STREET DOGS

Instead of just trying to be smart, it’s wise to think about not being stupid. Ray Dalio says: “People are so attached to being right and yet could so easily find out how they’re wrong. If they just said to themselves, ‘I’m not sure that I’m right and let me go find people who have alternative points of view’.

“Not to pay attention to their conclusions but to the thought process … it creates a fabulous learning. That process itself reduces the probability of being wrong and produces a great deal of learning.

“People are so hung up on being right.

“Starting their discussion and deriving some sort of satisfaction if at the end of the discussion they were where they began the discussion.

“That doesn’t make any sense, because there’s not going to be doing any learning.

“So ego plays an important role in that.

“The people that feel like, ‘I’m good. I’ve got it’ won’t learn. If you’ve got it, you won’t learn.

“So you have to get rid of this ego barrier, ‘I’ve got it’ thing. It changes how you see things because it starts to make you think, ‘how do I know I’m not the wrong one?’

“When you start to realise that people are actually seeing in those [different] ways — and that it’s a valid way of seeing — it gives you the evidence base that it’s okay to be different.

“The most important thing is to have humility and to think about ‘how do I get the best decision?’ To realise that it doesn’t have to come from you.

“After all, you just want it to be right, right?

“The greatest tragedy of mankind is people holding on to wrong opinions that could so easily be rectified and that are doing them harm because they’re making wrong decisions.”