Page 89 - Ray Dalio - Principles

While more extreme in the case of someone with bipolar
disorder, this is something I’ve seen most everyone do. I also
learned how people can control how their brains work to

produce dramatically better effects. These insights helped me
to deal with people more effectively, as I will explain in detail
in Chapter Four, Understand That People Are Wired Very
Differently.

MAKING BRIDGEWATER ROCK-

SOLID AND CUTTING-EDGE

At our annual town hall meeting in June 2008, I said that seen
through my eyes Bridgewater was then, and always had been,
“both terrible and terrific at the same time.” After about five

years of rapid growth toward building Bridgewater as an
institution, we had encountered our newest set of problems.
This was nothing new. Since I started Bridgewater we always
had some problems because we were always doing bold new
things, making mistakes, and evolving quickly. For example,
technology had changed so quickly during the years we’d built

the company that we had literally switched from using slide
rules to spreadsheet software to advanced artificial
intelligence. With so much changing so fast, it had seemed
pointless to focus on getting everything “just right” when
something newer and better was sure to come along. So we
built our technology in a light and flexible way, which made
sense at the time but also created a number of hairballs that

badly needed untangling. That same approach of moving
quickly and flexibly had been true throughout the company, so
several departments had become overstretched as we grew. It
had always been fun being cutting-edge, but we were having a
hard time becoming rock-solid, especially in the
noninvestment side of the business. The organization needed

to be renovated in several ways—but it wasn’t going to be
easy.

In 2008 I was working about eighty hours a week doing my
two full-time jobs (overseeing our investments and overseeing
the company), and in my opinion not doing well enough at