the open because it's just way more efficient. It's way more productive. I think it takes a little bit of practice. It's making people feel safe. It's making people feel like if we do cut them off, they know it's because we're trying to be the best group that we can be and have the best meeting we can.

My mom's a psychologist, social worker, and used the famous sandwich technique. Compliment, cut off, and then compliment. The best answer I have is from Andy Ratcliffe, who I've had on the podcast. He's run the company I work at now because I got into a lot of these situations myself and people would say, "Ah, Chris is like trying to derail this thing.

It's kind of frustrating." And his advice to me was, "You need to make sure you state your intentions more." So instead of interrupting someone and saying, "Hey, you're going on a little long. We got a purpose here. Let's move on." You say, "Hey, I just want to interrupt quick.

I really want to make sure that this meeting can be the most productive use of everyone's time. We came here for this reason. And so maybe we should get back on topic." For me, it's shown up a lot where I say, "Look, I really want to see us go big.

So when I criticize this thing, it's not because I think it's bad. It's because I think we can do better." So I didn't do that for a lot of time in my role in a few jobs. And it caused a lot of friction with people because they thought, "Oh, he just doesn't care.

He's just on his own mission. He has his own accord." And the reality was I needed to make sure people knew that I'm only here to build the best thing we can at this company. That's all I care about. And stating that puts everything else you say in context and saves a lot of back channel criticism of you.

Love that. Presume positive intent is what you're saying. Super quick story. One of my classmates from grad school is now a leadership professor at Harvard Business School. I go back and guest in his class every year, have for the last six or seven years for there's a specific case that I help with.

And it's a ton of fun. I see one of my best friends on the planet be an incredible professor and see him in action. And it's just really special. But there was one year where this grad school student was sitting in the back of the room and asked the proverbial three minute wind up of a question.

You all know the type. It's the, I want to tell you how smart I am, but really kind of pretend it's a question. And, and so the tail end of it was some thinly veiled question. And I said, you know, rather than me answering that, let me take this a different direction.

I said, honestly, I experienced you as a very bad question asker. And so let me tell you why it wasn't succinct enough. It wasn't, you know, X, Y, Z gave constructive feedback. And I said, look, right now you're probably not feeling great. You're probably shrinking in your chair a little bit, or you're frustrated with me or some combination of negative emotions.

But let me ask you this, would you rather me share this feedback with you? And then have you ask yourself like, Hey, maybe there's some something in there where I can learn and grow from, or would you rather have me not say what I just said and let you keep going through life as a terrible question asker?

Theoretically, it's really easy to understand. No, I want to be a great question asker. Okay, great. But how do you feel right now? And so you have to get over that negative feeling when somebody is trying to help build you up. Now you could argue that it's maybe publicly in 110 person classroom or whatever is not the place to do that.

But I was making a point for a reason. I was trying to make a metaphorical point to 110 students in the classroom is go through life, presuming positive intent from others, but when something goes sideways, like no matter if you're one or 99% wrong or 100% wrong, start with yourself and say, what could I have done better?

And then you won't miss that opportunity for growth and the principle of excellence, which we talked about at the beginning. Yeah. I mean, you could have followed up with said, and I could have said this to you privately. You could have learned well, but aren't you glad that 109 other people get to also learn that lesson?

Oh, dude, I wish I would have thought of that in the moment. This is a great opportunity to use your own feedback. Earlier, I asked a question about asking for help. We took a little bit of a detour. So you got to work a little bit, Mike, on your skills, listening to the question being asked, but I was trying to get at whether asking for help is a sign of strength or weakness.

It seems like something that shifted in the military. Can you talk about your perspective and, and why asking for help might be something we should do more of? Yeah. First of all, your, your feedback is spot on. You're absolutely correct. And I already was like, gosh, how did I miss answering that?

You totally asked it and I didn't answer it. My brain was in a million different spots and I simply wasn't good enough to remember what you said and to answer your question directly. So that's my response. Now, hopefully in there, people can hear the modeling for like the giving and receiving and feedback back and forth.

There's a meta point in there, but to answer directly now, it is a very serious topic. I grew up in the SEALs in an era where you only showed strength or perceived strength. You did not show weakness and that is not healthy. After the stress of decades plus of combat to buried about 70 different friends over time and everybody who's served knows somebody who has paid the ultimate sacrifice.

So the question right now is when somebody needs something, how do you make them feel when they ask, do you make them feel taller or smaller? We have to build up people who ask for help. If you just look at the number of people now who have died by suicide, it has risen astronomically on Thursday, a couple of days ago before recording five days before right now, I had a really good friend who I looked up to who was a BUD/S instructor, a SEAL instructor of mine who was an incredible human being.

I deployed with him to Iraq. We did a bunch of missions together. He took his own life and it really hit me hard. I don't know the details. He's a friend who I haven't talked to in a couple of years and unfortunately stories like this are way too common and I beat myself up over the weekend and saying, gosh, I haven't reached out to him lately.

Did I come up short? You know, and I had a tough weekend. I'll just say that. I think, why was my friend not able to ask for help? I don't know the answer to that question. I really don't. But I also will say the flip side of this is that to let asking the hard questions be okay, I'm going to ask the hard intrusive questions from now on.

I've said this because I've learned from people that I haven't helped well enough and now I go through life pretty comfortable saying, hey, have you ever considered harm to self or how are you really doing and most Americans or people when they say, how are you doing? We don't really want the answer.

That's just a little quick little, hey, how's it going? How are you doing? Okay, great. You're good. Okay, good. No, no, no. Like when, when we're really intrusive in people's lives, we are actually listening to what we can do to make sure that their life is as good as it can be.

And so we have to be, celebrate being intrusive in people's lives as positive. So asking for help on one side is a positive thing and being intrusive in people's lives is positive 99 times out of a hundred when I say to a friend of mine, have you ever considered harm to self?

It can be awkward. It's like, no, man, what are you asking me that for a defensive or whatever. But for the one time out of a hundred, when the person says, yes, I'll take the 99 awkwards for the one yes, because that is a way to make sure that you get people the help that they need.

It has to be okay to ask for help. I'm droning on and trying to, because I'm emphasizing the fact that the culture really had to change and it has changed, but it's still not where it needs to be, not just in the seals, but in the military writ large and in society writ large.

Life is hard in this pandemic. How do we make sure that people are as strong as they can? One more thing I'll say on this is that a trick I've learned in this is to not think about absolutes, think about relative in a team. And I, when I say team, a team is family.

It's your neighbors. It's your friends. It's your colleagues. It's people in your civic organizations. In a team, there are people who are always relatively up and relatively down. So the people who are relatively up have to help the people who are relatively down because tomorrow the roles will be reversed.

And so if the people who are always relatively up are helping the people who are relatively down, that's how you make a team as strong as you humanly can. Well, first off, I'm really sorry for your loss. And I appreciate you being open and sharing like that on the show.

What's a way to ask those questions at work to find out where people are down and try to help build them up? Are there questions you ask or things you bring to a meeting to try to bring people together towards that medium? If you're having a day where you're on the top.

It's creating comfort. You're absolutely. And so this is a situation where it's not in the 110 person classroom or conference room. This is truly a one-on-one conversation. And so look, I'm in an organization of 40,000 people. Now I run global operations for VMware, a massively awesome software company based in Palo Alto.

And look, I can't help 40,000 people. Right. And so how do I help as many people as I can? Well, it's simple. How do I take my seven or eight direct reports and do that with those seven and eight people, and then help make sure that they're doing it with their seven or eight direct reports, and then that it cascades through an organization.

So leadership has to model the behaviors that we want. Now it doesn't have to be prescriptive. You don't always have to do everything my way. That'll be unhealthy for an organization, but go achieve that goal. However, it makes the most sense, but really understand what is making someone either motivated or demotivated and help them have more of the good and less of the bad.

One tactic I know you mentioned in the book was going to meet just one-on-one people, trying to have a conversation with people you don't know at work. Can you talk a little bit about why you started doing that and what it's brought to organizations you've been a part of?

Yes, specifically when I was in the White House, both administrations, Bush and Obama. People work super hard in the White House. We can always make fun of whatever party's in or out of favor. There's a lot of really great public servants who are working long, long days to try to make this great nation greater.

What I have found is that it's hard to slow down when you're in those very visible roles. And I made a point to just go get a lunch with somebody three times a week. And it's a costly hour in the middle of the day. And inevitably, Chris, when I had to peel myself away from my desk and I have a million things that are needing to be done, I'd be scratching my head saying, gosh, why did I just do this?

Honestly, 15 minutes into that lunch, I was not thinking about all the things I needed to do. I was locked in with somebody else. And usually from either another part of the White House or an organization that had something to do loosely with whatever professional goals that I and we were trying to achieve.

And what you realize is at the end of the day, when you go home at 10 o'clock, you're not remembering that hour that you didn't spend at your desk in the middle of the day. But what you do remember is the relationship and the person and what you learned from the hour in that lunch.

And then not ironically, over time, you develop an ecosystem of people that you can call on and help make great things happen. A lot of times people ask me how to think about networking. My advice is that a network is not a group of people who you get something from.

A network is a group of people who you give something to. Then in the few times in life when we really do critically need help, that group of people that we've invested in, not surprisingly, is the group where we get energy back from and we get help back from.

So a network is a group of people we invest in. By investing in other people and understanding what is this colleague in the other wing of the White House or the other part of my company organization structure trying to achieve, well, I might be able to connect dots that that person may not be able to connect him or herself.

And so if I can create value for somebody else in very easy ways by connecting dots, then you're making your organization and then frankly, the nation, if you extract it out, a lot stronger. I love that lesson. I've used it a lot in a virtual world. I think it's been harder, but one tactic I'll share is that it can be so hard when you're on your computer working and then you have a meeting and you mentioned, "Gosh, in the moment, I just have all this stuff to do.

I have to step away." Well, when you're doing a video call, sometimes it's really hard to step away. Right? You've got your other tab open. So what I try to do myself is I try to force myself to put the meeting in full screen and slide back from my desk a little bit.

So the keyboard's not quite in reach and I'm not distracted. And I try to treat it more like that. It's difficult. I've actually started pushing away the virtual meeting and just saying, "Can we just do a phone call and go on a walk?" Because when I'm walking, I'm not distracted by work and I'm more engaged in the conversation and it seems counterintuitive to me to think, "Wow, if I don't see you, I might be more engaged." But when I see you, I see the alert popping up on my email.

I see the chat popping up on Slack or something. I've been struggling with the lack of in-person meetings. And I do genuinely believe those in-person meetings can be more valuable than their virtual counterparts. But I think there are a few tactics you can use to try to make those virtual conversations better.

Oh, man, I still agree. And I'm not good enough at it myself. I get distracted too easily. There were two tricks that somebody told me and I did a little bit of live TV. You know, I was on a bunch of different channels when my book first came out about a year ago.

And I just took a little yellow sticky and I drew an arrow to right where I needed to look for the, where the pinhole is on your camera, whatever camera you use, your eye then goes like right into the camera. That way you're not checking your stock prices or Instagram or whatever the case may be.

And then Chris, I've never said this to anybody, but I've got this little sticky that says, "Be present in the meeting." And I stick this right on my desk here. So as I sometimes start to reach for something else, I'm like, "No, wait a minute, lock in, lock in." Because we're recording a conversation where I feel like presence is the most important thing.

If I were writing my email, this would be a terrible interview, I assume. I actually invested and it wasn't that expensive. It was maybe a hundred dollars in a teleprompter and I have an iPad that sits under it. So I joined this meeting from an iPad that projects your face onto a mirrored screen with a camera behind it.

So I'm not actually looking at my computer right now. I'm looking at a piece of glass in front of a camera and it's allowed me to really be looking at you, having a conversation, feel like it's working, not feel like the, "Okay, do I look at the camera? Do I look at Mike's face?" It got stressful.

So that $100 purchase has made the presence I have in these conversations a lot better. And it might seem like overkill, but if delivering meetings is part of your job, things like that, things like even just buying a decent microphone. I noticed a side effect of this podcast was when I went to work meetings with the podcast microphone.

People are like, "Wow, you sound so crisp." Two people in my core team went and bought a microphone after that because they were like, "Look, I want to sound present. I want to be there. I don't want to sound like I'm distracted. Dishes clinking in the background or whatever." So there are a few tactics you can use there as well.

So hopefully this is all helpful. I hope we get more opportunities to spend time in person. And I already, at my company, see them happening right now. Absolutely. Well, Chris, I take the opposite. I'm a lot smarter when I'm on mute and I look better when the video is off.

You've been in a lot of situations and you talk about them in your book where you're at life or death, shoot or don't shoot. And I want to come back to that before we wrap and just talk about how some of those really high stakes decisions you've been in, where you had to make a decision in a moment, can be a lesson for people listening.

100%. The most important thing in these situations, again, is figuring out what do you want out of it? Another spoiler alert, but there's enough good stuff in the book where nothing I've said should dissuade you from picking up Never Enough. The way I open Never Enough is actually a situation in 2007 on the streets of Iraq.

There was a sealed platoon that was clearing houses and the job is very simple. How do you stop bad people from doing bad things to good people? Well, this particular night, myself and a teammate of mine named Josh were actually holding security outside the building and a man at two in the morning stepped out of his house on the other side of the street and he very quickly started to reach into his garb and it looked like he was potentially pulling a weapon out.

Now, Josh and I both instantly aimed at the guy because we're not going to let him shoot at us, but we were both so highly trained that we were able to wait for it and pause and let life slow down. And actually what he did was he pulled out an ID card to show that he was not a bad person.

And that could have been a deadly decision to reach quickly for an ID card. But fortunately, Josh and I were trained well enough where we could slow down and have that confidence where we could wait a couple milliseconds to see what does this guy actually pull out of his garb.

And thank God we did because, Chris, we don't want to harm anybody that we don't have to harm. Like, that's terrible. The story, seals that didn't kill someone, that's a celebration for us. You know, so we're trying to make the world a better place and that's the mission of the community, really.

And how does that happen? Again, we talked earlier in this conversation about training and about how do you get the world to slow down. But in these life and death situations, it really is about remaining extremely calm, not letting the distracting thoughts get in your head. Fear or any other negative emotions will only reduce the probability of a great outcome, the best possible outcome for you and your team or your organizations.

It's a hard thing to do, but you can get better and better at it. Ideally in training situations where it's safe, but then on game day, when you really need to perform or in this particular two in the morning in the streets of Fallujah in 2007, then you can perform when you have to.

Thanks for sharing. I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us.

I'm curious how you see the principles from Never Enough changing in a person's life and do some of them become more or less important at different stages? It's a great question. I would say that the most important thing is that principle around agility is exactly what you're describing. Everybody's heard the battlefield comment where no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

I'll tell you in my mind, my plan is already for the plan to change. When you go into a situation, knowing that it's going to be dynamic, you're already a step ahead. So in my real job now at VMware, my job is to not help transform VMware and our customers.

My job is to transform our ability to transform. Building that ultra agility into the organization, because none of us know where markets are going. Nobody can foresee the future. We can make smart guesses, but how do we improve our ability to react quickly and as well as possible? So I think that what I've written in Never Enough is an elastic set of principles that can apply not just today, but set you up for the unforeseen tomorrow.

Now, I'm very thankful you wrote the book because it's actually the kind of book where I've both read and referenced and taken some notes in. But I actually heard you say in an interview that you wanted to not be Googleable, you didn't want to be found and that writing it was out of your comfort zone.

And I thank you for making the change. But what happened and how did you make that kind of large change to start writing this book? You're the first person who's asked that question that way. First of all, what you said is right on just I will emphasize, I tried to stay off of not Googleable forever.

And it was a different moment for me. I'm probably like the one of the last comers to social media, if you will, I got on Instagram because of the book. And I said to myself, if I'm going to write a book, I want it to be successful. And what is success?

It's not about me. Never enough isn't about my case. I could care less about that. What I care about is elevating the conversation for people. And then literally the profits go to the 501(c)(3) that pay off mortgages for gold star families. I've personally, with my foundation, paid off six mortgages for widows and children whose fathers paid the ultimate sacrifice.

And for me, that's what it's about. I can't sit still, Chris. I'm never able to rest. And so for me, that mission to go continue to do great things for others is predicated on frankly, even doing this podcast, I love talking to you, but in the spirit of what we said earlier, asking for help is a sign of strength.

It isn't easy for me to go out there and say, Hey, well, everybody listening, please jump on Amazon or wherever you get buy books, go buy Never Enough. It's all of about 15 bucks or it's on Audible. And I read the book and like asking for that kind of help is really hard for me, but I've gotten used to it and out of my comfort zone.

The way I personally am able to square the circle there is because I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it to try to make a positive impact for others. I've been asked for life advice so many different times that I just don't have the capacity to do it for everybody.

Now I can hand them my best effort at a combination of stories and advice and insights. If you're listening, you're actually helping people buying this book. Mike's not making a profit here. I thought it was fantastic. I can highly recommend it. My wife borrowed it over the holiday a little bit ago and she enjoyed it.

So definitely check out the book. I have one other random question, which didn't fall into the narrative of the book. But you talk a lot about how when you're a SEAL, you don't sleep a lot. Sometimes you might stay up for five days straight. Are there any tactics that you took away from that that have been helpful in life after SEALs?

Well, Chris, I just want to first a little bit challenge the premise of what you said. Being able to operate on a little bit of sleep is essential, but it's also dumb. And so what we always try to do is be as rested and as strong as we possibly can.

We only build that skill or the ability to do that because we have to at times. And as a leader in the SEALs, what you're constantly thinking about is just very simple physical performance. It's scientifically proven, like as we diminish in our sleep, our performance does degrade. And so in SEAL training, we're up for a week straight.

We're up from a Sunday morning to a Friday afternoon in what's called hell week. You learn that you really can keep moving for literally a week straight. Yes, you get like 20 minutes of sleep on like the Wednesday. The instructors are like, oh, you're the best class we've ever seen.

We're actually going to get you let you rest for a little bit. You lay down and then 20 minutes later, they wake you up with bullhorns and yelling at you to go jump in the Pacific Ocean at 62 degrees or whatever it is. Like these are things that you do stretch like we talked about before.

So we all know that we can stay up for a week straight if we have to. But I don't think that operating on less sleep is something that you actually reap that many benefits from. I would encourage people to sleep as much as they humanly can. We're about to have baby number two, so I might have to take some of the lessons of knowing I can get by, but I agree.

I think sleep's important, but appreciate you sharing. Before we wrap question, I like to ask everyone is to pick a place that you're familiar with and share to anyone who might end up in that city, a place you think they should go, grab a meal, grab a drink and an activity that they might want to do.

That's that's not the most obvious thing to do. My happy place is Sonopee, New Hampshire, Lake Sonopee. It's fresh air. I'm in Westport, Connecticut right now. But we've got a place up in Sonopee, New Hampshire. That's where we really go when we want to get away. Beautiful little small town harbor in the fall.

It's the leaves in the summer. It's the incredible swimming and harbor for seasons of fun there. It's a hidden gem. It's actually a little known fact that Steven Tyler is actually from Sonopee, New Hampshire. He lives down the road a bit. But other than Steven Tyler, there's not a lot of glitz and glam to Lake Sonopee.

It's just a wonderful hidden gem. Chris, any place you'd say if someone's up there to. Is there a place to eat something to do? The Anchorage is a great place right in the harbor. The atmosphere could not be better. That sounds great. Mike, I really enjoyed the book. What is next for you?

Where can people stay in touch with everything you're working on and how can they support you? First and foremost, I'm loving helping transform VMware. But like many of us, we have a million things that we're doing in life. And one of mine is being on the board of the National Medal of Honor Museum, where we're on a mission to inspire America.

We're building a new museum outside of AT&T and Stadium and in Dallas, Texas. And one of the things that I will do in the coming couple of months is to start a podcast with a lifelong friend of mine who is one of the nation's 66 living Medal of Honor recipients.

His name is Britt Slabinski, affectionately Slab. Slab and I are going to co-host a podcast. We've got incredible people, lots of ex-presidents on the advisory board for the museum, people that I just am super excited to bring to life via a podcast associated with the Medal of Honor Museum.

So I'd say lock in on Instagram. This is dot Mike Hayes or on Twitter. This is Mike Hayes. In the coming months, be bringing more and more Medal of Honor Museum and leadership content out. So love for people to follow and start getting at the front of the line.

We will link to both those in the show notes. You mentioned the foundation you set up. Is that something people can read more about or is it kind of a private foundation? It's a 501 C three. It is Googleable. But I will tell you, we have no full time employees.

We're all volunteers. And the best help that people can give is help. Never enough. Get out there in the world more. Help elevate the conversation. All of those profits are going to gold star families. So I think the easiest ask and the best way to help is to get a copy or a couple of copies of Never Enough for your family and friends and people whose lives you want to positively influence.

Mike, that's such a great idea. Thank you for writing this book. Thank you for being here. Now, thank you, my friend, and appreciate all that you're doing to make this great nation greater. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it.

And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at all the hacks dot com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.