What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself?

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."

But I was blessed with parents who taught me not to let anyone make me feel like I wasn’t good enough, and as my mother told me, “You are just as good as anyone else. You get an education and try to be somebody. Then you won’t have to be kicked around by anybody, and you won’t have to depend on anyone for your livelihood, not even a man.”

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.

Oh, my granddad was ahead of his time. He was always in favor of education. My dad and mother were too, but Granddad was very aggressive in that. You know, as he used to say, “You’ve got to fill your head with new ideas so you can use them later to improve your own status and that of the neighborhood.”

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.

[My father] used to say all the time, “You’re in a struggle, but if you get in a fight and lose your temper, you’ll lose the fight. So don’t get mad, get smart.”

And what this person told me was that what you need to do is that, when you go to the White House, always say in the back of your mind that this may be the last time I’m going there because I might have to tell this president something he doesn’t like.