Chapter 1-4:
Ray talks about finding the truth will enhance your life and allow you to make the best decision possible.
Think for yourself to decide:
1. What you want
2. What is true,
3. What you should do to achieve 1 and 2
There are two main things that get in the way of your finding truth: One is your ego and emotions and the other is your blind spots (things that you don’t know you don’t know).
Ray goes on to talk about acknowledging strengths and weaknesses. To quote him
“Successful people change in ways that allow them to continue to take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses and unsuccessful people don’t. The important thing you notice that beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even impressed your weaknesses.”
My thoughts: I like the part where Ray talks about taking advantages of your strengths rather than being overly cynical about your weaknesses. It’s important to figure out how to overcome or compensate your weaknesses instead of spending a lot of time turning your weaknesses into strengths. I’ve previously spent misdirected enormous amount of time trying to convert my weaknesses into strengths and haven’t been able to do so. Turns out, neither could I take advantage of my strengths, nor was I getting any better on my weaknesses.
Learning from mistakes
I absolutely loved the part where Ray discusses about mistakes his employees were committing. Instead of getting angry or firing them (Bridgewater is an investment firm and mistakes costs millions), Ray started collecting logs of mistakes and thinking about how to avoid more of such occurrences. At Bridgewater, you were fine in case you made a mistake and logged it. You weren’t fine in case you made a mistake and didn’t log it.
Transparency and Principles in any relationships (personal or professional)
Ray explains very nicely that it’s important for any relationship to have principles and be transparent about it to make it work.
Three work principles important were:
– Put our honest thoughts out on the table
– Have thoughtful disagreement in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn
– Have agreed upon ways of deciding (eg voting, having clear authorities) if disagreements remain so that we can move beyond them without resentments
My thoughts: The third point is extremely important and can’t stress enough. At CleverTap we have these bonding sessions by Anil Thomas (not related to Clevertap cofounder Sunil Thomas 😛 ) where he’d mention that for a company it’s very important to have disagreements but there should be no resentments later, in-fact after disagreements everyone should commit to the outcomes of the meeting irrespective of the fact that your suggestions weren’t considered. As a company it’s very important that everyone’s on the same page, only then the company as whole can succeed.
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