5.3 Synthesize the situation through time.
5.3随着时间轴的推移来统筹局势
To see how the dots connect through time you must collect, analyze, and sort different types of information, which isn’t easy. For example, let’s imagine a day in which eight outcomes occur. Some are good, some bad. Let’s illustrate this day as shown, with each type of event represented by a letter and the quality of the outcome represented by its height.
为了看清这些小圆点随着时间轴的推移是如何连接起来的，你必须对不同类型的信息进行收集、分析和优先级排序，然而做到这些并不容易。举个例子，想象一下某一天有8个结果产生，这些结果有好也有坏。让我们用下面这张图来表现这一天，每种类型的事件由一个字母表示，事件成果的质量由这个字母所在的高度体现。
In order to see the day this way, you must categorize outcomes by type (signified by letters) and quality (the higher up the graph, the better), which will require synthesizing a by-and-large assessment of each. (To make the example more concrete, imagine you’re running an ice cream shop and the W’s represent sales, the X’s represent customer experience ratings, the Y’s represent press and reviews, the Z’s represent staff engagement, etc.) Keep in mind that our example is a relatively simple one: just eight occurrences over one day.
为了用这种方式看清这一天，你必须按照类型（用字母表示）和质量（在图表上越高表示质量越好）对这些结果进行分类，这就需要对每个结果综合出一个大体正确的评估。（为了让这个例子更加具体，设想你正在经营一家冰淇淋店，字母W代表销售额，X代表客户体验评分，Y代表新闻和评论，Z代表员工敬业度，等等。）记住，我们举的只是个相对简单的案例：一天只有8个事件。
From the chart on the right, you can see that it was a great day for sales (because the W’s are at the top) and a bad day for customer experience (the X’s). You might conjecture why—maybe a crowd generated sales but produced long lines.
从上图中你可以看到这一天的业绩非常好（因为W在最顶部），但与之同时，客户体验很糟糕（看X的位置）。你可能会推测其中的原因——也许是大的客流量带来的高销售额，但却因此要排很长的队。
Now let’s look at what a month of workdays looks like. Confusing, eh?
现在我们来看看一整个月的工作日状况。看晕了吧？
The chart below plots just the type X dots, which you can see are improving.
下面这张图只绘制了X型点的轨迹，你可以看到结果正在改善。
People who are good at pulling out such patterns of events are rare and essential, but as with most abilities, synthesizing through time is only partially innate; even if you’re not good at it, you can get better through practice. You’ll increase your chances of succeeding at it if you follow the next principle.
擅长制图、读图的人很罕见，但他们不可或缺。同大多数能力一样，随着时间的推移统筹信息的能力也只有部分是与生俱来的；即便一开始你并不擅长，但通过不断地刻意练习，最终定能够越做越好。如果你能遵循下面的原则，你在这方面能力成功提升的概率将会增加。
a. Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them. When determining an acceptable rate of improvement for something, it is its level in relation to the rate of change that matters. I often see people lose sight of this. They say “it’s getting better” without noticing how far below the bar it is and whether the rate of change will get it above the bar in an acceptable amount of time. If someone who has been getting grades of 30s and 40s on their tests raised their scores to 50s over the course of a few months it would be accurate to say that they are getting better, but they would still be woefully inadequate. Everything important in your life needs to be on a trajectory to be above the bar and headed toward excellent at an appropriate pace. The lines in the chart on the next page show how the dots connect through time. A’s trajectory gets you above the bar in an appropriate amount of time; B’s does not. To make good decisions, you need to understand the reality of which of these two cases is happening.
a.要同时关注进步的速度和所达到的水准，以及二者之间的关系。在确认某事物可接受的改进率时，关键是要确认其改进率和它要达到的水准之间的关系。我经常看到人们忽略了这一点。他们说「某事越来越好了」，却没有注意到它离标准线还有多远，以及以这样的改进率是否能在可接受的时间段内超过标准线。
如果某些人一直在测试中考30-40分，经过几个月的课程后提升到了50分。虽然他们确实在进步，但是他们仍然是严重不能胜任的。你人生中的每件重要的事情都需要以一个合适的步调，沿着一个会超过及格线并且朝向卓越的轨迹去提升。下页图表中的线条显示了随着时间的推移这些点有怎样的联系。A的轨迹可以让你在一段合适的时间内超过及格线；B的却不能。为了作出一个好的决策，你需要明白现实中正在发生的是这两种情况中的哪一种。
b.Be imprecise. Understand the concept of “by-and-large” and use approximations.Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking. For example, when asked to multiply 38 by 12, most people do it the slow and hard way rather than simply rounding 38 up to 40, rounding 12 down to 10, and quickly determining that the answer is about 400. Look at the ice cream shop example and imagine the value of quickly seeing the approximate relationships between the dots versus taking the time to see all the edges precisely. It would be silly to spend time doing that, yet that’s exactly what most people do. “By-and-large” is the level at which you need to understand most things in order to make effective decisions. Whenever a big-picture “by-and-large” statement is made and someone replies “Not always,” my instinctual reaction is that we are probably about to dive into the weeds—i.e., into a discussion of the exceptions rather than the rule, and in the process we will lose sight of the rule. To help people at Bridgewater avoid this time waster, one of our just-out-of-college associates coined a saying I often repeat: “When you ask someone whether something is true and they tell you that it’s not totally true, it’s probably by-and-large true.”
b.不要过分追求精确。懂得“大约”这个概念并知道使用近似值。因为我们的教育体系总是沉溺于追求精确，擅长估算的艺术却没有得到充分重视。这阻碍了概念性思考。比如，当问到38*12是多少时，大部分人的计算方式又慢又难，而不是简单的取38的近似值40，12的近似值10，然后快速确定答案是400左右。看这个冰淇淋店的例子，想象一下快速看出点与点之间大致关系的价值，再对比下耗费大量时间精确地看所有边角信息的价值。花费时间这么去做看起来很傻，但这就是大部分人会做的事情。“大约”指的是为了做出有效决策你需要知道的大部分信息。当我们对大局做了一个“大约”的声明，收到的反馈是“不总是这样”，我的第一反应就是我很可能淹没在杂草中了——也就是，讨论的是个例而不是常规情况，在这样的过程中我们经常会忽视常规情况。为了帮助桥水公司的员工避免在这方面浪费时间，我们一个刚大学毕业的伙伴创造了一个警句，我经常会重复它：“如果你问某个人这件事是否是真的，得到的答复是并不全是真的，那么它很可能‘大约’是真的。”
c. Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20 percent is. The 80/20 Rule states that you get 80 percent of the value out of something from 20 percent of the information or effort. (It’s also true that you’re likely to exert 80 percent of your effort getting the final 20 percent of value.) Understanding this rule saves you from getting bogged down in unnecessary detail once you’ve gotten most of the learning you need to make a good decision.
c.要记住二八法则，并知道这关键的20%是什么。二八法则说的是80%的价值来自20%的信息或努力。（这句也是真的：你倾向用80%的努力获得最终20%的价值。）懂得这个法则可以让你一旦获得足够的信息做出好的决策，就能及时抽离出来，而不至于拘泥于不必要的细节中。
d. Be an imperfectionist. Perfectionists spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of the important things. There are typically just five to ten important factors to consider when making a decision. It is important to understand these really well, though the marginal gains of studying even the important things past a certain point are limited.
d.不要做完美主义者。完美主义者花费太多的时间在边缘部分的细微区别上，代价却是牺牲重要的事情。通常情况下，做一个决策只有5-10个重要的因素需要考虑。理解这一点很关键，就算是学习重要的事情超过一定的程度，边际效益也很有限。
