Page 323 - Ray Dalio - Principles

in school tend to be the worst at learning from their mistakes,
because they have been conditioned to associate mistakes with
failure instead of opportunity. This is a major impediment to

their progress. Intelligent people who embrace their mistakes
and weaknesses substantially outperform their peers who have
the same abilities but bigger ego barriers.

3.1 Recognize that mistakes are a

natural part of the evolutionary

process.

If you don’t mind being wrong on the way to being right
you’ll learn a lot—and increase your effectiveness. But if you
can’t tolerate being wrong, you won’t grow, you’ll make

yourself and everyone around you miserable, and your work
environment will be marked by petty backbiting and
malevolent barbs rather than by a healthy, honest search for
truth.

You must not let your need to be right be more important
than your need to find out what’s true. Jeff Bezos described it
well when he said, “You have to have a willingness to

repeatedly fail. If you don’t have a willingness to fail, you’re
going to have to be very careful not to invent.”

a. Fail well. Everyone fails. Anyone you see succeeding is only
succeeding at the things you’re paying attention to—I
guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things. The
people I respect most are those who fail well. I respect them

even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a
painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one, so it
requires much more character to fail, change, and then succeed
than to just succeed. People who are just succeeding must not
be pushing their limits. Of course the worst are those who fail
and don’t recognize it and don’t change.

b. Don’t feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them! People

typically feel bad about their mistakes because they think in a
shortsighted way about the bad outcome and not about the
evolutionary process of which mistakes are an integral part. I