4.1 Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.
As I related in the first part of this book, my first breakthrough in understanding how people think differently occurred when I was a young father and had my kids tested by Dr. Sue Quinlan. I found the results remarkable, because she not only confirmed my own observations of the ways that their minds were working at the time but also predicted how they would develop in the future. For example, one of my kids was struggling with arithmetic. Because he tested well in mathematical reasoning, she correctly told him that if he pushed through the boredom of rote memorization required in elementary school, he would love the higher-level concepts he would be exposed to when he got older. These insights opened my eyes to new possibilities. I turned to her and others years later when I was trying to figure out the different thinking styles of my employees and colleagues.
At first, the experts gave me both bad and good advice. Many seemed as if they were more interested in making people feel good (or not feel bad) than they were at getting at the truth. Even more startling, I found that most psychologists didn’t know much about neuroscience and most neuroscientists didn’t know much about psychology—and both were reluctant to connect the physiological differences in people’s brains to the differences in their aptitudes and behaviors. But eventually I found Dr. Bob Eichinger, who opened the world of psychometric testing to me. Using Myers-Briggs and other assessments, we evolved a much clearer and more data-driven way of understanding our different types of thinkings.
Our difference weren’t a product of poor communication; it was the other way around. Our different ways of thinking Ied to our poor communications.
From conversations with experts and my own observations, I learned that many of our mental differences are physiological. Just as our physical attributes determine the limits of what we are able to do physically—some people are tall and others are short, some muscular and others weak—our brains are innately different in ways that set the parameters of what we are able to do mentally. As with our bodies, some parts of our brains cannot be materially affected by external experience (in the same way that your skeleton isn’t changed much through working out), while other part can be strengthened through exercise.
This was driven home to me by my son Paul’s three-year struggle with bipolar disorder. As terrifying and frustrating as his behavior was, I came to realize that it was due to his brain’s chemistry (specifically, its secreting serotonin and dopamine in spurts and sputters). As I went through that terrible journey with him, I experienced the frustration and anger of trying to reason with someone who wasn’t thinking well. I constantly had to remind myself that there was no basis for my anger because his distorted logic was a product of his physiology—and I saw for myself how the doctors who approached it that way brought him to a state of crystal clarity. The experience not only taught me a lot about how brains work but why creative genius often exists at the edge of insanity. Many highly productive and creative people have suffered from bipolar disorder, among them Ernest Hemingway, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, and the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison (who has written frankly about her own experiences with the disease in her book An Unquiet Mind). I learned that we are all different because of the different ways that the machine that is our brain works—and that nearly one in five Americans are clinically mentally ill in one way or another.
Once I understood that it’s all physiological, many things became clearer to me. While I used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize that they weren’t intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked. I also realized that as off-base as they seemed to me, they saw me the same way. The only sensible way of behaving with each other was to look down upon ourselves with mutual understanding so we could make objective sense of things. Not only did this make our disagreements less frustrating, it also allowed us to maximize our effectiveness.
Everyone is like a Lego set of attributes, with each piece reflecting the workings of a different part of their brain. All these pieces come together to determine what each person is like, and if you know what a person is like, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you can expect from them.
a. We are born with attributes that can both help us and hurt us, depending on their application.
Most attributes are d double-edged sword that bring potential benefits and potential harm. The more extreme the attribute, the more extreme the potential good or bad outcomes it is likely to produce. For example, a highly creative, goal-oriented person good at imagining new ideas might undervalue the minutiae of daily life, which is also important; he might be so driven in his pursuit of long-term goals that he might have disdain for people who focus on the details of daily life. Similarly, a task-oriented person who is great with deatils might undervalue creativity—and worse still, may squelch it in the interests of efficiency. These two people might make a great team, but are likely to have trouble taking advantage of the ways they’re complementary, because the ways their minds work make it difficult for them to see the value of each other’s ways of thinking.
Having expectations for people (including yourself) without knowing what they are like is a sure way to get in trouble. I learned this the hard way, through years of frustrating conversations and the pain of expecting things from people who were constitutionally incapable of delivering them. I’m sure that I caused them plenty of pain too. Over time, I realized that I needed a systematic approach to capturing and recording our differences so that we could actively take them into consideration when putting people into different roles at Bridgewater.
This led to one of my most valuable management tools: Baseball Cards, which I mentioned in the first part of this book. Just as a baseball card compiles the relevant data on a baseball player, helping fans know what that player is good and bad at, I decided that it would be similarly helpful for us to have cards for all of our players at Bridgewater.
In creating the attributes for our baseball cards, I used a combination of adjectives we already used to desccribe people, like “conceptual,” “reliable,” “creative,” and “determined”; the actions people took or didn’t take such as “holding others accountable” and “pushing through to results”; and terms from personality tests such as “extroverted” or “judging.” Once the cards were established, I created a process to have people evaluate each other, with the people rated highest in each dimension (e.g., “most creative”) having more weight on the ratings of other people in that dimension. People with proven track records in a certain area would get more believability, or decision-making weight, within that area. By recording these qualities in people’s Baseball Cards, others who’d never worked with them before could know what to expect from them. When people changed, their rating would chagne. And when they didn’t change, we were even more sure of what we could expect of them.
Naturally when I introduced this tool, people were skeptical or scared of it for various reasons. Some were afraid that the cards would be inaccurate; others thought it would be uncomfortable to have their weaknesses made so apparent, or that it would lead to their being pigeonholed, inhibiting their growth; still others thought it would be too complex to be practical. Imagine how you would feel if you were asked to force-rank all your cooeagues on creativity, determination, or reliability. Most people at first find that prospect frightening.
Still, I knew that we needed to be radically open in recording and considering what people were like, and that things would eventually evolve to address people’s concerns if we were sensible about how we approached the process. Today, most everyone at Bridgewater finds these Baseball Cards to be essential, and we have built a whole suite of other tools, which will be further described in Work Principles, to support our drive to understand what people are like and who is believable at what.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio