4 Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently
你必须知道人和人之间是非常不同的
Because of the different ways that our brains are wired, we all experience reality in different ways and any single way is essentially distorted. This is something that we need to acknowledge and deal with. So if you want to know what is true and what to do about it, you must understand your own brain.
因为我们大脑的运作方式是不同的，我们都以不同方式体验不同，任何单一的方法都是扭曲的。这就是我们需要承认和处理的。所以如果你想知道真相和打算怎么处理，你必须了解自己的大脑。
That insight led me to talk with many psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, personality testers, and other believable people in the field, and it led me to read many books. I discovered that though it is obvious to all of us that we are born with different strengths and weaknesses in areas such as common sense, creativity, memory, synthesis, attention to detail, and so forth, examining these differences objectively makes even most scientists uncomfortable. But that doesn’t make it any less necessary, so I pushed forward with these explorations over several decades.
基于此我与许多心理学家、精神病学家、神经科学家，个性测试者，以及其他很多领域的权威见面咨询。我还读了很多书。我发现尽管我们每个人出生就存在力量差别，和在尝试，创造性，记忆，协同，注意力，细节等方面存在缺憾，诸如此类的情况，而客观诊断这些不同可能会让大多数科学家感到不适。但却是必要的，所以我持续几十年时间推进这些方面的探索。
结果，我掌握了大量能帮助我的，我相信也能帮到你的东东，实际上，我对大脑了解的越多我的成功也就越多，而我对于经济和投资的理解也是如此。这一章，我将分享一些我学会的一些匪夷所思的事情。
As a result, I have learned a lot that helped me and that I believe can help you. In fact, I attribute as much of my success to what I’ve learned about the brain as I do to my understanding of economics and investing. In this chapter, I will share some of the amazing things I’ve learned.
WHY I TURNED TO NEUROSCIENCE
我为什么转向神经科学
当我从商业学院毕业后两年开始经营桥水公司，我不得不第一次管理员工。一开始我想管理就是雇佣聪明的人-例如，从最顶尖的学校雇佣最好的学生—应该可以得到有能力的雇员，但很多时候不是这样的，好的学生并不一定是好的雇员。“学习成绩好”并不等同于我需要的那种聪明。
When I started Bridgewater two years out of business school, I had to manage people for the first time. At first I thought that hiring smart people—for instance, the top students out of the top schools—should get me capable employees, but as often as not, those people didn’t turn out well. “Book smarts” didn’t typically equate to the type of smarts I needed.
我想和有着创造力的独立思考能力、概念，拥有大量常识的人一起工作。但我很难发现这样的人，即使我自己这样做的时候，不同人们的思考方式迥然不同。就像我们在说着不同的语言。举例，一些人是概念化和精确讲述某种语言而另一些人则用文字和精确讲述其他语言。这时候，我们将这种描述为沟通问题，但分别远大于此-并深深伤害了我们大家，尤其是当我们致力于一起干一件大事。
I wanted to work with independent thinkers who were creative, conceptual, and had a lot of common sense. But I had a hard time finding those sorts of people and even when I did, I was shocked at how differently their brains seemed to work. It was as though we were speaking different languages. For example, those who were “conceptual” and imprecise spoke one language while those who were literal and precise spoke another. At the time, we chalked this up to “communication problems,” but the differences were much deeper than that—and they were painful for all of us, particularly when we were trying to achieve big things together.
我记得一个研究项目-一项系统研究债券市场的伟大尝试—发生在很多年前。鲍勃普林斯负责，我们在概念上同意我们想要做的事情，但项目最后并没有向着既定目标前进。我们和鲍勃还有他的团队会面，一起尝试发现如何 推进项目。但当他们开始工作时发现没有任何进展。问题在于惯于设想的人习惯于先模糊设想应该怎么做，而习惯执行的人总是规划出操作具体流程，先设想的人如果没有这样做，想得越多而实干主义者则不会，实干主义者则会认为空想主义者在不切实际的瞎想。这样只会使事情更糟糕，他们彼此都无法理解。--简短说我们都是被禁锢的人每个人都认为是别人的错—那些盲目，固执，平庸的人。
I remember one research project—an ambitious attempt to systemize our global understanding of the bond markets—that took place years ago. Bob Prince was running it, and while we agreed conceptually on what we were trying to do, the project didn’t get pushed through to results. We’d meet with Bob and his team to agree on the goal and lay out how to get there. But when they’d go off to work on it, they’d make no progress. The problem was that conceptual people who visualized what should be done in vague ways expected more literal people to figure out for themselves how to do it. When they didn’t, the more conceptual people thought the more literal people had no imagination, and the more literal people thought the more conceptual people had their heads in the clouds. To make matters worse, none of them knew which were which—the more literal people thought that they were as conceptual as the conceptual people and vice versa. In short, we were gridlocked, and everyone thought it was someone else’s fault—that the people they were locking horns with were blind, stubborn, or just plain stupid.
那些会议对所有人都是痛苦的。因为没有人清楚好和坏，每个人都在表达自己的观点，根本没有好办法进行辨别。我们讨论了为什么项目组会失败，这导致我们明白鲍勃为自己的团队选择的每个人有着与岗位显明的优势和弱点。就这样坦率一点，开放思想，就是向前的一大进步，当然并不足以铭记和带来系统性的转变为足够的转变，所以同样人一再重复错误。
这不就是我们思考方式的根本不同吗，我们的情绪反馈，和我们没办法处理对我们来说很严重吗？我们应该怎么办，还是不作为？
Those meetings were painful for everyone. Because no one was clear about what they were good or bad at, everybody expressed opinions about everything and there wasn’t any sensible way of sorting through them. We discussed why the group was failing, which led us to see that the individuals Bob had chosen for his team reflected his own strengths and weaknesses in their own roles. While that took frankness and open-mindedness and was a big step forward, it wasn’t recorded and systematically converted into adequate changes, so the same people kept making the same sort of mistakes, over and over again.
Isn’t it obvious that our different ways of thinking, our emotional responses, and our not having ways of dealing with them is crippling us? What are we supposed to do, not deal with them?
我确信你一定也曾处于这种争议矛盾之中-一个人总是有着不同的视角，有时也会存在分歧。有着良好初衷的人也可能愤怒和恼怒；这当然令人沮丧，并最终成为个人问题。大多数企业为了回避这一点，通常都回避公开辩论，总是让专家做个简单的结论。我并不想要这样的公司。我知道我们需要深度挖掘那些阻碍高效我们协同工作的原因，暴露出问题，并解刨问题。
I’m sure you’ve been in contentious disagreements before—ones where people have different points of view and can’t agree on what’s right. Good people with good intentions get angry and emotional; it is frustrating and often becomes personal. Most companies avoid this by suppressing open debate and having those with the most authority simply make the calls. I didn’t want that kind of company. I knew we needed to dig more deeply into what was preventing us from working together more effectively, bring those things to the surface, and explore them.
桥水有大概1500雇员在做着不同的事情—一些人努力了解全球市场；另一些人开发技术；还有一些为客户服务，管理健康保险，或者为雇员服务，提供合理建议，管理it和设施，类似的工作。所偶这些活动都需要不同类的人一起工作-集合所有最好的主意，同时剔除糟糕的想法。指挥人们取长补短就像一个乐团合作。做得好就能产生奇迹，相反则一团糟。
Bridgewater’s roughly 1,500 employees do many different things—some strive to understand the global markets; others develop technologies; still others serve clients, manage health insurance and other benefits for employees, provide legal guidance, manage IT and facilities, and so on. All these activities require different types of people to work together in ways that harvest the best ideas and throw away the worst. Organizing people to complement their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses is like conducting an orchestra. It can be magnificent if done well and terrible if done poorly.
While “know thyself” and “to thine own self be true” are fundamental tenets I had heard long before I began looking into the brain, I had no idea how to go about getting that knowledge or how to act on it until we made these discoveries about how people think differently. The better we know ourselves, the better we can recognize both what can be changed and how to change it, and what can’t be changed and what we can do about that. So no matter what you set out to do—whether on your own, as a member of an organization, or as its director—you need to understand how you and other people are wired.
当然“认识自己” 和“真实的自己”是长久以来的基础信条，直到我开始研究大脑，我对于如何获取知识或怎样运用知识一无所知直到我们能发现为什么人们的思考是不同的为止。我们对自己了解越多，我们就对什么能改变和怎么改变他们，那些是不能改变的，我们鞥做什么有更好的了解。所以不管你打算做什么-或是你自身，作为一个组织的一员，或领导人—你需要明白为什么你和其他人是不同的。