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"Samantha Power, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, shares her hard-won work wisdom with Glamour&amp;#x27;s Cindi Leive. Ambassador Power, right, in her New York City office with Leive There&amp;#x27;s a job, and then there&amp;#x27;s a job. Samantha Power&amp;#x27;s post at the U.N. is definitely the latter. (Her assignment is essentially: Make the world a better place. No pressure!) And at 43 she&amp;#x27;s the youngest person ever to have the role. But Power is used to tough gigs: She&amp;#x27;s been a war correspondent, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and a high-profile member of the Obama administration. I visited the ambassador (and, by the way, mother of two) at her office near the U.N. to hear about her career&amp;amp;mdash;and her advice for the rest of us. CINDI LEIVE: You&amp;#x27;re celebrating your one-year anniversary at the U.N., and from the outside it looks like this has to be one of the most difficult jobs a person can have. Does it feel that way? SAMANTHA POWER: What is it Tolstoy said&amp;amp;mdash;every job is hard in its own special way? [Laughs.] Yeah, not quite that, but there is a convergence of crises that makes it challenging to keep the world&amp;#x27;s attention. Normally, Syria would be something we&amp;#x27;d be focused on 24/7&amp;amp;mdash;and we are...alongside Central African Republic, the schoolgirls in Nigeria, and the sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Terrorists nearly overran Mali; South Sudan is imploding.... But there&amp;#x27;s something beautiful about working in the one place in the world where the world is present. [Otherwise], one would have to go to each of these countries to negotiate. CL: How do you know when your workday is over? I mean, this is not a job where you can strike everything off your to-do list. SP: That&amp;#x27;s true. You could be here all night every night and still feel like you were not making a sufficient dent in the world&amp;#x27;s problems. I think the key is prioritization. But every job presents the tyranny of the inbox, of allowing the urgent to crowd out the important. So we have to have our lodestars. CL: Let&amp;#x27;s talk about how you came to your career. You wanted to be a sportscaster? SP: Yeah. She&amp;#x27;d barely remember this, but I was interning in the CBS sports affiliate in Atlanta with Robin Roberts.... I was taking notes on a Braves-Padres game, and on the live feed came footage of these kids protesting and getting crushed [during the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989]. In that moment I became like a lot of young people in this country today, horrified and inspired but confused as to what I might do. My second epiphany came as an intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The man I worked for was consumed with what was going on in Bosnia. And the more I knew [about it] the more saddened I was. There were these images of emaciated men behind barbed wire.... It was like, I&amp;#x27;ve got to find a way to do something.... I was working in the same building as U.S. News &amp;amp; World Report, and I banged on the door and said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m ready to go.&amp;quot; And they said, &amp;quot;What&amp;#x27;s your combat experience?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Does my parents&amp;#x27; divorce count? It was pretty rough.&amp;quot; Then they said, &amp;quot;What&amp;#x27;s your reporting experience?&amp;quot; And I said, &amp;quot;I covered the women&amp;#x27;s volleyball team in college exceptionally well.&amp;quot; [Laughs.] The guy was like, &amp;quot;You are so not ready to be a war correspondent.&amp;quot; But he said he would take my collect calls, so I [went]. The journalists there, many of whom were women...showed me the ropes. CL: What was your family&amp;#x27;s reaction to that? Did they think you were insane for going? Were they cheering you on? Both? SP: Well, I promised my mother I would stay in Croatia and do it from there. CL: But you did not do that. SP: I did not.... My [step]dad would take my clips&amp;amp;mdash;they were mailed to my parents&amp;amp;mdash;and stick them in the drawer so my mother wouldn&amp;#x27;t see the dateline [in the war zone]; she was just gonna worry. But I began to do NPR spots, and she was an avid listener. So one day, it was like, &amp;quot;This is Samantha Power reporting live from Sarajevo.&amp;quot; She&amp;#x27;s like, eeerrgh! [mimes frantic steering]&amp;amp;mdash;you know, crashing the car. She was relieved [when I came back and went to law school]. CL: In law school you found yourself thinking about genocide. That became years of your life, writing A Problem From Hell, right? SP: Yeah. As I went back, historically, I saw a pattern: The very enormity of genocide made people turn away. If you weren&amp;#x27;t going to send the Marines and go all in, the temptation was not to do a whole lot.... So that was A Problem From Hell. My mother, though, describes the title of the book as my relationship to writing it. After six years, she jokes the book was her problem from hell. My problem from hell. NEXT: How Power Balances Kids, Career, and the Occasional Mistake &amp;amp;#187; Power (and her boss) at her U.N. nomination announcement in the Rose Garden last summer CL: How do you not take your work home with you, emotionally? It doesn&amp;#x27;t get darker than writing about genocide, and yet by all accounts you&amp;#x27;re a sunny, optimistic, friendly person. SP: I guess I&amp;#x27;ve always felt like the lucky one, for two reasons. One, I&amp;#x27;m not them; if you want to feel good about your life, look at these people and you&amp;#x27;ll feel blessed . But also [as a journalist], I&amp;#x27;ve felt as if it&amp;#x27;s a privilege that people share their stories and want you to be the messenger.... Even in my current job, when I go abroad, I&amp;#x27;m racing to get back to the president and the secretary to share what I&amp;#x27;ve seen.... That&amp;#x27;s the long answer. The short answer is that my kids are my salvation.... It&amp;#x27;s a delight to walk in and get charged by a five-year-old and a two-year-old. That&amp;#x27;ll make you forget the darkness. CL: You&amp;#x27;re willing to talk about the experience of being a mother. But I notice a lot of other high-profile women don&amp;#x27;t want to bring their children into a public discussion of themselves. SP: Maybe it&amp;#x27;s like when guys get the shiny new car they want to show off. My favorite things in life are my children. If somebody wants to understand me, there&amp;#x27;s no better window into that than my children. CL: Let&amp;#x27;s get back to the chronology of your career. Your dinner with now President Obama [who contacted Power to request a meeting after reading her book] seems like a great example of following your instinct; after that conversation, you decided to leave your job and work for him. Was it in fact that immediate? SP: Yes. I heard myself say, &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#x27;t I?&amp;quot;.... I was inspired by the way he approached foreign policy, and I felt&amp;amp;mdash;what&amp;#x27;s the downside to learning how Congress works and partnering with somebody who had a vision? I look wonderfully Machiavellian, but...he had just gotten to the Senate. He was adamant [that he wasn&amp;#x27;t running for president]. CL: So you weren&amp;#x27;t thinking, I&amp;#x27;m gonna be ambassador to the United Nations? SP: No. I tell young people: If you [make a job choice] on the basis of something other than your nose or your gut, it&amp;#x27;s unlikely to work out.... It&amp;#x27;s perilous to look ahead and be like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;d like to be ambassador.&amp;quot; I would never have gone to Bosnia or spent years writing about genocide. Do it on the basis of what you can learn.... It&amp;#x27;s like falling in love. Your whole dating life, you&amp;#x27;re thinking, On the one hand, on the other hand. Then you meet the right guy, and you&amp;#x27;re not in list-making mode; you&amp;#x27;re just with the person you&amp;#x27;re supposed to be with. Jobs are like that too. CL: Speaking of relationships, I&amp;#x27;ve seen you and your husband [legal scholar Cass Sunstein] described both as the &amp;quot;fun couple of the twenty-first century&amp;quot; [by Esquire] and as &amp;quot;the most dangerous couple in America&amp;quot; [by conservative host Glenn Beck]. How would you describe your partnership? SP: I can say only that I get to be married to the liveliest mind I&amp;#x27;ve ever encountered.... I hit the jackpot. It took a long time, but I mean, we have the same birthday! I joke that I spent 38 years scouring the globe, going to war zones, trying to find the person with my exact birthday&amp;amp;mdash; CL: And it worked. SP: Yeah, I found the same-birthday guy. CL: I want to ask about working on the campaign trail [for Obama in 2008]. You stepped down in a high-profile way&amp;amp;mdash; SP: Yes. Not my finest hour. CL: But there&amp;#x27;s something to be learned about how to handle a mistake at work. You referred in an interview to Hillary Clinton [then running against Obama] as a &amp;quot;monster,&amp;quot; and you immediately apologized. SP: Because I was so mad at myself. It would have been impossible to give an account as to why, any kind of exculpatory thing.... The thing that spooked me the most was that Senator Clinton could actually think I would think that. There were a lot of haters...and the idea that I contributed to that, in that climate, gave me shudders.... In general, my rule is find out where your heart is, then speak from the heart. People know the difference between that and something scripted. CL: Did it make a difference when you were able to apologize to her personally? SP: A world of difference. The best was working together [during Senator Clinton&amp;#x27;s tenure at the State Department] and supporting her. CL: I know you don&amp;#x27;t believe in a five-year plan, but what will success mean in this job? SP: We&amp;#x27;ve got to bring the conflict in Syria to an end.... In sub-Saharan Africa, so much good is happening, but ethnic conflicts set many of these countries back. And we should take advantage of the constituency around the girls of Nigeria and dedicate ourselves, [with] Malala [Yousafzai] as a newly iconic voice, to elevating girls&amp;#x27; education. CL: You&amp;#x27;ve known some of the people who&amp;#x27;ve had this job before you well. I&amp;#x27;m curious what you learned from them. SP: I talk to Susan [Rice, the previous U.S. ambassador] a lot, but rarely about mentoring&amp;amp;mdash;[it&amp;#x27;s] what to do about this crisis or that crisis! Madeleine Albright&amp;#x27;s been just a wonderful big sister. When she was here, there were only seven women [U.N. ambassadors worldwide]. She created this group, the G7. Now there are 31, so we have the G31. From Richard Holbrooke [the late American diplomat and former U.N. ambassador]&amp;amp;mdash;and I miss him every day&amp;amp;mdash;I learned two things. One, prioritization: Never take your eye off the longer-term reforms. The other thing is, he was a hell of a schmoozer! So I should take advantage of my Irish love of beer and gift of the gab, and build relationships. That&amp;#x27;s a cherished part of the job, asking someone, &amp;quot;How did you get to be the Rwandan ambassador?&amp;quot; I try to take advantage of the fact that I hope to be here at least until the president&amp;#x27;s term ends getting to know my colleagues. Power and her son, Declan, in 2013 after her confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C. SECRETS OF THE OFFICE MASTER Ambassador Power on her ultimate job-success strategies: Q: How do you make decisions? A: I take more of a bite-size approach to professional development. You know, what in the here and now is this going to offer? Q: What&amp;#x27;s your advice to a woman who&amp;#x27;s made a mistake at work? A: First, recognize [the] mistake. The main thing is taking responsibility and being authentic. Q: How do you juggle your job and your family? A: Every working mother struggles with the BlackBerry, knowing the boss can call. My day job [is dealing] with Syria, but the challenges are similar."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2014/07/career-advice-ambassador-samantha-power>