Page 59 - Ray Dalio - Principles

ourselves and the amount of time it would take. I found myself
constantly on the phone at three in the morning, trying to make
sense of the shaky accounting and questionable controls at the

companies we were interested in—with all my Bridgewater
responsibilities awaiting me when the sun came up.

After about a year of this, I could see that running both
Bridgewater and Bridgewater China Partners wasn’t going to
be possible, so I closed its doors. Nobody made or lost any
money, because I hadn’t been comfortable enough with what I
was seeing to make any investments. I’m sure that if I had

devoted all my time to it, we would have had great success,
but then Bridgewater would not be what it is today. Despite
passing up this great opportunity, I don’t regret my choice. I
learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just
about anything you want, but not everything you want.
Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to
pursue even better ones.

While I stepped away from that opportunity, China
remained an important part of my own and my family’s lives.
We loved it, especially the people. In 1995, my wife, Barbara,
our eleven-year-old son, Matt, and I decided together that Matt
would spend a year in Beijing, attending an all-Chinese school
and living with our friend Madame Gu, who had stayed with
us in America during the Tiananmen Square days and whom

Matt had visited in China with us when he was three.
Standards of living in China were very different from what
Matt was accustomed to in Connecticut. For example, the
apartment Madame Gu and her husband lived in had hot water
for showers only twice a week, and the school Matt attended

didn’t have heat until well into the winter, so the students wore
their coats in the classrooms. Matt didn’t speak Chinese and
none of his classmates spoke English.

All of this was not just a huge adventure for Matt; it was
completely unprecedented and required special permission
from the Chinese government. I was excited for Matt because I
knew he would see a different world and broaden his mind.

Barbara needed a little convincing and a couple of visits to a
child psychologist for reassurance, but she had lived all around
the world herself and knew how it had benefited her, so she