Balancing my inner and outer life.

To be taller. I’ve been looking up at certain people all my life. If I was taller, I could look down and see them a lot better.

Thinking that I am not enough or not beautiful the way I am. That thinking is super-dangerous.

To be more outgoing. I love being home, but sometimes I feel guilty that I like it too much.

Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. … Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.

You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. … I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia.

The thing actually that I most dislike is cruelty. I can't stand cruel people. And if I see people doing something mean to somebody else, just to make themselves feel important it really gets me mad.

There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing. … For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I'm dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I'm not taking the American people seriously. I'm absolutely positive that I'm serving the American people better if I'm maintaining my authenticity. And that's an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I'm at my best when I believe what I am saying.

Part of what separates us from the other creatures on earth is that we make up stories. We are storytellers. And we can tell bad stories and we can tell good stories. We can tell stories that lead to division and hate and war. Or we can tell stories that lead to cooperation and peace and progress.

And finally, change requires more than just speaking out -- it requires listening, as well. In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois's first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement.