Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House

by Alyssa Mastromonaco

You should always be prepared to defend your choices, whether just to yourself (sometimes this is the hardest) or to your coworkers, your friends, or your family. The quickest way for people to lose confidence in your ability to ever make a decision is for you to pass the buck, shrug your shoulders, or otherwise wuss out. Learning how to become a decision maker, and how you ultimately justify your choices, can define who you are.

leadership has always been much more about rallying people around a project or cause than about being held up as the Boss.

Persistence will get you far, and leaders have to champion the push.

There is no bigger compliment than being intellectually curious about what someone else spends his or her days doing—it turned out that not having the answers did me no harm.

Preparation is protection you can create for yourself; for some people, the hard part may be balancing precautions with paranoia, but in my experience, you can never be too prepared.

We are all replaceable. Life goes on, but that doesn’t mean it feels good.

If you approach it with grace—and a willingness to accept that many people know much more than you—you can walk away a much better person than you were when you came in.

Kindness often exists on a smaller scale than the grand gestures popular on social media would have you believe.

I think a “serious” woman can also be a crazy cat lady, and I will be rescuing cats until someone has to rescue me.