...human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success. I've also learned that judging people b… - Ray Dalio

I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way.

Encounters like these have taught me that human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success. I’ve also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances — and that isn’t smart.

Shapers are people who can go from visualization to actualization. I wrote a lot about the people I call “shapers” in the first part of this book. I use the word to mean someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts of others. Shapers get both the big picture and the details right. To me, it seems that Shaper = Visionary + Practical Thinker + Determined. I’ve found that shapers tend to share attributes such as intense curiosity and a compulsive need to make sense of things, independent thinking that verges on rebelliousness, a need to dream big and unconventionally, a practicality and determination to push through all obstacles to achieve their goals, and a knowledge of their own and others’ weaknesses and strengths so they can orchestrate teams to achieve them. Perhaps even more importantly, they can hold conflicting thoughts simultaneously and look at them from different angles. They typically love to knock things around with other really smart people and can easily navigate back and forth between the big picture and the granular details, counting both as equally important. People wired with enough of these ways of thinking that they can operate in the world as shapers are very rare. But they could never succeed without working with others who are more naturally suited for other things and whose ways of thinking and acting are also essential.

Make sure they're fully informed and believable. Find out who is responsible for whatever you are seeking to understand and then ask them. Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.

Most people assume that the challenges that go along with growing a large business are greater than those of growing a smaller one. That is not true. Going from a five-person organization to a sixty-person organization was just as challenging as going from a sixty-person organization to a seven-hundred-person organization — and from a seven-hundred-person organization to a 1,500-person one.