Page 204 - Ray Dalio - Principles

Our differences weren’t a product of poor communication; it was the other way around. Our
different ways of thinking led to our poor communications.

From conversations with experts and my own observations, I learned that many of our
mental differences are physiological. Just as our physical attributes determine the limits of
what we are able to do physically—some people are tall and others are short, some muscular
and others weak—our brains are innately different in ways that set the parameters of what we
are able to do mentally. As with our bodies, some parts of our brains cannot be materially
affected by external experience (in the same way that your skeleton isn’t changed much
through working out), while other parts can be strengthened through exercise (I will have more
to say about brain plasticity later in this chapter).
This was driven home to me by my son Paul’s three-year struggle with bipolar disorder. As
terrifying and frustrating as his behavior was, I came to realize that it was due to his brain’s
chemistry (specifically, its secreting serotonin and dopamine in spurts and sputters). As I went
through that terrible journey with him, I experienced the frustration and anger of trying to
reason with someone who wasn’t thinking well. I constantly had to remind myself that there
was no basis for my anger because his distorted logic was a product of his physiology—and I
saw for myself how the doctors who approached it that way brought him to a state of crystal
clarity. The experience not only taught me a lot about how brains work but why creative genius
often exists at the edge of insanity. Many highly productive and creative people have suffered
from bipolar disorder, among them Ernest Hemingway, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Vincent van
Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, and the psychologist Kay Redfield
Jamison (who has written frankly about her own experiences with the disease in her book An
Unquiet Mind). I learned that we are all different because of the different ways that the
machine that is our brain works—and that nearly one in five Americans are clinically mentally
ill in one way or another.

Once I understood that it’s all physiological, many things became clearer to me. While I
used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize
that they weren’t intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just
living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked. I also realized that as
off-base as they seemed to me, they saw me the same way. The only sensible way of behaving
with each other was to look down upon ourselves with mutual understanding so we could
make objective sense of things. Not only did this make our disagreements less frustrating, it
also allowed us to maximize our effectiveness.

Everyone is like a Lego set of attributes, with each piece reflecting the workings of a
different part of their brain. All these pieces come together to determine what each person is
like, and if you know what a person is like, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you can
expect from them.
a. We are born with attributes that can both help us and hurt us, depending on their application. Most attributes
are a double-edged sword that bring potential benefits and potential harm. The more extreme
the attribute, the more extreme the potential good or bad outcomes it is likely to produce. For
example, a highly creative, goal-oriented person good at imagining new ideas might
undervalue the minutiae of daily life, which is also important; he might be so driven in his
pursuit of long-term goals that he might have disdain for people who focus on the details of
daily life. Similarly, a task-oriented person who is great with details might undervalue
creativity—and worse still, may squelch it in the interests of efficiency. These two people
might make a great team, but are likely to have trouble taking advantage of the ways they’re
complementary, because the ways their minds work make it difficult for them to see the value
of each other’s ways of thinking.
Having expectations for people (including yourself) without knowing what they are like is a
sure way to get in trouble. I learned this the hard way, through years of frustrating
conversations and the pain of expecting things from people who were constitutionally
incapable of delivering them. I’m sure that I caused them plenty of pain too. Over time, I
realized that I needed a systematic approach to capturing and recording our differences so that
we could actively take them into consideration when putting people into different roles at
Bridgewater.