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Create great decision-making machines by thinking through the criteria you are using to make decisions while you are making them.Whenever I make an investment decision, I observe myself making it and think about the criteria I used. I ask myself how I would handle another one of those situations and write down my principles for doing so. Then I turn them into algorithms. I am now doing the same for management and I have gotten in the habit of doing it for all my decisions. Algorithms are principles in action on a continuous basis. I believe that systemized, evidence-based decision making will radically improve the quality of management. Human managers process information spontaneously using poorly thought-out criteria and are unproductively affected by their emotional biases. These all lead to suboptimal decisions. Imagine what it would be like to have a machine that processes high-quality data using high-quality decision-making principles/criteria. Like the GPS in your car, it would be invaluable, whether you follow all of its suggestions or not. I believe that such tools will be essential in the future, and as I write these words, I am a short time away from getting a prototype online. Remember that a good plan should resemble a movie script. The more vividly you can visualize how the scenario you create will play out, the more likely it is to happen as you plan. Visualize who will do what when and the result they’ll produce. This is your mental map of your machine. Recognize that some people are better or worse at visualization. Accurately assess your own abilities and those of others so you can use the most capable people to create your plans.

Reading Duhigg’s book taught me that if you really want to change, the best thing you can do is choose which habits to acquire and which to get rid of and then go about doing that. To help you, I recommend that you write down your three most harmful habits. Do that right now. Now pick one of those habits and be committed to breaking it. Can you do that? That would be extraordinarily impactful. If you break all three, you will radically improve the trajectory of your life. Or you can pick habits that you want to acquire and then acquire them. The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness. Train your “lower-level you” with kindness and persistence to build the right habits. I used to think that the upper-level you needed to fight with the lower-level you to gain control, but over time I’ve learned that it is more effective to train that subconscious, emotional you the same way you would teach a child to behave the way you would like him or her to behave—with loving kindness and persistence so that the right habits are acquired. Understand the differences between right-brained and left-brained thinking. Just as your brain has its conscious upper part and its subconscious lower part, it also has two halves called hemispheres.30 You might have heard it said that some people are more left-brained while others are more right-brained. That’s not just a saying—Caltech professor Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering it. In a nutshell: The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, analyzes details, and excels at linear analysis. “Left-brained” or “linear” thinkers who are analytically strong are often called “bright.”

Evolution is good because it is the process of adaptation that generally moves things toward improvement. All things such as products, organizations, and human capabilities evolve through time in a similar way. It is simply the process by which things either adapt and improve or die. To me this evolutionary process looks like what you see on the right: Evolution consists of adaptations/inventions that provide spurts of benefits that decline in value. That painful decline leads either to new adaptations and new inventions that bring new products, organizations, and human capabilities to new and higher levels of development (as shown in the top diagram on the facing page); or decline and death, which looks like the diagram at bottom left. Think of any product, organization, or person you know and you will see that this is true. The world is littered with once-great things that deteriorated and failed; only a rare few have kept reinventing themselves to go on to new heights of greatness. All machines eventually break down, decompose, and have their parts recycled to create new machines. That includes us. Sometimes this makes us sad because we’ve become attached to our machines, but if you look at it from the higher level, it’s really beautiful to observe how the machine of evolution works. From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn’t be evolving. Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we’re perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them. You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed—or you won’t and you will fail. As the saying goes:

Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem. “I can’t get enough sleep” is not a problem; it is a potential cause (or perhaps the result) of a problem. To clarify your thinking, try to identify the bad outcome first; e.g., “I am performing poorly in my job.” Not sleeping enough may be the cause of that problem, or the cause may be something else—but in order to determine that, you need to know exactly what the problem is. Distinguish big problems from small ones. You only have so much time and energy; make sure you are investing them in exploring the problems that, if fixed, will yield you the biggest returns. But at the same time, make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they’re not symptoms of larger ones. Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it. Whether you tolerate it because you believe it cannot be solved, because you don’t care enough to solve it, or because you can’t muster enough of whatever it takes to solve it, if you don’t have the will to succeed, then your situation is hopeless. You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity. Diagnose problems to get at their root causes. Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.” It is a common mistake to move in a nanosecond from identifying a tough problem to proposing a solution for it. Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design. A good diagnosis typically takes between fifteen minutes and an hour, depending on how well it’s done and how complex the issue is. It involves speaking with the relevant people and looking at the evidence together to determine the root causes. Like principles, root causes manifest themselves over and over again in seemingly different situations. Finding them and dealing with them pays dividends again and again.

From what I can see, we do it for different reasons. For me, the main reason is that I can visualize the results of pushing through so intensely that I experience the thrill of success even while I’m still struggling to achieve it. Similarly, I can visualize the tragic results of not pushing through. I am also motivated by a sense of responsibility; I have a hard time letting people I care about down. But that’s just what’s true for me. Others describe their motivation as attachment to the community and its mission. Some do it for approval and some do it for financial rewards. All these are perfectly acceptable motivations and should be used and harmonized in a way consistent with the culture. The way one brings people together to do this is key. This is what most people call “leadership.” What are the most important things that a leader needs to do in order to get their organizations to push through to results? Most importantly, they must recruit individuals who are willing to do the work that success requires. While there might be more glamour in coming up with the brilliant new ideas, most of success comes from doing the mundane and often distasteful stuff, like identifying and dealing with problems and pushing hard over a long time. This was certainly the case with the Client Service Department. Through a lot of relentless hard work in the years since the original problem turned up, the department has become an example to other teams at Bridgewater—and our client satisfaction levels remain consistently high. The great irony of all this is that none of our clients ever even noticed the problems we saw with the memos. Sending out work not up to our standards was bad—and I’m glad it was corrected. But it could’ve been much worse, tarnishing our reputation for delivering pervasive excellence. Once that happens, it becomes much harder to restore trust.

Closed-minded people say things like “I could be wrong . . . but here’s my opinion.” This is a classic cue I hear all the time. It’s often a perfunctory gesture that allows people to hold their own opinion while convincing themselves that they are being open-minded. If your statement starts with “I could be wrong” or “I’m not believable,” you should probably follow it with a question and not an assertion. Open-minded people know when to make statements and when to ask questions. Closed-minded people block others from speaking. If it seems like someone isn’t leaving space for the other person in a conversation, it’s possible they are blocking. To get around blocking, enforce the “two-minute rule” I mentioned earlier. Open-minded people are always more interested in listening than in speaking; they encourage others to voice their views. Closed-minded people have trouble holding two thoughts simultaneously in their minds. They allow their own view to crowd out those of others. Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well—they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and forth between them to assess their relative merits. Closed-minded people lack a deep sense of humility. Humility typically comes from an experience of crashing, which leads to an enlightened focus on knowing what one doesn’t know. Open-minded people approach everything with a deep-seated fear that they may be wrong. Once you can sort out open-minded from closed-minded people, you’ll find that you want to surround yourself with open-minded ones. Doing so will not only make your decision making more effective but you’ll also learn a tremendous amount. A few good decision makers working effectively together can significantly outperform a good decision maker working alone—and even the best decision maker can significantly improve his or her decision making with the help of other excellent decision makers.

You can either fix it or you can get the help of others to deal with it well. There are two paths to success: 1) to have what you need yourself or 2) to get it from others. The second path requires you to have humility. Humility is as important, or even more important, as having the strengths yourself. Having both is best. On the following page is a template that some people find helpful. Understand your own and others’ mental maps and humility. Some people are good at knowing what to do on their own; they have good mental maps. Maybe they acquired them from being taught; maybe they were blessed with an especially large dose of common sense. Whatever the case, they have more answers inside themselves than others do. Similarly, some people are more humble and open-minded than others. Humility can be even more valuable than having good mental maps if it leads you to seek out better answers than you could come up with on your own. Having both open-mindedness and good mental maps is most powerful of all. To convey this simple concept, imagine rating from one to ten how good someone’s mental map is (in other words, what they know) on the Y-axis and how humble/open-minded they are on the X-axis, as shown on the opposite page.

Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. Natural selection’s trial-and-error process allows improvement without anyone understanding or guiding it. The same can apply to how we learn. There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one’s conscious mind so that we can recall it later); subconscious learning (the knowledge we take away from our experiences that never enters our conscious minds, though it affects our decision making); and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species’ adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation. To give you an example of how nature improves without thinking, just look at the struggle that mankind (with all its thinking) has experienced in trying to outsmart viruses (which don’t even have brains). Viruses are like brilliant chess opponents. By evolving quickly (combining different genetic material across different strains), they keep the smartest minds in the global health community busy thinking up countermoves to hold them off. Understanding that is especially helpful in an era when computers can run large numbers of simulations replicating the evolutionary process to help us see what works and what doesn’t. In the next chapter I will describe a process that has helped me, and I believe can help you, evolve quickly. But first I want to emphasize how important your perspective is in trying to decide what is important to you and what to go after.

When Bridgewater was still a small company, the principles by which we operated were more implicit than explicit. But as more and more new people came in, I couldn’t take for granted that they would understand and preserve them. I realized that I needed to write our principles out explicitly and explain the logic behind them. I remember the precise moment when this shift occurred—it was when the number of people at Bridgewater passed sixty-seven. Up until then, I had personally chosen each employee’s holiday gift and written them a lengthy personalized card, but trying to do it that year broke my back. From that point on, an increasing number of people came in who didn’t work closely with me, so I couldn’t assume they would understand where I was coming from or what I was striving to create, which was an idea meritocracy built on tough love. Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships. To give you an idea of what I mean by tough love, think of Vince Lombardi, who for me personified it. From when I was ten years old until I was eighteen, Lombardi was head coach of the Green Bay Packers. With limited resources, he led his team to five NFL championships. He won two NFL Coach of the Year awards and many still call him the best coach of all time. Lombardi loved his players and he pushed them to be great. I admired, and still admire, how uncompromising his standards were. His players, their fans, and he himself all benefited from his approach. I wish Lombardi had written out his principles for me to read. In order to be great, one can’t compromise the uncompromisable. Yet I see people doing it all the time, usually to avoid making others or themselves feel uncomfortable, which is not just backward but counterproductive. Putting comfort ahead of success produces worse results for everyone. I both loved the people I worked with and pushed them to be great, and I expected them to do the same with me.

Recognize that to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another’s eyes, you must suspend judgment for a time—only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view. Open-mindedness doesn’t mean going along with what you don’t believe in; it means considering the reasoning of others instead of stubbornly and illogically holding on to your own point of view. To be radically open-minded, you need to be so open to the possibility that you could be wrong that you encourage others to tell you so. Remember that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself. The answer doesn’t have to be in your head; you can look outside yourself. If you’re truly looking at things objectively, you must recognize that the probability of you always having the best answer is small and that, even if you have it, you can’t be confident that you do before others test you. So it is invaluable to know what you don’t know. Ask yourself: Am I seeing this just through my own eyes? If so, then you should know that you’re terribly handicapped. Be clear on whether you are arguing or seeking to understand, and think about which is most appropriate based on your and others’ believability. If both parties are peers, it’s appropriate to argue. But if one person is clearly more knowledgeable than the other, it is preferable for the less knowledgeable person to approach the more knowledgeable one as a student and for the more knowledgeable one to act as a teacher. Doing this well requires you to understand the concept of believability. I define believable people as those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question—who have a strong track record with at least three successes—and have great explanations of their approach when probed.

Make sure that those in charge are open-minded about the questions and comments of others. The person responsible for a decision must be able to explain the thinking behind it openly and transparently so that everyone can understand and assess it. In the event of disagreement, an appeal should be made to either the decision maker’s boss or an agreed-upon, knowledgeable group of others, generally people more knowledgeable than and senior to the decision maker. Recognize that getting in sync is a two-way responsibility. In any conversation, there is a responsibility to express and a responsibility to listen. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are always going to happen. Often, difficulty in communication is due to people having different ways of thinking (e.g., left-brained thinkers talking to right-brained thinkers). The parties involved should always consider the possibility that one or both of them misunderstood and do a back-and-forth so that they can get in sync. Very simple tricks—like repeating what you’re hearing someone say to make sure you’re actually getting it—can be invaluable. Start by assuming you’re either not communicating or listening well instead of blaming the other party. Learn from your miscommunications so they don’t happen again. Worry more about substance than style. This is not to say that some styles aren’t more effective than others with different people and in different circumstances, but I often hear people complaining about the style or tone of a criticism in order to deflect from its substance. If you think someone’s style is an issue, box it as a separate issue to get in sync on. Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable. You have a responsibility to be reasonable and considerate when you are advocating for your point of view and should never let your “lower-level you” gain control, even if the other person loses his or her temper. Their bad behavior doesn’t justify yours.

Manage as Someone Operating a Machine to Achieve a Goal No matter what work you do, at a high level you are simply setting goals and building machines to help you achieve them. I built the machine that is Bridgewater by constantly comparing its actual outcomes to my mental map of the outcomes that it should be producing, and finding ways to improve it. I won’t say anything specific about how you should set your own organization’s goals other than that the high-level principles about goal setting I covered in Life Principles apply equally to individuals and organizations. I will, however, point out that in running your organization, you and the people you work with must be clear on how your lower-level goals—whether they’re to produce things cost-effectively, achieve high customer satisfaction, help a certain number of people in need, whatever—grow out of your higher-level goals and values.No matter how good you are at design, your machine will have problems. You or some other capable mechanic needs to identify those problems and look under the hood of the machine to diagnose their root causes. You or whoever is diagnosing those problems has to understand what the parts of the machine—the designs and the people—are like and how they work together to produce the outcomes. The people are the most important part, since most everything, including the designs themselves, comes from people. Unless you have a clear understanding of your machine from a higher level—and can visualize all its parts and how they work together—you will inevitably fail at this diagnosis and fall short of your potential. At Bridgewater, the high-level goal of all of our machines is to create excellent outcomes for our clients—in the returns on their investments, of course, but also in the quality of our relationship and our thought partnership in understanding global economies and markets more broadly. Before we had anything else at Bridgewater, we had this commitment to excellence. Maintaining t

0.a. Have people “complete their swings” before moving on to new roles. There should always be follow-through, not interruption, unless a pressing reason exists (when, say, a person would be a great click for another job that needs to be filled immediately). In a company where things are evolving quickly and people are expected to speak openly, it is natural that there will be a steady stream of opportunities for employees to move into new roles. But if too many people jump from one job to another without fulfilling their responsibilities, the resulting discontinuity, disorder, and instability will be bad for managers, bad for the culture, and bad for the people moving, because they won’t be adequately tested in their ability to move things to completion. As a guideline, a year in a job is sufficient before having conversations about a new role, although this isn’t black and white—the range could easily vary depending on the circumstances. Don’t lower the bar. You reach a point in all relationships when you must decide whether you are meant for each other—that’s common in private life and at any organization that holds very high standards. At Bridgewater, we know that we cannot compromise on the fundamentals of our culture, so if a person cannot operate within our requirements of excellence through radical truth and transparency in an acceptable time frame, he or she must leave. Tough love is both the hardest and the most important type of love to give.

Recognize that there are many ways to skin a cat. Your assessment of how Responsible Parties are doing their jobs should not be based on whether they’re doing it your way but whether they’re doing it in a good way. Be careful about expecting a person who achieves success one way to do it a different way. That’s like insisting that Babe Ruth improve his swing. Think like an owner, and expect the people you work with to do the same. It’s a basic reality that if you don’t experience the consequences of your actions, you’ll take less ownership of them. If you are an employee, and you get a paycheck for turning up and pleasing your boss, your mind-set will inevitably be trained to this cause-effect relationship. If you are a manager, make sure you structure incentives and penalties that encourage people to take full ownership of what they do and not just coast by. This includes straightforward things such as spending money like it’s their own and making sure their responsibilities aren’t neglected when they’re out of the office. When people recognize that their own well-being is directly connected to that of their community, the ownership relationship becomes reciprocal. Going on vacation doesn’t mean one can neglect one’s responsibilities. Thinking like an owner means making sure that your responsibilities are handled well regardless of what comes up. While you are away on vacation, it’s your responsibility to make sure nothing drops. You can do that via a combination of good planning and coordination before you go and staying on top of things while you are away. This needn’t take much time—it can be as little as an hour of good checking from afar and it doesn’t even have to be every day, so you can typically slip it in when it’s convenient.

When you get down to it, our brains are essentially computers that are programmed in certain ways, take in data, and spit out instructions. We can program the logic in both the computer that is our mind and the computer that is our tool so that they can work together and even double-check each other. Doing that is fabulous. For example, suppose we were trying to derive the universal laws that explain species change over time. Theoretically, with enough processing power and time, this should be possible. We would need to make sense of the formulas the computer produces, of course, to make sure that they are not data-mined gibberish, by which I mean based on correlations that are not causal in any way. We would do this by constantly simplifying these rules until their elegance is unmistakable. Of course, given our brain’s limited capacity and processing speed, it could take us forever to achieve a rich understanding of all the variables that go into evolution. Is all the simplifying and understanding that we employ in our expert systems truly required? Maybe not. There is certainly a risk that changes not in the tested data might still occur. But one might argue that if our data-mining-based formulas seem able to account for the evolution of all species through all time, then the risks of relying on them for just the next ten, twenty, or fifty years is relatively low compared to the benefits of having a formula that appears to work but is not fully understandable (and that, at the very least, might prove useful in helping scientists cure genetic diseases).

and whether you should be teaching, asking questions, or debating. Too often people flail in their disagreements because they either don’t know or don’t think about how they should engage effectively; they just blurt out whatever they think and argue. While everyone has the right and obligation to make sense of everything, basic rules for engagement should be followed. Those rules and how you should follow them depend on your relative believabilities. For example, it would not be effective for the person who knows less to tell the person who knows more how something should be done. It’s important to get the balance between your assertiveness and your open-mindedness right, based on your relative levels of understanding of the subject. Think about whether the person you’re disagreeing with is more or less believable than you. If you are less believable, you are more of a student and should be more open-minded, primarily asking questions in order to understand the logic of the person who probably knows more. If you’re more believable, your role is more of a teacher, primarily conveying your understanding and answering questions. And if you are approximate peers, you should have a thoughtful exchange as equals. When there is a disagreement about who is more believable, be reasonable and work it through. In cases when you can’t do this alone effectively, seek out the help of an agreed-upon third party. In all cases, try to see things through the other person’s eyes so that you can obtain understanding. All parties should remember that the purpose of debate is to get at truth, not to prove that someone is right or wrong, and that each party should be willing to change their mind based on the logic and evidence.

What if you could unplug that lower part of your brain entirely and instead connect with a decision-making computer that gives you logically derived instructions, as we do with our investment systems? Suppose this computer-based decision-making machine has a much better track record than you because it captures more logic, processes more information more quickly, and makes decisions without being emotionally hijacked. Would you use it? In confronting the challenges I’ve faced in the course of my career I’ve created exactly such tools, and I am convinced that I would not have been nearly as successful without them. I have no doubt that in the years ahead such “machine-thinking” tools will continue to develop and that smart decision makers will learn how to integrate them into their thinking. I urge you to learn about them and consider using them. Know when it’s best to stop fighting and have faith in your decision-making process. It’s important that you think independently and fight for what you believe in, but there comes a time when it’s wiser to stop fighting for your view and move on to accepting what believable others think is best. This can be extremely difficult. But it’s smarter and ultimately better for you to be open-minded and have faith that the consensus of believable others is better than whatever you think. If you can’t understand their view, you’re probably just blind to their way of thinking. If you continue doing what you think is best when all the evidence and believable people are against you, you’re being dangerously arrogant.

Encourage people to be objectively reflective about their performance. Being able to see yourself from a higher level is essential for personal evolution and achieving your goals. So you and the people who report to you should be looking at the evidence of their performance together; for this to go well, you need lots and lots of evidence and an objective point of view. If required, use agreed-upon others to triangulate the picture the evidence presents. Look at the whole picture. In reviewing someone, the goal is to see the patterns and to understand the whole picture. No one can be successful in every way (if they are extremely meticulous, for example, they might not be able to be fast, and vice versa). Assessments made in reviews must be concrete; they’re not about what people should be like but what they are like.

Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn’t be doing. Because it is difficult to see oneself objectively, you need to rely on the input of others and the whole body of evidence. If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want. Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life Have clear goals. Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want. Don’t confuse goals with desires. Decide what you really want in life by reconciling your goals and your desires. Don’t mistake the trappings of success for success itself. Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable. Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability. Knowing how to deal well with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to move forward. Identify and don’t tolerate problems. View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you. Don’t avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at. Be specific in identifying your problems. Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem. Distinguish big problems from small ones. Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Diagnose problems to get at their root causes. Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.” Distinguish proximate causes from root causes. Recognize that knowing what someone (including you) is like will tell you what you can expect from them. Design a plan. Go back before you go forward. Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine. Remember that there are typically many paths to achieving your goals.

To give you an idea of how Bridgewater’s culture developed and how it’s different from what you’d find at most companies, I will tell you about how we handled benefits in our early days. When the company was just me and a small group of people, I didn’t provide employees with health insurance; I assumed that they would buy it on their own. But I did want to help the people I shared my life with during their times of need. If someone I worked with got seriously sick and couldn’t afford proper care, what was I going to do, stand by and not help them? Of course I’d help them financially, to whatever extent I could. So when I did begin providing health insurance to my employees, I felt that I was insuring myself against the money I knew I’d give them if they were injured or fell ill as much as I was insuring them. Because I wanted to make certain that they received the best care possible, the policies I provided allowed them to go to any doctor they chose and spend whatever amount was required. On the other hand, I didn’t protect them against the little things. For example, I didn’t provide dental insurance any more than I provided car insurance, because I felt that it was their own responsibility to protect their teeth, just as it was their own responsibility to take care of their car. If they needed dental insurance, they could pay for it out of their own pocket. My main point is that I didn’t approach benefits in the impersonal, transactional way most companies do, but more like something I provided for my family. I was more than generous with some things and expected people to take personal responsibility for others.

For the most part, life gives you so many decisions to make and so many opportunities to recover from your mistakes that, if you handle them well, you can have a terrific life. Of course, sometimes there are major influences on the quality of our lives that come from things beyond our control—the circumstances we are born into, accidents and illnesses, and so forth—but for the most part even the worst circumstances can be made better with the right approach. For example, a friend of mine dove into a swimming pool, hit his head, and became a quadriplegic. But he approached his situation well and became as happy as anybody else, because there are many paths to happiness. My point is simply this: Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control. Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control,” and studies consistently show that people who have it outperform those who don’t. So don’t worry about whether you like your situation or not. Life doesn’t give a damn about what you like. It’s up to you to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it and then find the courage to carry it through. In the next chapter I will show you the 5-Step Process that helped me learn about reality and evolve. Look at the machine from the higher level. Our uniquely human ability to look down from a higher level doesn’t apply just to understanding reality and the cause-effect relationships underlying it; it also applies to looking down on yourself and those around you. I call this ability to rise above your own and others’ circumstances and objectively look down on them “higher-level thinking.” Higher-level thinking gives you the ability to study and influence the cause-effect relationships at play in your life and use them to get the outcomes you want.

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots. Together, they make it difficult for you to objectively see what is true about you and your circumstances and to make the best possible decisions by getting the most out of others. If you can understand how the machine that is the human brain works, you can understand why these barriers exist and how to adjust your behavior to make yourself happier, more effective, and better at interacting with others. Understand your ego barrier. When I refer to your “ego barrier,” I’m referring to your subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses. Your deepest-seated needs and fears—such as the need to be loved and the fear of losing love, the need to survive and the fear of not surviving, the need to be important and the fear of not mattering—reside in primitive parts of your brain such as the amygdala, which are structures in your temporal lobe that process emotions. Because these areas of your brain are not accessible to your conscious awareness, it is virtually impossible for you to understand what they want and how they control you. They oversimplify things and react instinctively. They crave praise and respond to criticism as an attack, even when the higher-level parts of the brain understand that constructive criticism is good for you. They make you defensive, especially when it comes to the subject of how good you are. At the same time, higher-level consciousness resides in your neocortex, more specifically in the part called the prefrontal cortex. This is the most distinctively human feature of your brain; relative to the rest of the brain, it’s larger in humans than in most other species. This is where you experience the conscious awareness of decision making (the so-called “executive function”), as well as the application of logic and reasoning.

Embrace Reality and Deal with It There is nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference. I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater. All sorts of emotions come to me while I am playing and those emotions can either help me or hurt me. If I can reconcile my emotions with my logic and only act when they are aligned, I make better decisions. Learning how reality works, visualizing the things I want to create, and then building them out is incredibly exciting to me. Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilarating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning—just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks and that most of my learning will come from reflecting on them.14 Just as long-distance runners push through pain to experience the pleasure of “runner’s high,” I have largely gotten past the pain of my mistake making and instead enjoy the pleasure that comes with learning from it. I believe that with practice you can change your habits and experience the same “mistake learner’s high.” Be a hyperrealist.

Teach and reinforce the merits of mistake-based learning. To encourage people to bring their mistakes into the open and analyze them objectively, managers need to foster a culture that makes this normal and that penalizes suppressing or covering up mistakes. We do this by making it clear that one of the worst mistakes anyone can make is not facing up to their mistakes. This is why the use of the Issue Log is mandatory at Bridgewater. Know what types of mistakes are acceptable and what types are unacceptable, and don’t allow the people who work for you to make the unacceptable ones. When considering the kinds of mistakes you are willing to allow in order to promote learning through trial and error, weigh the potential damage of a mistake against the benefit of incremental learning. In defining what latitude I’m willing to give people, I say, “I’m willing to let you scratch or dent the car, but I won’t put you in a position where there’s a significant risk of your totaling it.” PAIN + REFLECTION = PROGRESS Get and Stay in Sync Remember that for an organization to be effective, the people who make it up must be aligned on many levels—from what their shared mission is, to how they will treat each other, to a more practical picture of who will do what when to achieve their goals. Yet alignment can never be taken for granted because people are wired so differently. We all see ourselves and the world in our own unique ways, so deciding what’s true and what to do about it takes constant work. Alignment is especially important in an idea meritocracy, so at Bridgewater we try to attain alignment consciously, continually, and systematically. We call this process of finding alignment “getting in sync,” and there are two primary ways it can go wrong: cases resulting from simple misunderstandings and those stemming from fundamental disagreements. Getting in sync is the process of open-mindedly and assertively rectifying both types.

If you’ve agreed with someone that something is supposed to go a certain way, make sure it goes that way—unless you get in sync about doing it differently. People will often subconsciously gravitate toward activities they like rather than what’s required. If they lose sight of their priorities, you need to redirect them. This is part of why it’s important to get frequent updates from people about their progress. Distinguish between a failure in which someone broke their “contract” and a failure in which there was no contract to begin with. If you didn’t make an expectation clear, you can’t hold people accountable for it not being fulfilled. Don’t assume that something was implicitly understood. Common sense isn’t actually all that common—be explicit. If responsibilities keep falling between the cracks, consider editing the design of your machine. Avoid getting sucked down. This occurs when a manager is pulled down to doing the tasks of a subordinate without acknowledging the problem. The sucked-down phenomenon bears some resemblance to job slip, since it involves the manager’s responsibilities slipping into areas that should be left to others. But while job slipping can make sense on a temporary basis to push through to a goal, it’s also generally a signal that a part of the machine is broken and needs fixing. The sucked-down phenomenon is what happens when a manager chronically fails to properly redesign an area of responsibility to keep him or herself from having to do the job that others should be capable of doing well. You can tell this problem exists when the manager focuses more on getting tasks done than on operating his or her machine.

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.

If you agree that a real idea meritocracy is an extremely powerful thing, it should not be a great leap for you to see that giving people the right to see things for themselves is better than forcing them to rely on information processed for them by others. Radical transparency forces issues to the surface—most importantly (and most uncomfortably) the problems that people are dealing with and how they’re dealing with them—and it allows the organization to draw on the talents and insights of all its members to solve them. Eventually, for people who get used to it, living in a culture of radical transparency is more comfortable than living in the fog of not knowing what’s going on and not knowing what people really think. And it is incredibly effective. But, to be clear, like most great things it also has drawbacks. Its biggest drawback is that it is initially very difficult for most people to deal with uncomfortable realities. If unmanaged, it can lead to people getting involved with more things than they should, and can lead people who aren’t able to weigh all the information to draw the wrong conclusions. For example, bringing all an organization’s problems to the surface and regarding every one of them as intolerable may lead some people to wrongly conclude that their organization has more intolerable problems than another organization that keeps its issues under wraps. Yet which organization is more likely to achieve excellence? One that highlights its problems and considers them intolerable or one that doesn’t?

Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it so that you or anyone else gets the biggest piece. The best negotiations are the ones with someone in which I say, “You should take more,” and they argue back, “No you should take more!” People who operate this way with each other make the relationship better and the pie bigger—and both benefit in the long run. Remember that in great partnerships, consideration and generosity are more important than money. Someone who doesn’t have much can be more generous giving a little than a rich person giving a lot. Some people respond to the generosity while others respond to the money. You want the first type with you, and you always want to treat them generously. When I had nothing, I was as generous as I could be with people who appreciated my generosity more than the higher levels of compensation others could afford to give them. For that reason, they stayed with me. I never forgot that, and I made a point of making them rich when I had the opportunity to do so. And they in turn were generous to me in their own way when I needed their generosity most. We both got something much more valuable than money—and we got the money too. Remember that the only purpose of money is to get you what you want, so think hard about what you value and put it above money. How much would you sell a good relationship for? There’s not enough money in the world to get you to part with a valued relationship. Be generous and expect generosity from others. If you’re not generous with others and others aren’t generous with you, you won’t have a quality relationship.

Workplace Personality Inventory. Another assessment we use is the Workplace Personality Inventory, a test based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor. It anticipates behavior and predicts job fit and satisfaction, singling out certain key characteristics/qualities, including persistence, independence, stress tolerance, and analytical thinking. This test helps us understand what people value and how they will make trade-offs between their values. For example, someone with low Achievement Orientation and high Concern for Others might be unwilling to step on others’ toes in order to accomplish their goals. Likewise, someone who is bad at Rule Following may be more likely to think independently. We have found that something like twenty-five to fifty attributes can pretty well describe what a person is like. Each one comes in varying degrees of strength (like color tones). If you know what they are and put them together correctly, they will paint a pretty complete picture of a person. Our objective is to use test results and other information to try to do just that. We prefer to do it in partnership with the person being looked at, because it helps us be more accurate and at the same time it’s very helpful to them to see themselves objectively. Certain attributes combine frequently to produce recognizable archetypes. If you think about it, you can probably come up with a handful of archetypal people you meet over and over again in life: the spacey, impractical Artist; the tidy Perfectionist; the Crusher who runs through brick walls to get things done; the Visionary who pulls amazing big ideas seemingly out of the air. Over time I came up with a list of others, including Shaper, Chirper, Tweaker, and Open-Minded Learner, as well as Advancer, Creator, Cat-Herder, Gossiper, Loyal Doer, Wise Judge, and others.

Don’t just pay attention to your job; pay attention to how your job will be done if you are no longer around. I wrote about key-man risk earlier, which applies the most to those with the largest areas of responsibility, especially the head of an organization. If that’s you, then you should designate the people who could replace you and have them do your job for a while so they can be vetted and tested. These results should be documented in a manual that the appropriate people can go to if you should be hit by a bus. If all the key people in the organization do this, you will have a strong “farm team,” or at least a clear understanding of vulnerabilities and a plan to deal with them. Remember that a ninja manager is somebody who can sit back and watch beauty happen—i.e., an orchestrator. If you are always trying to hire somebody who is as good as or better than you at your job, that will both free you up to go on to other things and build your succession pipeline. Beyond that, visualizing your replacement is an enlightening and productive experience. In addition to taking stock of what you are doing and coming up with both bad and good names, you will start to think about how to get your best people into slots that don’t yet exist. Knowing that you will have to test them by letting them do your job without interference, you will be motivated to train them properly before the test. And, of course, the stress-testing will help you learn and adapt, which will lead to better results.

To be clear, archetypes are less useful than the better fleshed-out pictures created through the assessments. They are not precise; they are more like simple caricatures, but they can be useful when it comes to assembling teams. Individual people will always be more complex than the archetypes that describe them, and they may well match up with more than one. For example, the Spacey Artist may or may not also be a Perfectionist or may be a Crusher too. While I won’t go over all of them, I will describe Shapers—the one that best represents me—in some depth. Shapers are people who can go from visualization to actualization. I wrote a lot about the people I call “shapers” in the first part of this book. I use the word to mean someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts of others. Shapers get both the big picture and the details right. To me, it seems that Shaper = Visionary + Practical Thinker + Determined. I’ve found that shapers tend to share attributes such as intense curiosity and a compulsive need to make sense of things, independent thinking that verges on rebelliousness, a need to dream big and unconventionally, a practicality and determination to push through all obstacles to achieve their goals, and a knowledge of their own and others’ weaknesses and strengths so they can orchestrate teams to achieve them. Perhaps even more importantly, they can hold conflicting thoughts simultaneously and look at them from different angles. They typically love to knock things around with other really smart people and can easily navigate back and forth between the big picture and the granular details, counting both as equally important. People wired with enough of these ways of thinking that they can operate in the world as shapers are very rare. But they could never succeed without working with others who are more naturally suited for other things and whose ways of thinking and acting are also essential.

Ask yourself: “Who should do what differently?” I often hear people complaining about a particular outcome without attempting to understand the machine that caused it. In many cases, these complaints come from people who are seeing the cons of some decision but not the pros and don’t know how the Responsible Party weighed them to come to a decision. Since all outcomes ultimately come from people and designs, asking yourself “Who should do what differently?” will point you in the direction of the kind of understanding that you need to actually change outcomes in the future (versus just chirping about them). Identify at which step in the 5-Step Process the failure occurred. If a person is chronically failing, it is due to a lack of training or a lack of ability. Which is it? At which of the five steps did the person fail? Different steps require different abilities and if you can identify which abilities are lacking, you’ll go a long way toward diagnosing the problem. Identify the principles that were violated. Identify which principles apply to the case at hand, review them, and see if they would have helped. Think for yourself which principles are best for handling similar cases. This will help solve not only this problem but other problems like it. Avoid Monday morning quarterbacking. Evaluate the merits of a past decision based not on what you know now but only on what you could have reasonably known at the time the decision was made. Every decision has pros and cons; you can’t evaluate choices in retrospect without the appropriate context. Do this by asking yourself, “What should a quality person have known and done in that situation?” Also, have a deep understanding of the person who made the decision (how they think, the type of person they are, whether they learned from the situation, and so on).

While all of what you read here may seem challenging and complicated in practice, if you believe as I do that there is no better way to make decisions than to have believable people open-mindedly and assertively surface, explore, and resolve their differences, then you will figure out what it takes to operate that way. If an idea meritocracy doesn’t work well, the fault doesn’t lie in the concept; it lies in people not valuing it enough to make sure that it works. If you take nothing else away from this book, you owe it to yourself to see what it’s like to experience an idea meritocracy. If it makes sense to you, I hope you will take the plunge. It won’t take long for you to understand what a radical difference it will make to your work and your relationships. To have an Idea Meritocracy: 1) Put your honest thoughts on the table 2) Have thoughtful disagreement 3) Abide by agreed-upon ways of getting past disagreement Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency Understanding what is true is essential for success, and being radically transparent about everything, including mistakes and weaknesses, helps create the understanding that leads to improvements. That’s not just a theory; we have put this into practice at Bridgewater for over forty years, so we know how it works. But like most things in life, being radically truthful and transparent has cons as well as pros, which I will describe as accurately as possible in this chapter. Being radically truthful and transparent with your colleagues and expecting your colleagues to be the same with you ensures that important issues are apparent instead of hidden. It also enforces good behavior and good thinking, because when you have to explain yourself, everyone can openly assess the merits of your logic. If you are handling things well, radical transparency will make that clear, and if you are handling things badly, radical transparency will make that clear as well, so it helps to maintain high standards.

At first, the experts gave me both bad and good advice. Many seemed as if they were more interested in making people feel good (or not feel bad) than they were at getting at the truth. Even more startling, I found that most psychologists didn’t know much about neuroscience and most neuroscientists didn’t know much about psychology—and both were reluctant to connect the physiological differences in people’s brains to the differences in their aptitudes and behaviors. But eventually I found Dr. Bob Eichinger, who opened the world of psychometric testing to me. Using Myers-Briggs and other assessments, we evolved a much clearer and more data-driven way of understanding our different types of thinking. 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).

Radical open-mindedness is motivated by the genuine worry that you might not be seeing your choices optimally. It is the ability to effectively explore different points of view and different possibilities without letting your ego or your blind spots get in your way. It requires you to replace your attachment to always being right with the joy of learning what’s true. Radical open-mindedness allows you to escape from the control of your lower-level you and ensures your upper-level you sees and considers all the good choices and makes the best possible decisions. If you can acquire this ability—and with practice you can—you’ll be able to deal with your realities more effectively and radically improve your life. Most people don’t understand what it means to be radically open-minded. They describe open-mindedness as being “open to being wrong,” but stubbornly cling to whatever opinion is in their head and fail to seek an understanding of the reasoning behind alternative points of view. To be radically open-minded you must: Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know. Most people make bad decisions because they are so certain that they’re right that they don’t allow themselves to see the better alternatives that exist. Radically open-minded people know that coming up with the right questions and asking other smart people what they think is as important as having all the answers. They understand that you can’t make a great decision without swimming for a while in a state of “not knowing.” That is because what exists within the area of “not knowing” is so much greater and more exciting than anything any one of us knows.

It is essential to know where the ultimate decision-making authority lies—i.e., how far the power of the argument will carry relative to the power of the assigned authority. While arguing and especially after a decision is rendered, everyone in the idea meritocracy must remain calm and respectful of the process. It is never acceptable to get upset if the idea meritocracy doesn’t produce the decision that you personally wanted. Surface areas of possible out-of-syncness. If you and others don’t raise your perspectives, there’s no way you will resolve your disputes. You can surface the areas of disagreement informally or put them on a list to go over. I personally like to do both, though I encourage people to list their disagreements in order of priority so I/we can more easily direct them to the right party at the right time. The nubbiest questions (the ones that there is the greatest disagreement about) are the most important ones to thrash out, as they often concern differences in people’s values or their approaches to important decisions. It’s especially important to bring these issues to the surface and examine their premises thoroughly and unemotionally. If you don’t, they will fester and cause rot. Distinguish between idle complaints and complaints meant to lead to improvement. Many complaints either fail to take into account the full picture or reflect a closed-minded point of view. They are what I call “chirping,” and are generally best ignored. But constructive complaints may lead to important discoveries. Remember that every story has another side. Wisdom is the ability to see both sides and weigh them appropriately. Be open-minded and assertive at the same time. Being effective at thoughtful disagreement requires one to be open-minded (seeing things through the other’s eyes) and assertive (communicating clearly how things look through your eyes) and to flexibly process this information to create learning and adaptation.

When someone is “without a box,” consider whether there is an open box that would be a better fit or whether you need to get them out of the company. Recognize that if they failed in that job, it is because of some qualities they have. You will need to understand what those qualities are and make sure they don’t apply to any new role. Also, if you learn that they don’t have the potential to move up, don’t let them occupy the seat of someone who can. Remember that you’re trying to select people with whom you want to share your life. Everyone evolves over time. Because managers develop a better idea of a new hire’s strengths and weaknesses and their fit within the culture than what emerges from the interview process, they are well positioned to assess them for another role if the one they were hired for doesn’t work out. Whenever someone fails at a job, it’s critical to understand why they failed and why those reasons won’t pose the same problems in a new job.

Since you don’t have the time to thoroughly examine everyone’s thinking yourself, choose your believable people wisely. Generally speaking, it’s best to choose three believable people who care a lot about achieving the best outcome and who are willing to openly disagree with each other and have their reasoning probed. Of course the number three isn’t set in stone; the group could be larger or smaller. Its ideal size depends on the amount of time available, how important the decision is, how objectively you can assess your own and others’ decision-making abilities, and how important it is to have a lot of people understand the reasoning behind the decision. When you’re responsible for a decision, compare the believability- weighted decision making of the crowd to what you believe. When they’re at odds, you should work hard to resolve the disagreement. If you are about to make a decision that the believability-weighted consensus thinks is wrong, think very carefully before you proceed. It’s likely that you’re wrong, but even if you’re right, there’s a good chance that you’ll lose respect by overruling the process. You should try hard to get in sync, and if you still can’t do that, you should be able to put your finger on exactly what it is you disagree with, understand the risks of being wrong, and clearly explain your reasons and logic to others. If you can’t do those things, you probably should suspend your own judgment and go with the believability-weighted vote. Recognize that everyone has the right and responsibility to try to make sense of important things.

Use “public hangings” to deter bad behavior. Have the clearest possible reporting lines and delineations of responsibilities. Assign responsibilities based on workflow design and people’s abilities, not job titles. Constantly think about how to produce leverage. Recognize that it is far better to find a few smart people and give them the best technology than to have a greater number of ordinary people who are less well equipped. Use leveragers. Remember that almost everything will take more time and cost more money than you expect. Do What You Set Out to Do Work for goals that you and your organization are excited about and think about how your tasks connect to those goals. Be coordinated and consistent in motivating others. Don’t act before thinking. Take the time to come up with a game plan. Look for creative, cut-through solutions. Recognize that everyone has too much to do. Don’t get frustrated. Use checklists. Don’t confuse checklists with personal responsibility. Allow time for rest and renovation. Ring the bell. Use Tools and Protocols to Shape How Work Is Done Having systemized principles embedded in tools is especially valuable for an idea meritocracy. To produce real behavioral change, understand that there must be internalized or habitualized learning. Use tools to collect data and process it into conclusions and actions. Foster an environment of confidence and fairness by having clearly-stated principles that are implemented in tools and protocols so that the conclusions reached can be assessed by tracking the logic and data behind them. And for Heaven’s Sake, Don’t Overlook Governance! To be successful, all organizations must have checks and balances. Even in an idea meritocracy, merit cannot be the only determining factor in assigning responsibility and authority. Make sure that no one is more powerful than the system or so important that they are irreplaceable. Beware of fiefdoms.

When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: 1) the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and 2) the case-at-hand level (what to do about it). When making rules, explain the principles behind them. Your policies should be natural extensions of your principles. While good principles and policies almost always provide good guidance, remember that there are exceptions to every rule. Understand the differences between managing, micromanaging, and not managing. Managers must make sure that what they are responsible for works well. Managing the people who report to you should feel like skiing together. An excellent skier is probably going to be a better ski coach than a novice skier. You should be able to delegate the details. Know what your people are like and what makes them tick, because your people are your most important resource. Regularly take the temperature of each person who is important to you and to the organization. Learn how much confidence to have in your people—don’t assume it. Vary your involvement based on your confidence. Clearly assign responsibilities. Remember who has what responsibilities. Watch out for “job slip.” Probe deep and hard to learn what you can expect from your machine. Get a threshold level of understanding. Avoid staying too distant. Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking. Probe so you know whether problems are likely to occur before they actually do. Probe to the level below the people who report to you. Have the people who report to the people who report to you feel free to escalate their problems to you. Don’t assume that people’s answers are correct. Train your ear. Make your probing transparent rather than private. Welcome probing. Remember that people who see things and think one way often have difficulty communicating with and relating to people who see things and think another way. Pull all suspicious threads.

I didn’t know for sure at the time, but our experience has proven this theory correct time and again. Bridgewater has had uncommonly few legal or regulatory encounters, largely because of our radical transparency. That’s because it’s tougher to do bad things and easier to find out what’s true and resolve claims through radical transparency. Over the last several decades, we have not had a single material legal or regulatory judgment against us. Naturally, growing bigger and more successful attracts more media attention, and reporters know that salacious and controversial stories draw more eyeballs than balanced ones. Bridgewater is especially vulnerable to this kind of reporting because, with our culture of bringing problems to the surface and sharing them transparently within the company, we leave ourselves open to leaks. Would it be better not to be transparent and so avoid such problems? I’ve learned that the people whose opinions matter most are those who know us best—our clients and our employees—and that our radical transparency serves us well with them. Not only has it led to our producing better results, but it also builds trust with our employees and clients so that mischaracterizations in the press roll off their backs. When we discuss such situations with them, they say that for us to not operate transparently would scare them much more. Having this sort of understanding and support to do the right things has been immeasurably valuable. But we wouldn’t have known about these great payoffs if we hadn’t so steadfastly pushed the limits of this truth and transparency.

Think of your plan as being like a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time. Write down your plan for everyone to see and to measure your progress against. Recognize that it doesn’t take a lot of time to design a good plan. Push through to completion. Great planners who don’t execute their plans go nowhere. Good work habits are vastly underrated. Establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan. Remember that weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions. Look at the patterns of your mistakes and identify at which step in the 5-Step Process you typically fail. Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it. Understand your own and others’ mental maps and humility. Be Radically Open-Minded Recognize your two barriers. Understand your ego barrier. Your two “yous” fight to control you. Understand your blind spot barrier. Practice radical open-mindedness. Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know. Recognize that decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide. Don’t worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal. Realize that you can’t put out without taking in. Recognize that to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another’s eyes, you must suspend judgment for a time—only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view. Remember that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that you can come up with yourself. Be clear on whether you are arguing or seeking to understand, and think about which is most appropriate based on your and others’ believability. Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement. Triangulate your view with believable people who are willing to disagree.