James Ream

With a quality as elusive as cool, there is the temptation to assume that it must come naturally—that it cannot be forced or forged. But the dirty little secret of our new president’s cool is that no element of it came with ease. Obama achieved his laid-back, too-cool-to-care persona by being a committed grind: He spent years working through his insecurities, learning to control his emotions, and sanding down the rough edges of his personality.