Mistakes will cause you pain, but you shouldn’t try to shield yourself or others from it. Pain is a message that something is wrong and it’s an effective teacher that one shouldn’t do that wrong thing again. To deal with your own and others’ weaknesses well you must acknowledge them frankly and openly and work to find ways of preventing them from hurting you in the future. It’s at this point that many people say, “No thanks, this isn’t for me—I’d rather not have to deal with these things.” But this is against your and your organization’s best interests—and will keep you from achieving your goals. It seems to me that if you look back on yourself a year ago and aren’t shocked by how stupid you were, you haven’t learned much. Still, few people go out of their way to embrace their mistakes. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Remember back in Life Principles, when I told the story about the time that Ross, then our head of trading, forgot to put in a trade for a client? The money just sat there in cash and by the time the mistake was discovered it had cost the client (actually Bridgewater, because we had to make good on it) a lot of money. It was terrible and I could easily have fired Ross to make the point that nothing less than perfection will be accepted. But that would have been counterproductive. I would have lost a good man and it would have only encouraged other employees to hide their mistakes, creating a culture that would not only be dishonest but crippled in its ability to learn and grow. If Ross hadn’t experienced that pain, he and Bridgewater would have been the worse for it.
