Pain plus reflection equals progress — the key is to treat pain as a puzzle that teaches you how reality works, then extract a principle from it.

20:50if you know how to develop the right habit. So the habit means that you have an instinctual positive reaction to something. So I have a uh a reaction which is okay that is that that's a lesson in reality. In other words, pain. Okay. So it's now like a puzzle for me. Okay. The puzzle is how does reality work? It'll tell me something about how reality works and I have to deal with

21:20reality to make it successful. And so what is my principle for dealing with my that reality to deal with it in the best possible way? Okay, that's my now instinct. So now when you've got that instinct, it's a whole different thing, right? Because you you start to say, okay, there's pain and you have your curiosity. Okay. Now you take your curiosity and you say, "What does that

21:47tell me about how reality works and how I should deal with reality?" Okay. And if you solve that puzzle, then you will get a gem. And that gem is a principle that you can carry with you to be better, right? And so if you start to recognize it as that and then I do write >> So what's that? What does that mean? You journal every morning, every night?

22:11>> No, no, no, no, no. I it's just when thoughts come to me or circumstances come to me and or I'm also making decisions I'm I'm reflecting and then what has happened to me is I found that um all those reflections are cause effect relationships because principles are if this happens what do you do and that kind of thing and then I put those in computer code okay that's how I built

22:36Bridgewater I built okay if this happens you do that okay and you put it in computer code and I made then this all computerized decisionmaking systems for markets and almost uh everything and because I've done this you know for 35 years or something on almost everything I've got thousands of these principles that I've written down and they are you know the ways of achieving success in whatever

23:06kind of decision if you know if the Fed does this or if somebody you love dies eyes or whatever it is. Okay. How do you reflect on them? What does that mean? I would recommend I I put out a journal that people can do so that they can journal their own principles and they have the reflections and so on. If they if they start to think that way, pain