“Don’t be looking to the sidelines all sheepish,” Barack Obama yells at Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Lewis in “Obama’s Way,” in October’s V.F. “You got to get back and play D!” When you’re on the president’s basketball team, Lewis learns, and you take a stupid shot, the president of the United States screams at you. When Lewis gets benched, he notices that no one goes easy on No. 44 (Obama’s number in the line of U.S. presidents, also emblazoned on his high-tops). “If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back,” explains one of the players for the other team, a former Florida State point guard. (Everyone on the court played basketball in college, and some even played pro overseas.)

“Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president,” Lewis, who interviewed President Obama multiple times over six months—on Air Force One, in the Oval Office, and on the basketball court—asks. Obama explains that every president is deeply aware of his duty to the American people. “Everything you are doing has to be viewed through this prism,” he says. “I don’t know George Bush well. I know Bill Clinton better. But I think they both approached the job in that spirit.”

Obama also covers the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he says, “or at some point you’ll just break down.” At play, the president wears red-white-and-blue Under Armor high-tops, but at work it’s strictly blue or gray suits. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make,” he tells Lewis. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” Lewis says that if he were president he might keep a list in his head. “I do,” Obama adds. “That’s my last piece of advice to you. Keep a list.”

“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama tells Lewis. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”

“One of my most important tasks is making sure I stay open to people, and the meaning of what I’m doing, but not to get so overwhelmed by it that it’s paralyzing. Option one is to go through the motions. That I think is a disaster for a president. But there is the other danger,” Obama tells Lewis. “There are times when I have to save it and let it out at the end of the day.”

“When I’m in Washington I spend half my time in this place,” the president says of the Oval Office. “It’s surprisingly comfortable.” Obama didn’t make many changes to the room. “We came in when the economy was tanking and our first priority wasn’t redecorating.” One thing he did do early on, though, was to fill the shelves with the original applications for several famous patents and patent models. “They had a bunch of plates in there,” he says, of prior administrations. “I’m not a dish guy.” Obama points to the 1849 patent model of Samuel Morse’s first telegraph: “This is the start of the Internet right here,” he tells Lewis. The president says there is no taping system in the Oval Office but that it would be fun to have one: “It’d be wonderful to have a verbatim record of history.” He also tells Lewis that people are nervous when they enter that storied room; “I think that the space affects them. But when you work here you forget about it.” According to Lewis, the first thing President Obama did in there, on his first day on the job, was to call in several junior staff members. “Let’s just stay normal,” he told them.