A Promised Land

Key takeaways:

- I appreciated the way Mr. Obama somehow made being president seem both like a regular job and completely unlike a regular job at the same time. Reading this book, I was struck by how often I flipped between two thoughts: I could never be president, it sounds way too complicated, and I could probably handle being president, it doesn't sound that hard. I'll attribute that to Mr. Obama's ability to humanize the role, not my own ability to handle the pressures of being president.
- Being president is just management. While reading this book, the perspective I took away is that effective management is two parts: 1) Getting experts to work for you and balancing all the concerns your experts bring up simultaneously. If we solve this problem the way the environmental expert says, how will that work with the military expert's concerns? How will that impact the economy? 2) Getting the most out of the experts that work for you.
- No problem tat reaches the top office (president, CEO, etc.) has a clean, 100% solution. If it did, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already. As the top official, you need to be comfortable weighing a mix of bad options and choosing the least-bad one.