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.

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

I once had to have Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, watch the bathroom door for me at Hamid Karzai’s palace while two Afghan guards played cards and smoked on the other side of it.

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.

I’m sure you remember seeing news break one morning about the president, vice president, or secretary of state having landed in Iraq or Afghanistan. In most cases, the president flies overnight so he can avoid anyone knowing he’s left the building, arriving as America wakes up so people with potentially dangerous motives don’t have time to plan anything extraordinary.

If you do it responsibly, quitting something that isn’t benefiting you—whether it’s dance classes that “everyone is taking” or a soul-sucking job that has nothing to do with anything you’re interested in—can change your life.

Then Benghazi happened: Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, killing the American ambassador to the country, a foreign service information management officer, and two CIA contractors.

For some people (like me), gathering the courage to speak up in meetings is a skill that requires practice. There are always the normal fears—that you’ll sound stupid, that everyone else has already thought of what you’re about to say and has moved on, that what you thought was a foolproof plan will have an obvious hole in it.

Developing self-awareness is a lifelong process; you don’t just wake up one day and have all you need.

America is a nation of people who work a lot and of people who strive to work a lot. The best thing you can be, our culture tells us, is “at the top of your field.” You are supposed to want to have power, to be an executive with a cushy corner office and a lot of money and an assistant, a person who travels for business and takes working breakfasts, fork in one hand and cell phone in the other.

Old political hands were saying they hadn’t seen people respond to anyone like this since Bobby Kennedy.