Our biggest barriers for doing this well are our ego barrier and our blind spot barrier. The ego barrier is our innate desire to be capable and have others recognize us as such. The blind spot barrier is the result of our seeing things through our own subjective lenses; both barriers can prevent us from seeing how things really are. The most important antidote for them is radical open-mindedness, which is motivated by the genuine worry that one might not be seeing one’s 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.
Doing this well requires practicing thoughtful disagreement, which is the process of seeking out brilliant people who disagree with you in order to see things through their eyes and gain a deeper understanding. Doing this will raise your probability of making good decisions and will also give you a fabulous education. If you can learn radical open-mindedness and practice thoughtful disagreement, you’ll radically increase your learning.
Finally, being radically open-minded requires you to have an accurate self-assessment of your own and others’ strengths and weaknesses. This is where understanding something about how the brain works and the different psychometric assessments that can help you discover what your own brain is like comes in. To get the best results out of yourself and others, you must understand that people are wired very differently.
In a nutshell, learning how to make decisions in the best possible way and learning to have the courage to make them comes from going after what you want, failing and reflecting well through radical open-mindedness, and changing/evolving to become ever more capable and less fearful.
You can of course do all of these things alone, but if you’ve understood anything about the concept of radical open-mindedness, it should be obvious that going it alone will only take you so far. We all need others to help us triangulate and get to the best possible decisions, and to help us see our weaknesses objectively and compensate for them. More than anything else, your life is affected by the people around you and how you interact with each other.
Your ability to get what you want when working with others who want the same things is much greater than your ability to get these things by yourself. Yet we haven’t talked about how groups should operate to be most effective. That’s what we’ll do in Work Principles.
Work Principles is about people working together. Because the power of a group is so much greater than the power of an individual, the principles that follow are likely even more important than those we covered up to this point. In fact, I wrote them first and then wrote Life Principles in order to help others make sense of the approach I was implicitly applying in running Bridgewater. My Work Principles are basically the Life Principles you just read, applied to groups. I will show you, principle by principle, how an actual, practical, believability-weighted decision-making system converts independent thinking into effective group decision-making. I believe that such a system can work to make any kind of organization, business, government, philanthropic, both more effective and more satisfying to belong to.
I hope these principles will help you struggle well and get all the joy you can out of life.
Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.
Embrace reality and deal with it
Be a hyperrealist.
Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.
Truth, or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality, is the essential foundation for any good outcome.
Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.
Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change.
Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way.
Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.
Look to nature to learn how reality works.
Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.
To be “good,” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded.
Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.
Evolve or die.
Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.
The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals.
Reality is optimizing for the whole, not for you.
Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable.