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    How to Think Like Obama
    How to Think Like Obama
    How to Think Like Obama
    Ebook202 pages2 hours

    How to Think Like Obama

    By Daniel Smith

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    About this ebook

    Be inspired by Barack Obama and learn how to think big with this unique insight into the mind of one of the world's great influencers.

    Born to a black Kenyan father and white American mother, raised in Hawaii and, for a time, Indonesia, Barack Obama would typically never have been tipped for a future president of the United States, such was the world he was born into. But the path towards greatness and the choices he made along the way can be understood by an attitude that saw him take on any challenge - indeed, 'Yes We Can' became the all-inclusive slogan for his presidential candidacy.

    Riding a wave of positivity and hope for the future that swept him all the way to the Oval Office, Obama aimed to define his presidency as one that would provide opportunities for the many, not the few. With the price of change being gritty negotiation and compromise, Obama evolved the skills of a twenty-first century president which belied his relative inexperience to achieve the America that, as a young man, he had dreamed of.

    How to Think Like Obama reveals the motivations, inspirations and philosophies behind a man who broke the mould to challenge the status quo. With his thoughts on leadership, innovation, overcoming obstacles and fighting inequality, and with quotes by and about him, with this book you too can learn to think like Barack Obama.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateOct 18, 2018
    ISBN9781789290011
    How to Think Like Obama
    Author

    Daniel Smith

    Daniel Smith is the originator and writer of ten books in the biographical How to Think Like… series for Michael O’Mara, which have been translated into twenty languages and sold around 500,000 copies. His works of narrative non-fiction include The Spade as Mighty as the Sword: The Story of World War Two's 'Dig for Victory' Campaign (Aurum Press, 2011) and The Ardlamont Mystery: The Real-Life Story Behind the Creation of Sherlock Holmes (Michael O'Mara Books, 2018).

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      Book preview

      How to Think Like Obama - Daniel Smith

      world.’

      Landmarks in a Remarkable Life

      Everything Starts with Family

      ‘Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important.’

      BARACK OBAMA, 2008

      Barack Obama’s start in life was anything but traditional. When he was born on 4 August 1961 in Honolulu, the capital of the island state of Hawaii, nobody could have seriously predicted that the White House would loom in his future. Yet for all of its unorthodoxy, Obama’s family would instil in him the principles and ambition that saw him rise to high office.

      The roll call of American presidents had, until Obama, been united by certain characteristics – most obviously, their maleness and whiteness. Moreover, more often than not they came from prosperous families, often boasting a long heritage. Apart from being born male, Obama’s story started noticeably differently.

      His mother, Ann Dunham, was a white teenager when she gave birth to him, and his father (also called Barack Obama) was a student economist who hailed from Kenya. In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, the younger Obama would say: ‘That my father looked nothing like the people around me – that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk – barely registered in my mind.’ But if he was colour-blind, much of the rest of the population was not so progressive. This was, after all, a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in some states.

      His parents had met only the year before his birth while both studying at the University of Hawaii, Obama Sr having won a prestigious scholarship for foreign students. They married in February 1961 and subsequently named their child Barack – ‘blessed’ in Swahili – although he soon became known as Barry. Within a few weeks of his birth, Obama’s mother moved herself and her young son to Seattle, where she studied at the University of Washington. Obama Sr stayed in Hawaii until 1962 when he graduated in economics. He then began a master’s degree at Harvard, living separately from the rest of the family. In 1964, the Obama marriage conclusively fell apart and the following year Obama Sr went back to Kenya, where he remarried. Barack would be ten years old before father and son saw each other again.

      Dunham, meanwhile, remarried in 1965, having fallen in love with another fellow student – an Indonesian called Lolo Soetoro. He returned to Indonesia the following year, with his wife and stepchild joining him in 1967. Obama spent the next four years being schooled in Jakarta (including a period of home-schooling with his mother) during which time he kept a monkey as a pet and also became fluent in Indonesian. It was around this time that he first gave voice to his ambitions to one day be American president. Moreover, he learned to box (under the tutelage of Soetoro), having been preyed upon by some local bullies. His efforts at the ‘sweet science’ no doubt provided him with useful skills for his later dealings with Congress.

      THE REALITIES OF LIFE

      In the US, the civil rights movement was gathering a head of steam. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed many forms of discrimination, including those based on race or colour, while the Voting Rights Act of the following year sought to end prohibitions on African-American voting rights at the state and local level. His mother encouraged Barack’s interest in the rapidly developing social climate back in the US, while also pushing his mastery of English, and gradually the young boy’s understanding of what it meant to be black in America grew.

      Dunham was keen that her son should continue his education in the US, and so sent Barack to a renowned Hawaiian private school, Punahou, when he was ten. His mother, and a half-sister called Maya who was born in 1970, remained in Indonesia while he lived with his maternal grandparents, whom he knew as Toot and Gramps. More upheaval was around the corner, though. His mother’s second marriage failed and she returned to Hawaii with Maya in 1972. Barack went to live with them while their mother continued her studies in anthropology. But in 1975 Dunham went back to Indonesia to carry out fieldwork for her PhD, taking Maya with her. Barack, though, did not want to go, so he moved back in with Toot and Gramps and stayed until he graduated from Punahou in 1979.

      Obama’s youth, then, was marked by repeated disruptions. His struggle to establish a sense of self-identity was heightened by the absence of a consistent father figure. He keenly felt the lack of a relationship with his natural father, whom he wished might serve as a guide and role model. As he would reflect in Dreams From My Father, ‘There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me would obviate that single, unassailable fact.’ Yet, where others might have gone off the rails altogether, Obama managed to maintain an admirable sense of equilibrium – although not without the odd outbreak of wayward behaviour, as detailed in the sections to come.

      Key to his success in the face of challenges under which others might have crumbled was the remarkable relationship he maintained with his mother, even as they lived thousands of miles apart. A teacher herself, she had striven to ensure he received the best education she could get him, and instilled in him many of the liberal, humanitarian principles that would guide his later political philosophy – including an openness to people of all backgrounds and a willingness to embrace different cultures. She was, he said, again in his book, ‘the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and … what is best in me I owe to her’.

      Also of vital importance in bolstering him in sometimes torrid times were his beloved maternal grandparents, who offered him home and sanctuary – as well as advice and direction – whenever he needed it. He acknowledged his debt to them in a speech he gave in Houston in February 2018: ‘You know, I was born to a teenage mother. My father left when I was two. So I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. And they didn’t have money, and they didn’t have fame. What they could give me was love, they gave me an education, and they gave me hope.’ It was that love and sense of hope that proved the wellspring from which all his remarkable accomplishments would subsequently emerge.

      You Can See a Lot from the Outside Looking In

      ‘As a teen, I had this divided identity …’

      BARACK OBAMA, INTERVIEW WITH O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE, 2004

      One result of Obama’s unconventional upbringing was that he was often cast as an outsider – a position that fundamentally moulded his world view. As his sense grew of a world divided along lines of ‘them’ and ‘us’, it fostered his belief that true power and change occur when people are brought together. But regularly finding himself on the outside and a step removed from the heart of things also taught him skills of analysing from a distance –

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