Bridgewater’s roughly 1,500 employees do many different things, some strive to understand the global markets; others develop technologies; still others serve clients, manage health insurance and other benefits for employees, provide legal guidance, manage IT and facilities, and so on. All these activities require different types of people to work together in ways that harvest the best ideas and throw away the worst. Organizing people to complement their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses is like conducting an orchestra. It can be magnificent if done well and terrible if done poorly.
While “know thyself” and “to thine own self be true” are fundamental tenets I had heard long before I began looking into the brain, I had no idea how to go about getting that knowledge or how to act on it until we made these discoveries about how people think differently. The better we know ourselves, the better we can recognize both what can be changed and how to change it, and what can’t be changed and what we can do about that. So no matter what you set out to do, whether on your own, as a member of an organization, or as its director, you need to understand how you and other people are wired.
Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.
As I related in the first part of this book, my first breakthrough in understanding how people think differently occurred when I was a young father and had my kids tested by Dr. Sue Quinlan. I found the results remarkable, because she not only confirmed my own observations of the ways that their minds were working at the time but also predicted how they would develop in the future. For example, one of my kids was struggling with arithmetic. Because he tested well in mathematical reasoning, she correctly told him that if he pushed through the boredom of rote memorization required in elementary school, he would love the higher-level concepts he would be exposed to when he got older. These insights opened my eyes to new possibilities. I turned to her and others years later when I was trying to figure out the different thinking styles of my employees and colleagues.
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.