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My family was incredibly supportive. If I wanted to run, they would be there for me 100 percent. Chelsea had campaigned relentlessly in 2008, becoming a superb surrogate and sounding board for me. Bill knows more than almost anyone alive about what it takes to be President. He was convinced I was the best person for the job and strenuously denied that this was just a husband’s love talking.

Still, the obstacles were daunting. Yes, I had left the State Department with some of the highest approval ratings of anyone in public life—one poll from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News in January 2013 put me at 69 percent. I was also the most admired woman in the world, according to the annual Gallup poll. Ah, the good old days.

But I knew that my high approval rating was partly because Republicans had been willing to work with me when I was Secretary and praised my service. They had trained their fire on President Obama and largely left me alone. Also, the press corps covering me in those years genuinely cared about the work of diplomacy and the issues I dealt with, which meant the news coverage of my work was substantive and, for the most part, accurate. I knew it would be different if I ran for President again. And as Bill said—and history supported—the country’s perennial desire for change would make it hard for any Democrat to win, especially one like me who was closely tied to the current administration.

In 2014, President Obama’s approval rating was stuck in the low 40s. Despite the administration’s best efforts, the economic recovery was still anemic, with wages and real incomes stagnating for most Americans. The administration had botched the rollout of the new health care marketplaces, a centerpiece of the President’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. A new terrorist group, ISIS, was seizing territory in Iraq and Syria and beheading civilians live on the internet. There was even a terrifying Ebola epidemic in Africa that many Americans worried would jump to the United States. Thankfully, the Obama administration reacted swiftly to shore up our public health defenses and support Ebola response efforts in West Africa. Despite the facts, conservative partisans warned breathlessly—and with zero evidence—that ISIS terrorists would sneak across our southern border and bring Ebola with them. It was a right-wing conspiracy theory trifecta.

In the run-up to the 2014 midterms, Bill and I both campaigned hard across the country for endangered Democratic incumbents and competitive challengers. Late at night, we’d compare notes about the anger, resentment, and cynicism we were seeing, and the vicious Republican attacks fueling it.

For years, GOP leaders had stoked the public’s fears and disappointments. They were willing to sabotage the government in order to block President Obama’s agenda. For them, dysfunction wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. They knew that the worse Washington looked, the more voters would reject the idea that government could ever be an effective force for progress. They could stop most good things from happening and then be rewarded because nothing good was happening. When something good did happen, such as expanding health care, they would focus on tearing it down, rather than making it better. With many of their voters getting their news from partisan sources, they had found a way to be consistently rewarded for creating the gridlock voters say they hate.

The success of this strategy was becoming evident. In 2014, in Georgia and North Carolina, I campaigned for two smart, talented, independent-minded candidates who should have had a good chance to win: Michelle Nunn and Senator Kay Hagan. Both races were tight up until the end. But days before the election, a savvy Georgia political observer confided to me that he’d seen private polling that showed Nunn and other Democrats cratering. Republicans were using fears about ISIS and Ebola to scare people and raise questions about whether a Democrat, especially a woman, could really be tough enough on national security.

In several states, Republicans ran an ad mixing images of Ebola responders in hazmat suits with photos of President Obama playing golf. It’s ironic to remember that now, with Donald Trump spending about 20 percent of his new presidency at his own luxury golf clubs. I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter, and cable news, what’s left?

Bill told me about a particularly troubling conversation he had with an old friend who lived up in the Ozarks of northern Arkansas. He had become an endangered species in Arkansas—a still-loyal, progressive Democrat. Bill called and asked our friend if he thought two-term Senator Mark Pryor could be reelected. Mark was a moderate Democrat with a golden name. (His father, David, was an Arkansas legend, having served as Congressman, Governor, and Senator.) Mark had voted for Obamacare because he believed everyone deserved the high-quality health care he received when he suffered from cancer as a young man. Our friend said he didn’t know, and he and Bill agreed the best way to find out was to visit a certain country store deep in the Ozarks where a couple hundred people regularly came out of the woods to buy food and talk politics.

When our friend got back, he called Bill and told him what the store owner had said: “You know, I always supported Clinton, and I like Mark Pryor a lot. He’s a good man and fair to everyone. But we’re going to give Congress to the Republicans.” The store owner was no fool. He knew the Republicans wouldn’t do anything for him and his neighbors. But he thought the Democrats hadn’t done anything, either. “And at least the Republicans won’t do anything to us,” he said. “The Democrats want to take away my gun and make me go to a gay wedding.”

Sure enough, Mark lost big on Election Day to Tom Cotton, one of the most right-wing members of Congress. It wasn’t that voters were turning away from the policies Mark and other Democrats had championed—in fact, in the same election, they passed an increase in the state’s minimum wage. But the politics of cultural identity and resentment were overwhelming evidence, reason, and personal experience. It seemed like “Brexit” had come to America even before the vote in the United Kingdom, and it didn’t bode well for 2016. Our party might have won the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, but the political landscape for the 2016 race was shaping up to be extremely challenging.

As if all this wasn’t enough to worry about, there was also the simple, inescapable fact that I was turning sixty-eight years old. If I ran and won, I would be the oldest President since Reagan. I suspected there’d be waves of rumor-mongering about my health—and everything else in my life. It would be invasive, crass, and insidious. But contrary to persistent rumors made up and spread by the right-wing media, my health was excellent. I had recovered fully from the concussion I suffered in late 2012. And the whole world could see I had no trouble keeping up a punishing travel schedule. I admired the likes of Diana Nyad, who at the age of sixty-four became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. When she finally emerged back on dry land, she offered three pieces of advice: Never ever give up. You’re never too old to chase your dreams. And even if something looks like a solitary sport, it’s a team effort. Words to live by!

Still, is this how I wanted to spend my time? Did I really want to put myself back in front of the firing squad of national politics for years on end, first in the campaign and then, hopefully, in the White House? Some of my dearest friends—including my longtime advisors and former chiefs of staff in the White House and the State Department, Maggie Williams and Cheryl Mills—told me I would be crazy to do it. Plenty of other people in my position had passed up the chance to run: everyone from General Colin Powell, to Mike Bloomberg, to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who came so close to running, he had an airplane waiting on the tarmac to take him to New Hampshire when he finally decided “no.”

So why did I do it?

I did it because when you clear away all the petty and not-so-petty reasons not to run—all the headaches, all the obstacles—what was left was something too important to pass up. It was a chance to do the most good I would ever be able to do. In just one day at the White House, you can get more done for more people than in months anywhere else. We had to build an economy that worked for everyone and an inclusive society that respected everyone. We had to take on serious national security threats. These were issues already on my mind all the time, and they would all require a strong, qualified President. I knew I would make the most of every minute. Once I started thinking about it that way, I couldn’t stop.

As it happened, the person who gave me the chance to serve as Secretary of State would once again play a decisive role.

A month after I left the State Department in 2013, Barack and Michelle invited Bill and me to join them for a private dinner in the White House residence. The four of us talked about our kids and the experience of raising them in the fishbowl of the White House. We discussed life after the Oval Office. Barack and Michelle mused about maybe one day moving to New York, just as we had done. That prospect still felt very far away. We all had high hopes for Barack’s second term. There was a lot of unfinished business, both at home and around the world. We ended up staying for hours, talking late into the night. If (back in the heated days of 2008) any of us could have gotten a glimpse of that evening, we wouldn’t have believed it.

Over the next year or so, the President and I kept in regular touch. He invited me back for lunch that summer, and the two of us sat out on the terrace outside the Oval Office eating jambalaya. I think he was just a tiny bit jealous of my newfound freedom, which was a good reminder of how all-consuming the job is. We had lunch again the following spring. Some of the time the President and I talked about work, especially the foreign policy challenges he was facing in the second term. But gradually, as 2013 turned into 2014, our conversations turned more frequently to politics.

President Obama knew the challenges facing Democrats. He never took his reelection for granted, and while it was a resounding win in 2012 (the legitimately resounding kind), he knew that his legacy depended to a large degree on a Democratic victory in 2016. He made it clear that he believed that I was our party’s best chance to hold the White House and keep our progress going, and he wanted me to move quickly to prepare to run. I knew President Obama thought the world of his Vice President, Joe Biden, and was close to some other potential candidates, so his vote of confidence meant a great deal to me. We had our differences in both style and substance, but overwhelmingly we shared the same values and policy goals. We both saw ourselves as pragmatic progressives trying to move the country forward in the face of implacable opposition from a Republican Party that had been taken over by the radical-conservative Tea Party fringe and was in thrall to its billionaire backers. I shared the President’s sense of urgency about how much was at stake in 2016, but I still wasn’t entirely sold that running was the right decision for me.

As I had found when he insisted that I become Secretary of State and literally wouldn’t take no for an answer, President Obama is a persuasive and persistent advocate. In the summer of 2013, David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager who engineered my defeat in 2008, offered to provide any help and advice he could as I planned my next steps after leaving the State Department. I invited him over to my house in Washington, and quickly saw why the President had leaned on him so much. He really knew his stuff. We met again in September 2014, when he visited my house once more to give me a presentation about what it would take to build a winning presidential campaign. He spoke in detail about strategy, data, personnel, and timing. I listened carefully, determined that if I did jump into the race, I would avoid the mistakes that had dogged me the last time. Plouffe emphasized that time was of the essence, as hard as that was to believe more than two years before the election. In fact, he said I was late already and urged me to get started. He was right.

For me, political campaigns have always been something to get through in order to be able to govern, which is the real prize. I’m not the most natural politician. I’m a lot better than I’m usually given credit for, but it’s true that I’ve always been more comfortable talking about others rather than myself. That made me an effective political spouse, surrogate, and officeholder, but I had to adjust when I became a candidate myself. At the beginning, I had to actively try to use the word I more. Luckily, I love meeting people, listening, learning, building relationships, working on policy, and trying to help solve problems. I would have loved to meet all 320 million Americans one at a time. But that’s not how campaigns work.

In the end, I came back to the part that’s most important to me. We Methodists are taught to “do all the good you can.” I knew that if I ran and won, I could do a world of good and help an awful lot of people.

Does that make me ambitious? I guess it does. But not in the sinister way that people often mean it. I did not want to be President because I want power for power’s sake. I wanted power to do what I could to help solve problems and prepare the country for the future. It’s audacious for anyone to believe he or she should be President, but I did.

I started calling policy experts, reading thick binders of memos, and making lists of problems that needed more thought. I got excited thinking about all the ways we could make the economy stronger and fairer, improve health care and expand coverage, make college more affordable and job training programs more effective, and tackle big challenges, such as climate change and terrorism. It was honestly a lot of fun.

I talked with John Podesta, a longtime friend who had been Bill’s Chief of Staff in the White House and was also a top advisor to President Obama. If I was going to do this again, I would need John’s help. He promised that if I ran, he’d leave the White House and become chairman of my campaign. He thought we could put together a fantastic team very quickly. An energetic grassroots group called Ready for Hillary was already drumming up support. All of that was very reassuring.

I thought back to what made me run for Senate the first time. It was the late 1990s and Democrats in New York were urging me to run, but I kept turning them down. No First Lady had ever done anything like that before. And I hadn’t run for office since I’d been student government president at Wellesley College.

One day I visited a school in New York with the tennis star Billie Jean King for an event promoting an HBO special about women in sports. Hanging above our heads was a big banner proclaiming the title of the film, Dare to Compete. Before my speech, the seventeen-year-old captain of the high school basketball team introduced me. Her name was Sofia Totti. As we shook hands, she bent down and whispered in my ear, “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete.” Something just clicked. For years, I had been telling young women to step up, participate, go for what you believe in. How could I not be willing to do the same? Fifteen years later, I was asking myself the same question.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I declared, “I’m doing it!” Bill and I closed out 2014 with a trip to the beautiful home of our friends Oscar and Annette de la Renta in the Dominican Republic. We swam, ate good food, played cards, and thought about the future. By the time we got back, I was ready to run.

The most compelling argument is the hardest to say out loud: I was convinced that both Bill and Barack were right when they said I would be a better President than anyone else out there.

I also thought I’d win. I knew that Republicans had moved much further from the vital center of American politics than Democrats had, as nonpartisan political scientists have documented. But I still believed that the United States was a pretty sensible country. Previous generations faced much worse crises than anything we’ve seen, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, from World War II to the Cold War, and they responded by electing wise and talented leaders. Only rarely have Americans gotten carried away by extremes or enthralled by ideology, and never for long. Both major political parties, despite the madness of their respective nominating processes, nearly always managed to weed out the most extreme candidates. Before 2016, we’d never elected a President who flagrantly refused to abide by the basic standards of democracy and decency. If I was the best-qualified candidate, had good ideas about the future, held my own on the trail and in the debates, and demonstrated a capacity to get things done with both Republicans and Democrats, it was reasonable to believe I could get elected and be able to govern effectively.

That’s why I ran.

There are things I regret about the 2016 campaign, but the decision to run isn’t one of them.

I started this chapter with some lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker” that I’ve always loved:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

When I first read that, as a teenager in Park Ridge, Illinois, it struck a chord somewhere deep inside, maybe in that place where dim ancestral memories of indomitable Welsh and English coal miners hid alongside half-understood stories from my mother’s childhood of privation and abandonment. “There is only the trying.”

I went back to that poem a few years later, in 1969, when my classmates at Wellesley asked me to speak at our graduation. Many of us were feeling dismayed and disillusioned by the Vietnam War and the racial injustice in America, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and our seeming inability to change our country’s course. My paraphrasing gave Eliot’s elegant English verse a Midwestern makeover: “There’s only the trying,” I told my classmates, “again and again and again; to win again what we’ve lost before.”

In the nearly fifty years since, it’s become a mantra for me and our family that, win or lose, it’s important to “get caught trying.” Whether you’re trying to win an election or pass a piece of legislation that will help millions of people, build a friendship or save a marriage, you’re never guaranteed success. But you are bound to try. Again and again and again.