Mine has been a long journey, a lifetime journey to Oslo. It was shaped by the values of my parents and by my two grandmothers – indigenous Liberians, farmers and market traders – neither of whom could read or write. They taught me that only through service is one's life truly blessed.

But if it did well, I’d remember what my parents told me, which was the hardest thing is not attaining success, it’s being able to endure it.

I thought often during my years in the White House of an admonition that we received in our small school in Plains, Georgia, from a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman. She often said: "We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

One of my editors once said to me, “If you get invited to the White House, take your notebook with you,” and he meant it. It’s something one has to always remember because when you stray off the path, you do a disservice to the American public.

But I couldn’t let myself feel that way until it was all right to. And that’s part of the surgical mind too, addressing what you need to, and you know you can do, and postponing how you feel about it, thinking only of the patient and what you need to do.