Page 198 - Ray Dalio - Principles

I’ve faced in the course of my career I’ve created exactly such tools, and
I am convinced that I would not have been nearly as successful without
them. I have no doubt that in the years ahead such “machine-thinking”
tools will continue to develop and that smart decision makers will learn
how to integrate them into their thinking. I urge you to learn about them
and consider using them.
i. Know when it’s best to stop fighting and have faith in your decision-making process. It’s
important that you think independently and fight for what you believe
in, but there comes a time when it’s wiser to stop fighting for your view
and move on to accepting what believable others think is best. This can
be extremely difficult. But it’s smarter and ultimately better for you to
be open-minded and have faith that the consensus of believable others is
better than whatever you think. If you can’t understand their view,
you’re probably just blind to their way of thinking. If you continue
doing what you think is best when all the evidence and believable
people are against you, you’re being dangerously arrogant.

The truth is that while most people can become radically open-minded,
some can’t, even after they have repeatedly encountered lots of pain
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from betting that they were right when they were not. People who
don’t learn radical open-mindedness don’t experience the
metamorphosis that allows them to do much better. I myself had to have
that humility beaten into me by my crashes, especially my big one in
1982. Gaining open-mindedness doesn’t mean losing assertiveness. In
fact, because it increases one’s odds of being right, it should increase
one’s confidence. That has been true for me since my big crash, which is
why I’ve been able to have more success with less risk.

Becoming truly open-minded takes time. Like all real learning, doing
this is largely a matter of habit; once you do it so many times it is almost
instinctive, you’ll find it intolerable to be any other way. As noted
earlier, this typically takes about eighteen months, which in the course
of a lifetime is nothing.

ARE YOU UP FOR THE CHALLENGE?

For me, there is really only one big choice to make in life: Are you
willing to fight to find out what’s true? Do you deeply believe that
finding out what is true is essential to your well-being? Do you have a
genuine need to find out if you or others are doing something wrong that
is standing in the way of achieving your goals? If your answer to any of
these questions is no, accept that you will never live up to your
potential. If, on the other hand, you are up for the challenge of becoming
radically open-minded, the first step in doing so is to look at yourself