Dan Glick­man tells his sto­ry of a clas­sic fam­i­ly back­ground, reli­gious her­itage, and ​“Mid­west­ern-nice” roots, and how it led to a long and suc­cess­ful career in pub­lic ser­vice. Dan com­bines a steady sense of humor with seri­ous reflec­tion on his rise from the mid­dle of nowhere to becom­ing a suc­cess­ful US politi­cian and the first Jew­ish sec­re­tary of agri­cul­ture. Dan defines suc­cess as a will­ing­ness to lis­ten, an abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate ideas, and a yen for com­pro­mise. He has suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ed the worlds of con­gres­sion­al pol­i­tics, cab­i­net-lev­el admin­is­tra­tion and the enter­tain­ment indus­try and offers many tricks of the trade he has learned over the years. Dan is con­vinced the tox­i­c­i­ty seen in our cur­rent polit­i­cal cul­ture and pub­lic dis­course can be mit­i­gat­ed by the prin­ci­ples that have guid­ed his life: a strong sense of humor (specif­i­cal­ly an abil­i­ty to laugh at him­self), respect and civil­i­ty for those who have dif­fer­ent points of view, a belief sys­tem found­ed on the Gold­en Rule, and a com­mit­ment to solve prob­lems rather than cre­ate irrec­on­cil­able conflicts.