Top highlights from Principles
If youre not failing, youre not pushing your limits, and if youre not pushing your limits, youre not maximizing your potential
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I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.
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Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.
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Having the basicsa good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sexis most important, and those things dont get much better when you have a lot of money or much worse when you have less. And the people one meets at the top arent necessarily more special than those one meets at the bottom or in between.
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the happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.
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I just want to be rightI dont care if the right answer comes from me.
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Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your lifeyou have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.
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Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.
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If you cant successfully do something, dont think you can tell others how it should be done
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I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failedbut that wont be true unless you give up.
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Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.
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Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.
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The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.
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Its more important to do big things well than to do the small things perfectly.
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Unattainable goals appeal to heroes,
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first principle: Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2... ... and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.
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To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out whats true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.
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I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
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The most valuable habit Ive 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.
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Remember that most people are happiest when they are improving and doing the things that suit them naturally and help them advance. So learning about your peoples weaknesses is just as valuable (for them and for you) as is learning their strengths.
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Remember that in great partnerships, consideration and generosity are more important than money.
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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? Theres not enough money in the world to get you to part with a valued relationship.
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Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We cant stop our movement down this river and we cant avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.
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Meditate. I practice Transcendental Meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight. Im not saying that you have to meditate in order to develop this perspective; Im just passing along that it has helped me and many other people and I recommend that you seriously consider exploring it.
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Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
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Thoughtful disagreement is not a battle; its goal is not to convince the other party that he or she is wrong and you are right, but to find out what is true and what to do about it.
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Choose your habits well. Habit is probably the most powerful tool in your brains toolbox.
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The people who work for you should constantly challenge you,
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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).
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My approach was to hire, train, test, and then fire or promote quickly, so that we could rapidly identify the excellent hires and get rid of the ordinary ones, repeating the process again and again until the percentage of those who were truly great was high enough to meet our needs.
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The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.
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Managers who do not understand people's different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations.
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in most companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others impressions of how theyre doing their job.
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I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure.
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Pay for the person, not the job. Look at what people in comparable jobs with comparable experience and credentials make, add some small premium over that, and build in bonuses or other incentives so they will be motivated to knock the cover off the ball. Never pay based on the job title alone.
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Because most people are more emotional than logical, they tend to overreact to short-term results; they give up and sell low when times are bad and buy too high when times are good. I find this is just as true for relationships as it is for investmentswise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel, jumping into things when theyre hot and abandoning them when theyre not.
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Having nothing to hide relieves stress and builds trust.
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Never say anything about someone that you wouldnt say to them directly and dont try people without accusing them to their faces.
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While I used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize that they werent intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked.
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What you will be will depend on the perspective you have.
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Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning. Having open-minded conversations with believable people who disagree with you is the quickest way to get an education and to increase your probability of being right.
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Then I spoke with proven shapers I knewBill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hours worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches. While not perfect, these assessments have been invaluable. (In fact, I have been adapting and refining them to help us in our recruiting and management.) The answers these shapers provided to the standardized questions gave me objective and statistically measurable evidence about their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they cant. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who arent excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.
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I came to see that peoples greatest weaknesses are the flip sides of their greatest strengths.
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Every leader must decide between 1) getting rid of liked but incapable people to achieve their goals and 2) keeping the nice but incapable people and not achieving their goals. Whether or not you can make these hard decisions is the strongest determinant of your own success
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Its senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic valueits value comes from what it can buy, and it cant buy everything. Its smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but its not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.
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If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.
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d. In designing your organization, remember that the 5-Step Process is the path to success and that different people are good at different steps. Assign specific people to do each of these steps based on their natural inclinations. For example, the big-picture visionary should be responsible for goal setting, the taste tester should be assigned the job of identifying and not tolerating problems, the logical detective who doesnt mind probing people should be the diagnoser, the imaginative designer should craft the plan to make the improvements, and the reliable taskmaster should make sure the plan gets executed. Of course, some people can do more than one of these thingsgenerally people do two or three well. Virtually nobody can do them all well. A team should consist of people with all of these abilities and they should know who is responsible for which steps.
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beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even embrace your weaknesses.
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While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: Its senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic valueits value comes from what it can buy, and it cant buy everything. Its smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but its not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money lessas long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that. In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations ( Grains and Oilseeds, Livestock and Meats, Economy and Financial Markets) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our business. Today, almost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Observations are read, reflected on, and argued about by clients and policymakers around the world. Im still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people dont care to read them or I die.
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Systemize your decision making.
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Beware of statements that begin with I think that... Just because someone thinks something doesnt mean its true.
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Dont just pay attention to your job; pay attention to how your job will be done if you are no longer around.
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Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple
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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.
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Some people go through life collecting all kinds of observations and opinions like pocket lint, instead of just keeping what they need. They have detail anxiety, worrying about unimportant things.
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Dont hire people just to fit the first job they will do; hire people you want to share your life with.
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In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.
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no manager at any level can expect to succeed without the skill set of an organizational engineer.
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Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice?
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Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.
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