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garnered lots of good reviews. More important, the book was like a seed planted in my twenties that finally sprouted in my forties, when I became seriously engaged in political life.
    I had abundant passion and abundant hope (not to mention abundant nerve!), all of which pushed me past all my fears.

David L. Calhoun
    Chairman and CEO of the Nielsen Company

    Develop Your Own Brand of Self-Confidence
    I worked for a guy named Jack Welch for twenty years at GE. He was and is a great mentor and a great leader. If I had to isolate the subject he spoke most passionately to me about during those years, it is that self-confidence is the most important characteristic of successful people. Self-confidence—a quiet self-confidence that is not cockiness, not conceit, not arrogance—is the key to excelling, no matter what you do in life.
    Henry David Thoreau once said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I don’t believe that most do, but I do believe that quietly desperate people are the ones who never quite found their self-confidence. So how do you get it? What is the secret to developing your own brand of self-confidence?
    First, you must resolve to grow intellectually, morally, technically, and professionally every day through your entire work and family life. You need to be absolutely paranoid about the currency of your knowledge, and to ask yourself every day, Am I really up to speed? Or am I stagnating intellectually, faking it or, even worse, falling behind? Am I still learning? Or am I just doing the same stuff on a different day, or, as Otis Redding sings, “sittin’ on the dock of the bay / Watching the tide roll away”?
    The lust for learning is age-independent. When I worked for GE, we had fifty-five- and sixty-year-old engineers in our jet-engine business who were as leading-edge as anyone I knew then, or have known since. Their lust for learning defined their very being at work and in their communities. They perfected the habit of learning, and they practiced it every working hour despite the fact that many of them were already the world’s leading experts in their respective fields. In contrast, we’d occasionally find a thirty-year-old tiptoeing around who had already forgotten how to learn; who may have actually listened to someone who told him, “Today marks the end of learning and the time to begin doing.” If you bring that mind-set to companies like GE or Nielsen, your career will be short-lived. We compensate people for what we believe they will learn—for the discoveries that lie ahead—not for yesterday’s news.
    Next, get to know yourself. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses with cool objectivity. Even as your confidence grows, you must suppress your ego; focus on your weaknesses and on ways to overcome them. What are your sources of anxiety?
    Years ago, still early in my career, I realized that I had no real experience with customers—a shortcoming that caused me great personal anxiety, particularly in light of my boss’s desire to promote me quickly into business leadership. Against the advice of my boss, I accepted a job and a demotion in order to work in sales. I’ve never made a better career move in my life. My confidence grew and my anxiety abated. At another period, I found myself envious of the courage and resourcefulness of GE executives who had spent years in developing markets in Southeast Asia or in South America, where there were strange languages and business practices, different timelines and ways of getting things done. In order to have these experiences, I uprooted my family, with their consent, and took a job in Asia. I faced the unknown, made more than a few mistakes, and am better for it in the end, and so is my family.
    During the course of our lives, we must all wrestle with the “work/life balance.” This issue, at its heart, comes down once again to self-confidence. Five short years after graduating from college, I fell into a terrible rut,