Hard Call: Great Decisions and the extraordinary people who made them by john mccain with mark salter

This book is a little bit of a weird one for me to recommend. It’s a 428 page book that I’m only recommending reading about 40 pages of. Let me explain.

This book is organized around six principles that the authors feel are critical to making hard decisions: Awareness, Foresight, Timing, Confidence, Humility, and Inspiration. Each quality has a section of the book devoted to it. Each section begins with McCain and Salter’s thoughts on that quality, which is followed by real-life examples of people who exemplified that quality in making a hard decision. The stories I found to be less than inspirational, but the essays at the beginning of each section were profound. Truly mind-blowing. I highlighted more per page of those pages than I have in a lot of the other books I recommend on this list.

You might like the stories that accompany the essays. Either way, pick this book up and read the Introduction, the beginnings of each section, and the Afterword. You won’t be sorry. This is from the introduction:

“We must prepare ourselves, of course, for such eventualities, by learning all we can about the situation in which we bear responsibility. We must understand, to the best of our ability, the people involved, with us and against us. We must know ourselves, our own strengths and weaknesses, and how best to apply the former and compensate for the latter. We must remember, almost instinctively, the lessons we have learned from earlier decisions, both those that succeeded and those that did not. And we must learn to act when necessary, no matter how challenging the obstacles, and to wait when caution is appropriate, no matter how urgently we feel the need to proceed.”

Recommended for all ranks