Page 288 - Ray Dalio - Principles

6. That led us to be able to bring in more audacious
independent thinkers with more audacious goals to
strengthen this self-reinforcing upward spiral.

We did that over and over again, which produced the

evolutionary looping behind Bridgewater’s forty-plus years of
success. It’s shown in the diagram on the facing page.

This really works! You don’t have to take my word for it.
There are two ways you can evaluate the likelihood that this
approach and the principles that follow from it are as powerful
as I believe they are. You can 1) look at the results they
produced and 2) look at the logic behind them.

As for the results, like Lombardi’s and the Packers’, our
track record speaks for itself. We consistently got better over
forty years, going from my two-bedroom apartment to become
the fifth most impor-tant private company in the U.S.,
according to Fortune, and the world’s largest hedge fund,
making more total money for our clients than any other hedge
fund in history. We have received over one hundred industry

awards and I’ve earned three lifetime achievement awards—
not to mention remarkable financial and psychological
rewards, and most importantly, amazing relationships.

But even more important than these results is the
underlying cause-effect logic behind these principles, which
came before the results. Over forty years ago, this way of
being was a controversial, untested theory that nevertheless

seemed logical to me. I will explain this logic to you in the
pages that follow. That way, you can assess it for yourself.

There’s no doubt that our approach is very different. Some
people have even described Bridgewater as a cult. The truth is
that Bridgewater succeeds because it is the opposite of a cult.
The essential difference between a culture of people with

shared values (which is a great thing) and a cult (which is a
terrible thing) is the extent to which there is independent
thinking. Cults demand unquestioning obedience. Thinking for
yourself and challenging each other’s ideas is anti-cult
behavior, and that is the essence of what we do at Bridgewater.