Ashraf Ghani is an impatient man.

“I have a strange—because there’s no other way probably of describing it—uh, temper,” he says. “I’m a very difficult taskmaster. I don’t wait.”

That's not so surprising when you consider he was educated, started a family, and worked most of his adult life in America. But he's also Afghan, raised in Kabul, and now one of eight presidential candidates in a country not known for punctuality.

It's one way the former U.S. citizen—he renounced his citizenship in 2009 during his first run for the Afghan presidency—is still defined by America, and it’s one reason he’s known as a prickly personality. “He has an incredible reputation of having really angered every cabinet member he ever worked with,” says Ronald E. Neumann, America’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005-2007. But perhaps that’s what it takes. Because Ghani, Neumann adds, “is enormously organized. Any time you go see Ashraf he has ideas and plans and the plans are developed, and they’re developed down to six levels of specificity.”

That specificity reveals itself even in the way Ashraf Ghani speaks about himself, like a man reading from a ledger of his own life with all the dates listed neatly in the margins. He doesn’t have to pause and add things up in his head—all the details are at the ready, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to remember, five decades later and without a moment’s hesitation, that “I left on August 26, 1977” or that “in the last four years I have travelled 140 times to the provinces and there isn’t one province I haven’t been to at least twice.” “An encyclopedic memory,” is how Clare Lockhart, who launched the Institute for State Effectiveness and coauthored Fixing Failed States with Ghani, describes it. “An ability to recall events with absolute precision."