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Afterward, Axe was gentle in his postgame critique. “Your problem,” he said, “is you keep trying to answer the question.” “Isn’t that the point?” I said. “No, Barack,” Axe said, “that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities? That’s what people care about. Look, half the time the moderator is just using the question to try to trip you up. Your job is to avoid the trap they’ve set. Take whatever question they give you, give ’em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.” “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Exactly,” he said. I was frustrated with Axe and even more frustrated with myself. But I realized his insight was hard to deny after watching a replay of the debate. The most effective debate answers, it seemed, were designed not to illuminate but to evoke an emotion, or identify the enemy, or signal to a constituency that you, more than anyone else on that stage, were and would always be on their side. It was easy to dismiss the exercise as superficial. Then again, a president wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant or a pilot, hired to carry out some narrow, specialized task. Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions—that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth—that was the bar I needed to clear.
A Promised Land
Barack Obama
To improve, we need feedback that meets a particular set of criteria. We need it to be specific, improvement-focused, reflective of the audience we are trying to reach, and properly timed. The good news is that all four elements are simple to achieve, so long as we stay mindful of the difference between feedback quality and quantity, and commit to asking the right people the right questions at the right times.
Decoding Greatness
Ron Friedman
We talked, which helped, but it didn’t solve the underlying problem. When working long-term undercover, I felt I couldn’t allow distractions that could cause a fatal mistake. My survival instinct forced me to concentrate solely on the case, which inevitably shut out my personal life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to think about my loved ones or talk to them, but doing that posed a challenge because I frequently had to focus a hundred percent
The Infiltrator
Robert Mazur
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