Page 215 - Ray Dalio - Principles

or she knows a lot about instruments) as much as visualize the outcome and sees to it that each
member of the orchestra helps achieve it. The conductor makes sure each member of the
orchestra knows what he or she is good at and what they’re not good at, and what their
responsibilities are. Each must not only perform at their personal best but work together so the
orchestra becomes more than the sum of its parts. One of the conductor’s hardest and most
thankless jobs is getting rid of people who consistently don’t play well individually or with
others. Most importantly, the conductor ensures that the score is executed exactly as he or she
hears it in his or her head. “The music needs to sound this way,” she says, and then she makes
sure it does. “Bass players, bring out the structure. Here are the connections, here’s the spirit.”
Each section of the orchestra has its own leaders—the concertmaster, the first chairs—who
also help bring out the composer’s and the conductor’s visions.
Approaching things in this way has helped me a lot. For example, with the bond
systemization project I mentioned earlier, having this new perspective allowed us to better see
the gaps between what we had and what we needed. While Bob was a great intellectual partner
to me in understanding the big-picture problem we wanted to solve, he was much weaker at
visualizing the process required to get us from where we were to the solution. He also wasn’t
surrounding himself with the right people. He tended to want to work with people who were
like him, so his main deputy on the project was a great sparring partner for mapping out big
ideas on a whiteboard but a lousy one for fleshing out the who, what, and when needed to
bring those ideas to life. This deputy tested as a “Flexor,” meaning that he was great at going
in whatever direction Bob wanted to but lacked the clear, independent view needed to keep
Bob on track.

After a few rounds of not making progress, we used our new tools for understanding people
and acted on them, pushing Bob to transition to a new deputy who was especially skilled at
navigating the levels between the big-picture ideas and the discrete, smaller projects required
to bring them about. Comparing the new deputy’s Baseball Card to the original deputy’s, she
excelled in independent and systematic thinking, which were essential for having a clear
picture of what to do with Bob’s big ideas. This new deputy brought on other layers of support,
including a project manager who was less engaged with the concepts and much more focused
on the details of specific tasks and deadlines. When we looked at the new team members’
Baseball Cards, we could quickly see them lighting up in some of the areas around being
planful, concrete, and driving things to completion, which were areas of weakness for Bob.
With this new team in place, things really started to hum. It was only by looking hard at the
complete “Lego set” required to achieve our goal—and then going out and finding the missing
pieces—that we were able to do it.
Bond systemization is just one of countless projects that have benefited from our frank and
open approach to understanding what people are like. And to be clear, I have just scratched the
surface of what there is to know about mental wiring.
In the next chapter, I’ll bring everything you’ve read about up to now together and break
down the essentials of decision making. Some decisions you should make yourself and some
you should delegate to someone more believable. Using self-knowledge to know which are
which is the key to success—no matter what it is you are trying to do.

29 Lots of data show that relationships are the greatest reward—that they’re more important to your health and happiness than
anything else. For example, as Robert Waldinger, director of Harvard’s seventy-five-year Grant and Glueck study of adult
males from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, puts it, “You could have all the money you’ve ever wanted, a successful
career, and be in good physical health, but without loving relationships, you won’t be happy . . . The good life is built with
good relationships.”
30 A good book on this is A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink, and a good article on the science of this is “A Wandering
Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight” by Robert Lee Hotz from The Wall Street Journal. While many parts of the brain come
in two halves, it’s only the more recently developed cortex, which accounts for three-quarters of the brain, that has been shown
to have functional differences between the right and left sides.
31 That’s a big question. Entire specialties are dedicated to this question alone, and no one answer is authoritative, certainly
not mine. However, because knowing what can change is important for people trying to manage themselves and others, I have
looked fairly deeply into the issue of brain plasticity. What I learned coincided with my own experiences, and I will pass that
along to you.
32 A brain-imaging study by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found physical changes in the
brain after an eight-week meditation course. Researchers identified increased activity in parts of the brain associated with