Livre de Ray Dalio le milliardaire qui vend
Principles
Highlights
Part 1: The Importance of Principles
WHAT ARE PRINCIPLES?Your values are what you consider important, literally what you “value.” Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions; they are beacons that guide your actions, and help you successfully deal with the laws of reality. It is to your principles that you turn when you face hard choices.
Part 1: The Importance of Principles
WHY ARE PRINCIPLES IMPORTANT?All successful people operate by principles that help them be successful. Without principles, you would be forced to react to circumstances that come at you without considering what you value most and how to make choices to get what you want. This would prevent you from making the most of your life. While operating without principles is bad for individuals, it is even worse for groups of individuals (such as companies) because it leads to people randomly bumping into each other without understanding their own values and how to behave in order to be consistent with those values.
Part 1: The Importance of Principles
WHERE DO PRINCIPLES COME FROM?Sometimes we forge our own principles and sometimes we accept others’ principles, or holistic packages of principles, such as religion and legal systems. While it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to use others’ principles—it’s difficult to come up with your own, and often much wisdom has gone into those already created—adopting pre-packaged principles without much thought exposes you to the risk of inconsistency with your true values. Holding incompatible principles can lead to conflict between values and actions—like the hypocrite who has claims to be of a religion yet behaves counter to its teachings. Your principles need to reflect values you really believe in.
Part 1: The Importance of Principles
DO YOU HAVE PRINCIPLES THAT YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE BY? WHAT ARE THEY?Your principles will determine your standards of behavior. When you enter into relationships with other people, your and their principles will determine how you interact. People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflict with one another. Too often in relationships, people’s principles are unclear. Think about the people with whom you are closest. Are their values aligned with yours?
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I learned that finding out what is true, regardless of what that is, including all the stuff most people think is bad—like mistakes and personal weaknesses—is good because I can then deal with these things so that they don’t stand in my way.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I learned that there is nothing to fear from truth. While some truths can be scary—for example, finding out that you have a deadly disease—knowing them allows us to deal with them better. Being truthful, and letting others be completely truthful, allows me and others to fully explore our thoughts and exposes us to the feedback that is essential for our learning
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I learned that one of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads—often theories that are critical of others—that they won’t test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people’s backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I learned that being truthful was an extension of my freedom to be me. I believe that people who are one way on the inside and believe that they need to be another way outside to please others become conflicted and often lose touch with what they really think and feel. It’s difficult for them to be happy and almost impossible for them to be at their best. I know that’s true for me
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I met a number of great people and learned that none of them were born great—they all made lots of mistakes and had lots weaknesses—and that great people become great by looking at their mistakes and weaknesses and figuring out how to get around them. So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement and movement toward what I wanted.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Yes, I started Bridgewater from scratch, and now it’s a uniquely successful company and I am on the Forbes 400 list. But these results were never my goals—they were just residual outcomes—so my getting them can’t be indications of my success. And, quite frankly, I never found them very rewarding.[16]What I wanted was to have an interesting, diverse life filled with lots of learning—and especially meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I feel that I have gotten these in abundance and I am happy
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I am just saying that I believe hyperrealism is the best way to choose and achieve one’s dreams. The people who really change the world are the ones who see what’s possible and figure out how to make that happen. I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
For example, the ability to fly or to send cellular phone signals imperceptibly and instantaneously around the world or any other new and beneficial developments resulted from understanding and using previously existing laws of the universe. These inventions did not come from people who were not well-grounded in reality.[17]
The same is true for economic, political, and social systems that work. Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I believe that evolution, which is the natural movement toward better adaptation, is the greatest single force in the universe, and that it is good.[18]
It affects the changes of everything from all species to the entire solar system. It is good because evolution is the process of adaptation that leads to improvement. So, based on how I observe both nature and humanity working, I believe that what is bad and most punished are those things that don’t work because they are at odds with the laws of the universe and they impede evolution
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I believe that the desire to evolve, i.e., to get better, is probably humanity’s most pervasive driving force.
Enjoying your job, a craft, or your favorite sport comes from the innate satisfaction of getting better. Though most people typically think that they are striving to get things (e.g., toys, better houses, money, status, etc.) that will make them happy, that is not usually the case. Instead, when we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied.[19]
It is natural for us to seek other things or to seek to make the things we have better. In the process of this seeking, we continue to evolve and we contribute to the evolution of all that we have contact with. The things we are striving for are just the bait to get us to chase after them in order to make us evolve
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
our lives are not satisfied by obtaining our goals rather than by striving for them—because of the law of diminishing returns.[20]
For example, suppose making a lot of money is your goal and suppose you make enough so that making more has no marginal utility. Then it would be foolish to continue to have making money be your goal. People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony. So, because of the law of diminishing returns, it is only natural that seeking something new, or seeking new depths of something old, is required to bring us satisfaction.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In other words, the sequence of 1) seeking new things (goals); 2) working and learning in the process of pursuing these goals; 3) obtaining these goals; and 4) then doing this over and over again is the personal evolutionary process
that fulfills most of us and moves society forward.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I believe that pursuing self-interest in harmony with the laws of the universe and contributing to evolution is universally rewarded, and what I call “good.” Look at all species in action: they are constantly pursuing their own interests and helping evolution in a symbiotic way, with most of them not even knowing that their self-serving behaviors are contributing to evolution. Like the hyenas attacking the wildebeest, successful people might not even know if or how their pursuit of self-interest helps evolution, but it typically does.[21]
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic: more than anything else, it is pursuit of self- interest that motivates people to push themselves to do the difficult things that benefit them and that contribute to society. In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted—NOT how much they desired to make money
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
. I know that this is true for me—i.e., I never worked to make a lot of money, and if I had I would have stopped ages ago because of the law of diminishing returns. I know that the same is true for all the successful, healthy (i.e., non-obsessed) people I know
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
highly creative, goal-oriented people who are good at imagining the big picture often can easily get tripped up on the details of daily life, while highly pragmatic, task-oriented people who are great with the details might not be creative. That is because the ways their minds work make it difficult for them to see both ways of thinking. In nature everything was made for a purpose, and so too were these different ways of thinking. They just have different purposes. It is extremely important to one’s happiness and success to know oneself—most importantly to understand one’s own values and abilities—and then to find the right fits
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
typically defensive, emotional reactions—i.e., ego barriers—stand in the way of this progress. These reactions take place in the part of the brain called the amygdala. As a result of them, most people don’t like reflecting on their weaknesses even though recognizing them is an essential step toward preventing them from causing them problems. Most people especially dislike others exploring their weaknesses because it makes them feel attacked, which produces fight or flight reactions; however, having others help one find one’s weaknesses is essential because it’s very difficult to identify one’s own. Most people don’t like helping others explore their weaknesses, even though they are willing to talk about them behind their backs. For these reasons most people don’t do a good job of understanding themselves and adapting in order to get what they want most out of life. In my opinion, that is the biggest single problem of mankind because it, more than anything else, impedes people’s abilities to address all other problems and it is probably the greatest source of pain for most people.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Some people get over the ego barrier and others don’t. Which path they choose, more than anything else, determines how good their outcomes are.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
the quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I believe that the way we make our dreams into reality is by constantly engaging with reality in pursuit of our dreams and by using these encounters to learn more about reality itself and how to interact with it in order to get what we want—and that if we do this with determination, we almost certainly will be successful. In short:Reality+Dreams+Determination=A Successful Life
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
So what is success? I believe that it is nothing more than getting what you want—and that it is up to you to decide what that is for you.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
What is essential is that you are clear about what you want and that you figure out how to get it.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
for most people happiness is much more determined by how things turn out relative to their expectations rather than the absolute level of their conditions. For example, if a billionaire loses 10 thousand unexpectedly gets another $2 thousand, he will probably be happy. This basic principle suggests that you can follow one of two paths to happiness: 1) have high expectations and strive to exceed them, or 2) lower your expectations so that they are at or below your conditions. Most of us choose the first path, which means that to be happy we have to keep evolving.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Another principle to keep in mind is that people need meaningful work and meaningful relationships in order to be fulfilled.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way.
Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way. At the same time, nature made the process of getting stronger require us to push our limits. Gaining strength is the adaptation process of the body and the mind to encountering one’s limits, which is painful. In other words, both pain and strength typically result from encountering one’s barriers. When we encounter pain, we are at an important juncture in our decision- making process.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Most people react to pain badly. They have “fight or flight” reactions to it: they either strike out at whatever brought them the pain or they try to run away from it. As a result, they don’t learn to find ways around their barriers, so they encounter them over and over again and make little or no progress toward what they want.[
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Those who react well to pain that stands in the way of getting to their goals—those who understand what is causing it and how to deal with it so that it can be disposed of as a barrier—gain strength and satisfaction. This is because most learning comes from making mistakes, reflecting on the causes of the mistakes, and learning what to do differently in the future. Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel the pain if you approach it correctly, because it will signal that you need to find solutions and to progress.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them—i.e., reflecting[30]—if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices. They typically do this because facing “harsh realities” can be very difficult. However, by not facing these harsh realities, they don’t find ways of properly dealing with them. And because their decisions are not based in reality, they can’t anticipate the consequences of their decisions.[32]
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In contrast, people who know that understanding what is real is the first step toward optimally dealing with it make better decisions.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Ask yourself, “Is it true?”…because knowing what is true is good.How much do you let what you wish to be true stand in the way of seeing what is really true?
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future
[37]
For example, if you are dumb or ugly, you are unlikely to acknowledge it, even though doing so would help you better deal with that reality. Recognizing such “harsh realities” is both very painful and very productive.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
These people typically try to prove that they have the answers, even when they really don’t. Why do they behave in this unproductive way? They typically believe the senseless but common view that great people are those who have the answers in their heads and don’t have weaknesses. Not only does this view not square with reality, but it also stands in the way of progress.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I have never met a great person who did not earn and learn their greatness.[34] They have weaknesses like everyone else—they have just learned how to deal with them so that they aren’t impediments to getting what they want
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
How much do you worry about looking good relative to actually being good?
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second- and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.[36]
This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision-making. For example, the first-order consequences of exercise (pain and time-sink) are commonly considered undesirable, while the second-order consequences (better health and more attractive appearance) are desirable.
Note
Discipline
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Quite often the first-order consequences are the temptations that cost us what we really want, and sometimes they are barriers that stand in our way of getting what we want. It’s almost as though the natural selection process sorts us by throwing us trick choices that have both types of consequences and penalizing the dummies who make their decisions just on the basis of the first-order consequences alone.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
By contrast, people who choose what they really want, and avoid the temptations and get over the pains that drive them away from what they really want, are much more likely to have successful lives
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
How much do you respond to 1st order consequences at the expense of 2nd and 3rd order consequences?
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Blaming bad outcomes on anyone or anything other than one’s self is essentially wishing that reality is different than it is, which is silly.[37]
And it is subversive because it diverts one’s attention away from mustering up the personal strength and other qualities that are required to produce the best possible outcomes.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In summary, I believe that you can probably get what you want out of life if you can suspend your ego and take a no-excuses approach to achieving your goals with open-mindedness, determination, and courage, especially if you rely on the help of people who are strong in areas that you are weak.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Successful people understand that bad things come at everyone and that it is their responsibility to make their lives what they want them to be by successfully dealing with whatever challenges they face.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
whether or not I achieve my goals is a test of what I am made of. It is a game that I play, but this game is for real. In the next part I explain how I go about playing it.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In summary, I don’t believe that limited abilities are an insurmountable barrier to achieving your goals, if you do the other things right.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
you(1) should look down on you(2) and all the other resources at your(1) disposal and create a “machine” to achieve your(1) goals, remembering that you(1) don’t necessarily need to do anything other than to design and manage the machine to get what you(1) want. If you(1) find that you(2) can’t do something well fire yourself(2) and get a good replacement! You shouldn’t be upset that you found out that you(2) are bad at that—you(1) should be happy because you(1) have improved your(1) chances of getting what you(1) want. If you(1) are disappointed because you(2) can’t be the best person to do everything, you(1) are terribly naïve because nobody can do everything well.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
There are five things that you have to do to get what you want out of life. First, you have to choose your goals, which will determine your direction. Then you have to design a plan
to achieve your goals. On the way to your goals, you will encounter problems. As I mentioned, these problems typically cause pain. The most common source of pain is in exploring your mistakes and weaknesses. You will either react badly to the pain or react like a master problem solver. That is your choice. To figure out how to get around these problems you must be calm and analytical to accurately diagnose your problems. Only after you have an accurate diagnosis of them can you design a plan that will get you around your problems. Then you have to do the tasks
specified in the plan. Through this process of encountering problems and figuring out how to get around them, you will become progressively more capable and achieve your goals more easily. Then you will set bigger, more challenging goals, in the same way that someone who works with weights naturally increases the poundage. This is the process of personal evolution, which I call my 5-Step Process.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Before discussing these individual steps in more detail, I want to make a few general points about the process.1) You must approach these as distinct steps rather than blur them together.
For example, when setting goals, just set goals (don’t think how you will achieve them or the other steps);
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
If you are missing any of the required talents and disciplines, that is not an insurmountable problem because you can acquire them, supplement them, or compensate for not having them, if you recognize your weaknesses and design around them. So you must be honestly self-reflective.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
It is essential to approach this process in a very clear-headed, rational way rather than emotionally
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
To help you do these things well—and stay centered and effective rather than stressed and thrown off by your emotions—try this technique for reducing the pressure: treat your life like a game
or a martial art. Your mission is to figure out how to get around your challenges to get to your goals. In the process of playing the game or practicing this martial art, you will become more skilled. As you get better, you will progress to ever-higher levels of the game that will require—and teach you—greater skills
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
This particular game—i.e., your life—will challenge you in ways that will be uncomfortable at times. But if you work through this discomfort and reflect on it in order to learn, you will significantly improve your chances of getting what you want out of life. By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t give a damn what you “like.”
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things—which often are difficult but produce good results
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
That’s just the way it is, so you might as well accept it. Once you accept that playing the game will be uncomfortable, and you do it for a while, it will become much easier (like it does when getting fit). When you excel at it, you will find your ability to get what you want thrilling. You’ll see that excuses like “That’s not easy” are of no value and that it pays to “push through it” at a pace you can handle.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
The first- order consequences of escaping life’s challenges may seem pleasurable in the moment, but the second- and third-order consequences of this approach are your life and, over time, will be painful. With practice, you will eventually play this game like a ninja, with skill and a calm centeredness in the face of adversity that will let you handle most of your numerous challenges well.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
However, you will never handle them all well: mistakes are inevitable, and it’s important to recognize and accept this fact of life. The good news, as I have mentioned, is that most learning comes through making mistakes—so there is no end to learning how to play the game better.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
You will have an enormous number of decisions to make, so no matter how many mistakes you make, there will be plenty of opportunities to build a track record of success
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
failing to make the distinction between goals and desires will lead you in the wrong direction, because you will be inclined to pursue things you want that will undermine your ability to get things you want more. In short, you can pursue anything you desire—just make sure that you know the consequences of what you are doing.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Avoid setting goals based on what you think you can achieve.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Another common reason people fail at this stage is that they lose sight of their goals, getting caught up in day-to-day tasks.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
I also know that I can “cheat.” Unlike in school, in life you don’t have to come up with all the right answers. You can ask the people around you for help—or even ask them to do the things you don’t do well.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Every time I set goals, I don’t yet have any idea how I am going to achieve them because I haven’t yet gone through the process of thinking through them. But I have learned that I can achieve them if I think creatively and work hard.[43]
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
As I said before, do each step separately and distinctly without regard to the others. In this case, that means don’t rule out a goal due to a superficial assessment of its attainability. Once you commit to a goal, it might take lots of thinking and many revisions to your plan over a considerable time period in order to finalize the design and do the tasks to achieve it. So you need to set goals without yet assessing whether or not you can achieve them.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
This requires some faith that you really can achieve virtually anything,[42]
even if you don’t know how you will do it at that moment. Initially you have to have faith that this is true, but after following this process and succeeding at achieving your goals, you will gain confidence.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Great expectations create great capabilities
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Generally speaking, goal-setting is best done by those who are good at big-picture conceptual thinking, synthesizing, visualizing, and prioritizing. But whatever your strengths and weaknesses are, don’t forget the big and really great news here: it is not essential that you have all of these qualities yourself, because you can supplement them with the help of others.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
For example, if your impediments are due largely to issues of will—to your unwillingness to confront what is really happening—you have to strengthen your will, for example by starting small and building up your confidence.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
The more precise you are, the easier it will be to come up with accurate diagnoses and successful solutions. For example, rather than saying something like “People don’t like me,” it is better to specify which people don’t like you and under what circumstances.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Once you identify your problems, you must not tolerate them.Tolerating problems has the same result as not identifying them (i.e., both stand in the way of getting past the problem), but the root causes are different. Tolerating problems might be due to not thinking that they can be solved, or not caring enough about solving them.[47]
[50]
Not caring to solve problems often occurs when the expected reward is less than the expected cost. For example, when someone is working toward someone else’s goals without being appropriately supervised, rewarded or punished.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
if you are motivated, you can succeed even if you don’t have the abilities (i.e., talents and skills) because you can get the help from others. But if you’re not motivated to succeed, if you don’t have the will to succeed, the situation is hopeless.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People who are good at this step—identifying and not tolerating problems—tend to have strong abilities to perceive
and synthesize
a clear and accurate picture, as well as demonstrate a fierce intolerance of badness
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Can you comfortably identify your problems without thinking about how to solve them? It is a good exercise to just make a list of them, without possible solutions. Only after you have created a clear picture of your problems should you go to the next step.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
You will be much more effective if you focus on diagnosis and design rather than jumping to solutions.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
It is a very common mistake for people to move directly from identifying a tough problem to a proposed solution in a nanosecond without spending the hours required to properly diagnose and design a solution. This typically yields bad decisions that don’t alleviate the problem. Diagnosing and designing are what spark strategic thinking.You must be calm and logical.When diagnosing problems, as when identifying problems, reacting emotionally, though sometimes difficult to avoid, can undermine your effectiveness as a decision-maker. By contrast, staying rational will serve you well. So if you are finding yourself shaken by your problems, do what you can to get yourself centered before moving forward.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Many problems are caused by people’s mistakes. But people often find it difficult to identify and accept their own mistakes. Sometimes it’s because they’re blind to them, but more often it’s because ego and shortsightedness make discovering their mistakes and weaknesses painful. Because people are often upset when their mistakes are pointed out to them, most people are reluctant to point out mistakes in others. As a result, an objective diagnosis of problems arising from people’s mistakes is often missing and personal evolution is stunted.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
exercise eventually becomes pleasurable for people who hardwire the connection between exercise and its benefits.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
The most important qualities for successfully diagnosing problems are logic, the ability to see multiple possibilities, and the willingness to touch people’s nerves to overcome the ego barriers that stand in the way of truth.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In some cases, you might go from setting goals to designing the plans that will get you to these goals; while in other cases, you will encounter problems on the way to your goals and have to design your way around them. So design will occur at both stages of the process, though it will occur much more often in figuring out how to get around problems. In other words, most of the movement toward your goals comes from designing how to remove the root causes of your problems. Problems are great because they are very specific
impediments, so you know that you will move forward if you can identify and eliminate their root causes.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Think about each problem individually, and as the product of root causes—like the outcomes produced by a machine.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Then think about how the machine should be changed to produce good outcomes rather than bad ones. There are typically many paths toward achieving your goals, and you need to find only one of them that works, so it’s almost always doable.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
an effective design requires thinking things through and visualizing how things will come together and unfold over time. It’s essential to visualize the story of where you have been (or what you have done) that has led you to where you are now and what will happen sequentially in the future to lead you to your goals. You should visualize this plan through time, like watching a movie that connects your past, present, and future.
Note
Imagination is key to goal setting
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Then write down the plan so you don’t lose sight of it, and include who needs to do what and when. The list of tasks falls out from this story (i.e., the plan), but they are not the same. The story, or plan, is what connects your goals to the tasks. For you to succeed, you must not lose sight of the goals or the story while focusing on the tasks;
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
When designing your plan, think about the timelines of various interconnected tasks. Sketch them out loosely and then refine them with the specific tasks. This is an iterative process, alternating between sketching out your broad steps (e.g., hire great people) and filling these in with more specific tasks with estimated timelines (e.g., in the next two weeks choose the headhunters to find the great people) that will have implications (e.g., costs, time, etc.). These will lead you to modify your design sketch until the design and tasks work well together. Being as specific as possible (e.g., specifying who will do what and when) allows you to visualize how the design will work at both a big-picture level and in detail. It will also give you and others the to-do lists and target dates that will help direct you.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
It doesn’t take much time to design a good plan—literally just hours spread out over days or weeks—and whatever amount of time you spend designing it will be only a small fraction of the time you spend executing it. But designing is very important because it determines what you will have to do to be effective.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People successful with this stage have an ability to visualize
and a practical understanding
of how things really work. Remember, you don’t have to possess all these qualities if you have someone to help you with the ones you are missing.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Creating a design is like writing a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time in order to achieve the goal.Visualize the goal or problem standing in your way, and then visualize practical solutions
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
When designing solutions, the objective is to change how you do things so that problems don’t recur—or recur so often.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
The design will give you your to-do list (i.e., the tasks).
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
. You need to “push through” to accomplish the goals. This requires the self-discipline to follow the script that is your design. I believe the importance of good work habits is vastly underrated
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People with good work habits have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make themselves do what needs to be done. By contrast, people with poor work habits almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them, or they can’t bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don’t like to do (or are unable to do)
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
You need to know whether you (and others) are following the plan, so you should establish clear benchmarks. Ideally you should have someone other than yourself objectively measure if you (and others) are doing what you planned. If not, you need to diagnose why and resolve the problem.
Note
Like a coach
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
People who are good at this stage can reliably execute a plan. They tend to be self-disciplined
and proactive
rather than reactive to the blizzard of daily tasks that can divert them from execution. They are results-oriented: they love to push themselves over the finish line to achieve the goal. If they see that daily tasks are taking them away from executing the plan (i.e., they identify this problem), they diagnose it and design how they can deal with both the daily tasks and moving forward with the plan.As with the other steps, if you aren’t good at this step, get help. There are many successful, creative people who are good at the other steps but who would have failed because they aren’t good at execution. But they succeeded nonetheless because of great symbiotic relationships with highly reliable task-doers.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Designs and tasks can be modified or changed often (because you might want to reassess how to achieve the goal), but changing goals frequently is usually a problem because achieving them requires a consistent effort
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
, I believe that we would have a radically more effective and much happier society if we taught the truth, which is that everyone has weaknesses, and knowing about them and how to deal with them is how people learn and succeed
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Having a weakness is like missing a sense—if you can’t visualize what it is, it’s hard to perceive not having it.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
For these two reasons, having people show you what you are missing can be painful, though its essential for your progress. When you encounter that pain, try to remember that you can get what you want out of life if you can open-mindedly reflect, with the help of others, on what is standing in your way and then deal with it.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
Your values determine what you want, i.e., your goals. In trying to achieve your goals, you will encounter problems that have to be diagnosed. Only after determining the real root causes of these problems can you design a plan to get around them. Once you have a good plan, you have to muster the self-discipline to do what is required to make the plan succeed. Note that this process starts with your values, but it requires that you succeed at all five steps.
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
In a nutshell, my 5-Step process for achieving what you want is:Values → 1) Goals → 2) Problems → 3) Diagnoses → 4) Designs → 5) Tasks
Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles
At which step do you have the most problem?Which qualities needed do you wish you had more of?
Part 3: My Management Principles
While individuals operating individually can choose whatever values and principles they like, when working in a group the people must agree on the group’s values and principles. If the group is not clear about them, confusion and eventually gravitation toward the population’s averages will result. If the group’s values and principles are clear, their way of being (i.e., their culture) will permeate everything they do. It will drive how the people in the group set goals, identify problems, diagnose problems, design solutions and make sure that these designs are implemented
Part 3: My Management Principles
Every organization works like a machine to achieve its goals. This machine produces outcomes. By comparing the outcomes to the goals, those running the machine can see how well the machine is working. This is the feedback loop
that those who are responsible for the machine need to run well in order to improve the machine. Based on the feedback, the machine can be adjusted to improve. The machine consists of two big parts—the culture
and the people.
Part 3: My Management Principles
By diagnosing what is wrong, designing improvements and implementing those improvements, the machine will evolve.
Part 3: My Management Principles
The best advice I can give you is to ask yourself what do you want, then ask ‘what is true’—and then ask yourself ‘what should be done about it.’ I believe that if you do this you will move much faster towards what you want to get out of life than if you don’t!
Principles
125) Recognize that behavior modification typically takes about 18 months of constant reinforcement.
Principles
141) To perceive problems, compare how the movie is unfolding relative to your script
Principles
174) Most importantly, build the organization around goals rather than tasks.
Principles
a)
First come up with the best workflow design, sketch it out in an organizational chart, visualize how the parts interact, specify what qualities are required for each job, and, only after that is done, choose the right people to fill the jobsb)
Organize departments and sub-departments around the most logical groupings.c)
Make departments as self-sufficient as possible so that they have control over the resources they need to achieve the goals.d)
The efficiency of an organization decreases and the bureaucracy of an organization increases in direct relation to the increase in the number of people and/or the complexity of the organization.
Principles
Being truthful is an extension of your freedom to be you; people who are one way on the inside and another on the outside become conflicted and often lose touch with their own values. It’s difficult for them to be happy, and almost impossible for them to be at their best. While the first-order effects of being radically truthful might not be desirable, the second- and third-order effects are great.
Principles
For every mistake that you learn from you will save thousands of similar mistakes in the future, so if you treat mistakes as learning opportunities that yield rapid improvements you should be excited by them
Principles
But if you treat them as bad things, you will make yourself and others miserable, and you won’t grow. Your work environment will be marked by petty back-biting and malevolent barbs rather than by a healthy, honest search for truth that leads to evolution and improvement
Principles
Do not feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them! Remember that 1) they are to be expected, 2) they’re the first and most essential part of the learning process, and 3) feeling bad about them will prevent you from getting better. People typically feel bad about mistakes because they think in a short-sighted way that mistakes reflect their badness or because they’re worried about being punished (or not being rewarded). People also tend to get angry at those who make mistakes because in a short-sighted way they focus on the bad outcome rather than the educational, evolutionary process they’re a part of. That’s a real tragedy.I once had a ski instructor who had taught Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, how to ski. He explained that Jordan enjoyed his mistakes and got the most out of them. At the start of high school, Jordan was an unimpressive basketball player; he became a champion because he loved using his mistakes to improve. Yet despite Jordan’s example and the example of countless other successful people, it is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning
Principles
Perhaps it’s because school learning overemphasizes the value of having the right answers and punishes wrong answers. Good school learners are often bad mistake-based learners because they are bothered by their mistakes.
Principles
Remember that intelligent people who are open to recognizing and learning from their weaknesses substantially outperform people with the same abilities who aren’t similarly open
Principles
By and large, you will get what you deserve over time.
The results that you end up with will reflect how you and your people learn to handle things. So take control of your situation and hold yourself and others accountable for producing great results. People who wish for a great result but are unwilling to do what it takes to get there will fail.
Note
Je dois faire attention à ça :
Principles
Give me someone who can effectively be responsible for an area—i.e., who can design, hire, and sort to achieve the goal, and I can be comfortable about all that is in that area
Note
How ro become an achiever?
Principles
Choose those who understand the difference between goals and tasks to run things.
Otherwise you will have to do their jobs for them.
Note
I’m not good here, I run task and lose the final goal. Priority
Principles
Values are the deep- seated beliefs that motivate behaviors; people will fight for their values, and values determine people’s compatibility with others
Note
Definition
Principles
Abilities are ways of thinking and behaving. Some people are great learners and fast processors; others possess common sense; still others think creatively or logically or with supreme organization, etc.
Note
Mindset?
Principles
Skills are learned tools, such as being able to speak a foreign language or write computer code.
Principles
While values and abilities are unlikely to change much, most skills can be acquired in a limited amount of time (e.g., most master’s degrees can be acquired in two years) and often change in worth (e.g., today’s best programming language can be obsolete in a few years).
Principles
It is important for you to know what mix of qualities is important to fit each role and, more broadly, with whom you can have successful relationships. In picking people for long-term relationships, values are most important, abilities come next, and skills are the least important.
Note
Recrutement
Principles
I know I have only scratched the surface of learning about how people think, why they think differently, and how to test for these different thinking abilities, so I am excited about the potential of learning more
Principles
Performance in school will correlate well with the quality of one’s learning-based thinking, but will not reliably correlate with one’s reasoning-based thinking. The most able learners are easily found, since they are, or were, the best students from the best schools. The best thinkers are tougher to find
Principles
People who rely on memory-based learning will typically be more skeptical of unconventional ideas because their process is to more readily accept what they have been told and because they are less able to assess it for themselves. Those who rely on more on reasoning won’t care much about convention and will assess ideas on their merits.
Principles
Some people are focused on daily tasks, and others are focused on their goals and how to achieve them. Those who “visualize” best can see the pictures (rather than the dots) over time. They have a strong capacity to visualize and will be more likely to make meaningful changes and anticipate future events.
Principles
By contrast, those who are focused on the daily tasks are better at managing things that don’t change much or require repetitive processes done reliably
Principles
Perceivers see things happening and work backward to understand the cause and how to respond; they work from the outside in; they also see many more possibilities that they compare and choose from; often they see so many that they are confused by them. In contrast, planners work from the inside out, figuring out first what they want to achieve and then how things should unfold. Planners and perceivers have trouble appreciating each other. While a perceiver likes to see new things and change directions often, this is discomforting to planners, who prefer to stick to a plan
Principles
Both people expressing their own views and those considering others’ views need to take into account their differences. These differences are real,
Principles
If you’re not naturally good at one type of thinking, it doesn’t mean you’re precluded from paths that require that type of thinking, but it does require that you either work with someone who has that required way of thinking (which works best) or learn to think differently (which is very difficult and sometimes impossible).
Principles
Think through what values, abilities, and skills you are looking for.
A lot of time and effort is put into hiring a person, and substantial time and resources are invested in new employees’ development before finding out whether they are succeeding. Getting rid of employees who aren’t succeeding is also difficult, so it pays to be as sure as possible in hiring.
Principles
Weigh values and abilities more heavily than skills in deciding whom to hire.
Avoid the temptation to think narrowly about filling a job with a specific skill
Principles
While having that skill might be important, what’s most important is determining whether you and they are working toward the same goals and can work in the same ways and share the same values.
Principles
Write the profile of the person you are looking for into the job description.
Principles
personality assessments. These can be a fantastic tool in your arsenal for quickly getting a picture of what people are like—abilities, preferences, and style.They are often much more objective and reliable than interviews.
Note
Je suis pas d’accord mais j’ai pas testé
Principles
school is of limited value for teaching and testing common sense, vision, creativity, or decision-making.[63] Since those traits all outweigh memory, processing speed, and the ability to follow directions in most jobs, you must look beyond school to ascertain whether the applicant has the qualities you’re looking for.
Principles
Don’t hire people just to fit the first job they will do at Bridgewater; hire people you want to share your life with.
The best relationships are long term and based on shared missions and values
Principles
you delegate to him, you still need to make sure that his incentives are aligned with his responsibilities and that he is doing his job well
Principles
Managing means: 1) understanding how well your people and designs are operating to achieve your goals and 2) constantly improving them. To be successful, you need to manage.
Principles
Constantly compare your outcomes to your goals.
Identify problems and diagnose whether the problems are with the way the organization is designed or with the way the people are handling their responsibilities.
Principles
remember to do this constantly so you have a large sample size. You want to have a large sample size because 1) any one problem can either be a one-off imperfection or symptomatic of root causes that will show up as problems repeatedly; and 2) looking at a large sample size of problems will make clear which it is. Also, the larger your sample size, the clearer the root causes of your problems, and the more obvious your solutions, will be.
Principles
Look down on your machine and yourself within it from the higher level.
Higher-level thinking doesn’t mean the thinking done by higher-level beings. It means seeing things from a top-down perspective—like looking at a photo of Earth from outer space, which shows you the relationships between the continents, counties, and seas, and then going down to a photo of your country, then down to your neighborhood, then down to your family. If you just saw your family without the perspective of seeing that there are millions of other families, and there have been many millions of other families over thousands of years, and observing how your family compares and how families evolve, you would just be dealing with the items that are coming at you as they transpire without the perspective.
Principles
We want people who know that if the community works well, it will be good for them. We don’t want people who need to be ordered and threatened. We don’t want people who just follow orders.