Translate a book's text into a specified target language while maintaining the original context, tone, and meaning. 

# Steps

1. **Understand the Source Text**: Read and comprehend the original text to capture its themes, tones, and styles.
2. **Translate Precisely**: Convert text into the target language, ensuring to accurately convey the same meaning, intent, and emotion.
3. **Maintain Cultural Relevance**: Adapt cultural references to suit the target language's culture where necessary.
4. **Review for Consistency**: Check the translation for consistency in language use across the text, ensuring that terminologies and character voices are uniform throughout.
5. **Proofread**: Perform a thorough check for grammatical accuracy and errors in the target language.

# Notes

- Be aware of idiomatic expressions and ensure they are translated for meaning rather than word-for-word.
- Pay attention to the genre and age appropriateness of the language used in translation.
- Consider variations in dialect when translating for specific regions.

Translate to french :

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Ray Dalio does not want you to read this book.

He told me as much. At the start of this project, I reached out to him by email to seek his perspective. He responded with skepticism about my intentions. After considerable back-and-forth, he elected not to be interviewed, as is his right.

I am endlessly grateful that hundreds of people in and around Bridgewater Associates trusted me with their time, and with their experiences. I also relied on contemporaneous notes, emails, recordings, court records, myriad other internal and external company documents, and published interviews and articles. All of the names that appear here are real, except for one pseudonym, used to conceal the identity of a former employee who alleged sexual misbehavior.

In some instances, the dialogue in this book comes directly from the subject; in others, it is from others in the room, or people briefed afterward, or those who listened to recordings of an event. It should not be assumed that the people quoted spoke to me. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author James B. Stewart wrote, “Given the vagaries of human memory, remembered dialogue is rarely the same as actual recordings and transcripts. At the same time, it is no more nor less accurate than many other recollections.”

As for Dalio’s own recollections, the public lacks no opportunity to hear them. He wrote a bestselling autobiography-cum-self-help book, Principles: Life and Work. Over the past decade, he has given hundreds of media interviews on five continents, preaching the gospel of Ray. He’s appeared on major broadcast and cable networks, popular podcasts, and magazine covers. He was interviewed by Gwyneth Paltrow. As of publication, nearly 2.5 million people follow him on LinkedIn. His TED Talks have been viewed nearly 7 million times and his most popular YouTube video more than 34 million times.

While Dalio is hardly the first financier to develop a taste for the spotlight, he might be the first to claim that he alone has discovered the solution to what he sees as two of mankind’s greatest challenges: Our reluctance to disagree with one another, and our desire to pursue meaningful lives. Dalio has for years stuck to a narrative that all Bridgewater employees are judged on an equal playing field, and that any difference in rank or authority was due only to a rigorous system that susses out merit. The truth is rather more Orwellian. At Bridgewater, some are more equal than others.

This is the story of Ray Dalio, the most equal one of all.

—ROB COPELAND

INTRODUCTION
A few minutes after hanging up the phone, Paul McDowell carefully smoothed his button-down shirt, knelt in the snow, and dry heaved.

McDowell wasn’t so much upset as overwhelmed. The balding Canadian tended to shy away from big risks, yet he had just taken the biggest gamble of his life, negotiating with one of the world’s wealthiest men—and winning, or so it seemed. Not for the last time, he wondered what the hell had just happened.

When his cell phone rang earlier that afternoon, McDowell was seated at his desk in the tiny office that counted as the Canadian headquarters for BearingPoint consulting, the sort of sad corporate advisory firm that picked up the projects that McKinsey & Company wouldn’t touch. He picked up the phone and heard the low, gravelly voice of Ray Dalio.

“Paul,” Dalio said, skipping any small talk, “it’s so hard to find anyone like you.”

McDowell felt his chest fill with heat. That anyone was calling at all—let alone laying on compliments—was its own feat. If McDowell was known at all to his colleagues elsewhere in the company, it was simply as the Canada man. Unlike many consultants, he loathed the slick presentations or client glad-handing endemic to the career. But divorced and in debt, he needed his well-paying job. He had made himself an expert in technology infrastructure, human resources, and compensation management—dull topics, but areas where hard work and a high tolerance for spreadsheets could whittle out a corporate life. Though McDowell often felt underappreciated, he also valued being something of an expert in how to find novel ways for BearingPoint’s clients to make small changes that had big impacts on their operations.

It was confusing, and deeply flattering, that someone like Ray Dalio had sought him out. Dalio wasn’t just any business titan; he was founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates, and a burgeoning celebrity in the financial world.

This was December 2008, and while most of Wall Street was being thrashed, Dalio was having the best year of his professional career. He had famously rung the alarm on the housing bubble, publicly warning a year earlier that mortgages seemed on the brink of collapse. He looked like an oracle, and so now Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke—the world’s most important banker—consulted with Dalio on how to pull the country out of its tailspin. A week after McDowell’s phone call, the New York Post would write, “Dalio has been so prescient about the state of the economy that reading his daily observations has been like reading the financial papers two weeks in advance.”

The idea that Dalio needed McDowell made little sense. McDowell was one of a slew of consultants Bridgewater had brought in, and he helped not with the investments that made Dalio so much money, but the less sexy work of cleaning up back-office processes. But as Dalio described his situation, McDowell began to see how he could help. Bridgewater was growing at a punishing rate, Dalio explained, and he needed help to oversee the day-to-day management of the firm. He spent much of his time traveling the world, meeting with wealthy individuals and institutions and advising them on what to do with their money. McDowell, Dalio said, could be just the man to tend the store at the hedge fund’s Connecticut headquarters.

BearingPoint had done some consulting work for Bridgewater and helped the hedge fund design a system to analyze talent, saving it money. McDowell figured his team had done a pretty good job because in 2008 alone Bridgewater added 211 new employees, ballooning the firm’s ranks by more than a third in just one year. McDowell had not interacted much directly with Dalio, but when McDowell had, he had noticed immediately that Bridgewater’s staff seemed in awe of the founder. There was scarcely a meeting where Dalio did not stop to share lessons from his experience, as those around him furiously scribbled down notes. His words were cited constantly by others, whether he was present or not.

One afternoon, while working out of a conference room at Bridgewater’s headquarters during a torrential rainstorm, McDowell spotted the billionaire Bridgewater founder helping underlings dodge puddles as they carried in catered trays of lunch. McDowell made a mental note that such an important man would pitch in even when it seemed nobody was watching.

McDowell knew that Dalio had a reputation for hiring the best, regardless of résumé. Dalio would often say that he weighed values and character over specific skills. He instructed Bridgewater’s recruiters to prize logical thinking and a tolerance for frank feedback from all employees, from the C-suite down to Bridgewater’s janitorial staff. Don’t just hire people to fit the job, Dalio would say, but people with whom you want to share your life. McDowell, Dalio now told him, was one of the few people the Bridgewater founder had met who met the mark.

“I think you would be fantastic,” Dalio told McDowell. “You absolutely understand the way we are, and you can do anything here you want. You could even run the company.”

McDowell was flabbergasted and momentarily speechless. That didn’t matter much, because Dalio blazed ahead with his pitch, launching into an extensive explanation of McDowell’s broad future responsibilities at Bridgewater. They included finding a way to reorganize staff across the company in accordance with Dalio’s unique values. Dalio was on the hunt for a new chief executive to take over when the founder retired, and he told McDowell that he was one of a handful who could get the job.

“Paul, I am so thrilled about our partnership,” Dalio said, finally wrapping up. “What do you say?”

“Ray, my only concern is that I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to be intimidated by you. I don’t want us to have that kind of relationship. I’d like us to be able to be very honest and straight with one another and not worry about that.”

There was a long pause before Dalio responded. “I think the problem with those people, Paul, is that those people can’t distinguish between ‘goal’ and task. You absolutely understand things at the ‘goal’ level.” Finally, McDowell thought, here was someone who saw him as a leader.
McDowell asked about salary and was quoted a generous sum, more than a million dollars in the first full year alone including a bonus. “You’ll make a ridiculous amount of money. Soon you’ll be making millions of dollars,” Dalio said.

Dalio then asked what McDowell was currently making, and in the spirit of the honesty the two men had just pledged, McDowell answered truthfully: Bridgewater’s base salary alone was $100,000 higher than his current pay.

“Okay, actually, then that’s what I’ll pay. I only pay people what they’re currently making,” Dalio said airily.

McDowell’s skin prickled. He had just been dangled, and had now apparently just as quickly lost, what seemed to him a small fortune. “Wait, you just said what I was worth. Why would I take less than what you believe me to be worth?”

“I can’t believe a hundred thousand dollars a year is going to make a difference to you to join this place. Don’t let that guide your choice.”

The two men began to talk over each other, until it was clear Dalio’s patience for this conversation had worn thin. “All right, Paul, I never, ever, ever do this, but okay, I’ll pay what you ask. That’s the deal.”

The billionaire wished him a merry Christmas, and the line went dead.