Page 203 - Ray Dalio - Principles

Those meetings were painful for everyone. Because no one was clear about what they were
good or bad at, everybody expressed opinions about everything and there wasn’t any sensible
way of sorting through them. We discussed why the group was failing, which led us to see that
the individuals Bob had chosen for his team reflected his own strengths and weaknesses in
their own roles. While that took frankness and open-mindedness and was a big step forward, it
wasn’t recorded and systematically converted into adequate changes, so the same people kept
making the same sort of mistakes, over and over again.
Isn’t it obvious that our different ways of thinking, our emotional responses, and our not
having ways of dealing with them is crippling us? What are we supposed to do, not deal with
them?
I’m sure you’ve been in contentious disagreements before—ones where people have
different points of view and can’t agree on what’s right. Good people with good intentions get
angry and emotional; it is frustrating and often becomes personal. Most companies avoid this
by suppressing open debate and having those with the most authority simply make the calls. I
didn’t want that kind of company. I knew we needed to dig more deeply into what was
preventing us from working together more effectively, bring those things to the surface, and
explore them.

Bridgewater’s roughly 1,500 employees do many different things—some strive to
understand the global markets; others develop technologies; still others serve clients, manage
health insurance and other benefits for employees, provide legal guidance, manage IT and
facilities, and so on. All these activities require different types of people to work together in
ways that harvest the best ideas and throw away the worst. Organizing people to complement
their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses is like conducting an orchestra. It can be
magnificent if done well and terrible if done poorly.
While “know thyself” and “to thine own self be true” are fundamental tenets I had heard
long before I began looking into the brain, I had no idea how to go about getting that
knowledge or how to act on it until we made these discoveries about how people think
differently. The better we know ourselves, the better we can recognize both what can be
changed and how to change it, and what can’t be changed and what we can do about that. So
no matter what you set out to do—whether on your own, as a member of an organization, or as
its director—you need to understand how you and other people are wired.

4.1 Understand the power that comes from knowing how
you and others are wired.

As I related in the first part of this book, my first breakthrough in understanding how people
think differently occurred when I was a young father and had my kids tested by Dr. Sue
Quinlan. I found the results remarkable, because she not only confirmed my own observations
of the ways that their minds were working at the time but also predicted how they would
develop in the future. For example, one of my kids was struggling with arithmetic. Because he
tested well in mathematical reasoning, she correctly told him that if he pushed through the
boredom of rote memorization required in elementary school, he would love the higher-level
concepts he would be exposed to when he got older. These insights opened my eyes to new
possibilities. I turned to her and others years later when I was trying to figure out the different
thinking styles of my employees and colleagues.

At first, the experts gave me both bad and good advice. Many seemed as if they were more
interested in making people feel good (or not feel bad) than they were at getting at the truth.
Even more startling, I found that most psychologists didn’t know much about neuroscience and
most neuroscientists didn’t know much about psychology—and both were reluctant to connect
the physiological differences in people’s brains to the differences in their aptitudes and
behaviors. But eventually I found Dr. Bob Eichinger, who opened the world of psychometric
testing to me. Using Myers-Briggs and other assessments, we evolved a much clearer and
more data-driven way of understanding our different types of thinking.