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Happier with Gretchen Rubin

Little: Eisenhower: To Do Some Work Well, We Have to Do Some Work Poorly

Happier with Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin / The Onward Project

Education, Health & Fitness, Self-improvement

4.713K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2019

⏱️ 1 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eisenhower gave Nixon some helpful advice: to be excellent in some areas, we have to be willing to be mediocre in other areas. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Gretchen Ribbon and this is a little happier.

0:03.0

I have written two biographies in my time,

0:06.0

40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill,

0:08.0

and 40 Ways to Look at JFK.

0:10.0

I had also planned to write a book called

0:12.0

40 Ways to Look at Richard Nixon,

0:14.0

and I did a tremendous amount of research for that book

0:17.0

until my editor said that she didn't want to publish it,

0:20.0

so I had to cancel that project.

0:22.0

Now, at the time, this was a huge disappointment and shock to me,

0:25.0

but as it turns out, the book that I wrote instead

0:28.0

was the happiness project, so that whole thing turned out fine.

0:31.0

But as part of my research for the book that I ended up not writing,

0:35.0

I did a lot of work related to Richard Nixon.

0:38.0

And one story I often recall from that time came from a book

0:41.0

by Richard Reeves called Nixon Alone in the White House.

0:45.0

Now, when Nixon was president, an advisor drafted a letter,

0:49.0

which Nixon thought didn't strike the right tone,

0:52.0

but he sent it anyway, and he repeated to that aid

0:55.0

something that Eisenhower had once told him.

0:59.0

A true executive can sign a poor letter without changing it.

1:04.0

I remind myself to be excellent in some areas,

...

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