I believe that for the most part, achieving success - whatever that is for you - is mostly a matter of personal choice and that, initially, making the right choices can be difficult.

I have a bad rote memory, but I tend to learn through my experiences. And then when I went into the markets, and then starting my business as an entrepreneur, that affected my thinking a lot, too, because in order to be successful as both an investor and an entrepreneur, one has to be an independent thinker and bet against the consensus and be right. Because the consensus is built into the price, and if you're not an independent thinker in the markets you won't succeed. And if you're not an independent thinker as an entrepreneur starting out, you're not going to bring anything special.

Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.

In the end, what matters most is that the people you work with share your values, so I've wanted people who value the meaningful work and meaningful relationships that always motivated me in building Bridgewater.

By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn't give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.

When I say I believe in radical truth and radical transparency, all I mean is we take things that ordinarily people would hide, and we put them on the table, particularly mistakes, problems, and weaknesses. We put those on the table, and we look at them together. We don't hide them.

I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.