Hire someone better than you.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Sistematiza la toma de decisiones.
Focusing strictly on the logical cause-effect relationships was what allowed us to see what was really going on.
There’s nothing you can’t accomplish if you think creatively and have the character to do the difficult things.
Over the years that followed, I found that most of the extraordinarily successful people I’ve met had similar big painful failures that taught them the lessons that ultimately helped them succeed. Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
Remember that almost everything will take more time and cost more money than you expect.
Putting comfort ahead of success produces worse results for everyone.
I myself find the excitement, lower risk, and educational value of achieving a deep understanding of cause-effect relationships much more appealing than a reliance on algorithms I don’t understand, so I am drawn to that path.
Closed-minded people focus much more on being understood than on understanding others. When people disagree, they tend to be quicker to assume that they aren’t being understood than to consider whether they’re the ones who are not understanding the other person’s perspective. Open-minded people always feel compelled to see things through others’ eyes.
Good principles are effective ways of dealing with reality.
I’ll explain the concept of believability in more detail in later chapters, but to cover it quickly: Believable parties are those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished something – and have great explanations for how they did it.
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: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value – its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything.
Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position, of the individual. The best ideas win no matter who they come from.
I made the company’s investment decisions and its management decisions and then I built the organization to support me and eventually to carry on excellently without me.
Most people do not look thoughtfully at the facts and draw their conclusions by objectively weighing the evidence. Instead, they make their decisions based on what their deep-seated subconscious mind wants and then they filter the evidence to make it consistent with those desires.
Each person at Bridgewater should act like an owner, responsible for operating in this way and for holding others accountable to operate in this way.
If a number of different believable people say you are doing something wrong and you are the only one who doesn’t see it that way, assume that you are probably biased.
Because we are capable of conscious, memory-based learning, we can evolve further and faster than any other species, changing not just across generations but within our own lifetimes.
It is futile to give responsibilities to people who do not have the qualities required to succeed. It frustrates, and inevitably angers, all parties, which is damaging to the environment.