At the very beginning of Bridgewater, we just hired people we liked. But too many of them turned out to be bad fits. Because we liked them, we were reluctant to give up on them, and things often went from bad to worse. So we started hiring like most companies do, by looking at résumés, narrowing the lists, and then interviewing to get a gut feel for who was right. But the questions we asked our candidates, unlike the questions on a scientifically constructed personality test, were unlikely to elicit answers truly indicative of what they were like. What we were doing, essentially, was looking at prospective employees through our own biased perspectives. Those of us who were linear thinkers tended to want to hire linear thinkers; those of us who were lateral thinkers tended to want to hire lateral thinkers. We all thought the type we chose would perform best in all jobs, and as a result we weren’t able to accurately predict who would succeed and who would fail in our very unusual environment. As a result, we continued to make a lot of bad hires. Eventually we learned from our mistakes and failures that we could improve our hiring results in two ways: 1) by always being crisp and clear on exactly what kind of person we were looking for, and 2) by developing our vocabulary for and means of evaluating people’s abilities at a much more granular level. This chapter lays out in detail the principles we’ve learned for doing this. While we still make too many hiring mistakes, we have significantly reduced the odds of making them by following these processes, which we continually try to improve. #principleoftheday

Don't assume that people are operating in your interest rather than their own. A higher percentage of the population than you might imagine will cheat if given the opportunity. When offered the choice of being fair with you or taking more for themselves, most people will take more for themselves. Even a tiny amount of cheating is intolerable, so your happiness and success will depend on your controls. I have repeatedly learned this lesson the hard way. #principleoftheday