Seek the Mission First: The Miracle on the Hudson Survivor’s Case for Purpose Over Profit

I did not choose my mission. It chose me, on a river, on a Thursday afternoon in January, when I was the last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549. I had spent years building a career in enterprise sales leadership, and none of it prepared me for what I learned standing in that aisle.

Five years later, almost to the day, Jeff Pegues sat across from me on CBS Evening News on January 15, 2014, and asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since. What was my mission before that flight? I told him the truth. Before Flight 1549, my mission was to make money. That was it. That was the whole plan. What Jeff reported afterward was that my mission had changed, that it had turned into supporting the Red Cross, into service, into something bigger than a paycheck. He was right. But what he captured in that interview was not really a change in direction. It was a change in order. I had not stopped caring about provision. I had simply stopped putting it first.

I was raised Methodist, and I still practice my faith that way today. John Wesley had a phrase I return to often. Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can. That is not a business strategy. It is a way of ordering your life so the good comes first, and everything else, including provision, follows behind it. I did not fully understand that instruction until I was standing in an aisle on a sinking plane, deciding what mattered enough to act on in the time I had left, or sitting across from a national news camera five years later, forced to say out loud what I used to chase before the water changed me.

Seek first the mission, and the money follows. That is not something I invented. It echoes something far older, seek first the kingdom, and all these things will be added unto you. I did not build Resilience Partners Group, or write Moments Matter, From Turmoil to Triumph, and The Limitless Life, because I calculated a revenue model. I built them because I could not stay quiet about what I had learned. The revenue came because the mission was real, and people could feel that it was real.

Years after that day, I went back into the Hudson River. Not by accident this time. On purpose, and in the water, to swim, raising money for Navy SEALs. There is a difference between surviving water that tried to take your life and choosing to return to it. But that is exactly what the mission asks of you eventually. It asks you to go back to the place that changed you, not to relive it, but to redeem it. That same conviction carried me into the water again on September 19, 2026, when I took part in the SOF Swim in San Diego alongside the Honor Foundation, raising support for Navy SEALs and the broader special operations community. Giving first has become the architecture of my mission, not a slogan I attach after the fact.

Wesley talked about sanctification as an ongoing process, not a finished state. You do not arrive at your purpose and stay there. You keep growing into it. Moments Matter was one stage. From Turmoil to Triumph was another. The Limitless Life pushed it further still. And When It Hits the Water, the book I am finishing now, is the next stage. These swims are the mission living outside the pages, proof the lessons were never meant to stay theoretical.

This is also the same principle Strategic Coach taught me about long-term relationship building. You plant something true, you tend it with consistency, and you trust the harvest to come in its own season. That is active faith, expressed through discipline, a very Methodist idea. Wesley did not believe grace excused you from effort. He believed grace and effort worked together.

I think often about the parable of the talents. The servants who were rewarded were not the ones who protected what they had out of fear. They were the ones who put what they were given to work. I could have buried what happened to me on that plane, and I could have kept the answer I gave Jeff Pegues private, a quiet confession rather than a public turning point. Instead, I let it become part of the record, part of the mission, one talk, one book, one swim at a time.

If you are building something right now and the money feels distant, ask yourself the question Jeff asked me. What is the mission, really, underneath the answer you would give on camera? Because that is the one worth feeding. That is the one that grows.

I did not find my mission by looking for it. I found it because I was still standing when the plane stopped moving. Seek the mission first, give before you receive, and provision has a way of following obedience.

That has been my experience. I remain grateful for every bit of it.