Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

If you had asked me what my objective was when I started out, I would’ve said it was to have fun working with people I like. Work was a game I played with passion and I wanted to have a blast playing it with people I enjoyed and respected.

I liked to imagine and build out new, practical concepts that never existed before. I especially loved doing these things with people who were on the same mission with me. I treasured thoughtful disagreement with them as a way of learning and raising our odds of making good decisions, and I wanted all the people I worked with to be my “partners” rather than my “employees.” In a nutshell, I was looking for meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I quickly learned that the best way to do that was to have great partnerships with great people.

The main test of a great partnership is not whether the partners ever disagree—people in all healthy relationships disagree—but whether they can bring their disagreements to the surface and get through them well. Having clear processes for resolving disagreements efficiently and clearly is essential for business partnerships, marriages, and all other forms of partnership.

Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships. To give you an idea of what I mean by tough love, think of Vince Lombardi, who for me personified it. From when I was ten years old until I was eighteen, Lombardi was head coach of the Green Bay Packers. With limited resources, he led his team to five NFL championships. He won two NFL Coach of the Year awards and many still call him the best coach of all time. Lombardi loved his players and he pushed them to be great. I admired, and still admire, how uncompromising his standards were. His players, their fans, and he himself all benefited from his approach.

In order to be great, one can’t compromise the uncompromisable. Yet I see people doing it all the time, usually to avoid making others or themselves feel uncomfortable, which is not just backward but counterproductive. Putting comfort ahead of success produces worse results for everyone. I both loved the people I worked with and pushed them to be great, and I expected them to do the same with me.

I learned that the more caring we gave each other, the tougher we could be on each other, and the tougher we were on each other, the better we performed and the more rewards there were for us to share. This cycle was self-reinforcing. I found that operating this way made the lows less low and the highs higher.

As hard as they were, we look back on some of these challenging times as our finest moments. For most people, being part of a great community on a shared mission is even more rewarding than money.

Conflict in the pursuit of excellence is a terrific thing. There should be no hierarchy based on age or seniority. Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position, of the individual. The best ideas win no matter who they come from.

Criticism (by oneself and by others) is an essential ingredient in the improvement process, yet, if handled incorrectly, can be destructive. It should be handled objectively. There should be no hierarchy in the giving or receiving of criticism.

Our fates are intertwined. One should know that others can be relied upon to help. As a corollary, substandard performance cannot be tolerated anywhere because it would hurt everyone.

Long-term relationships are both a) intrinsically gratifying and b)efficient, and should be intentionally built. Turnover requires re-training and therefore creates setbacks.

Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary—you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently w...

A believability-weighted idea meritocracy is the best system for making effective decisions.

Unlike Lombardi, whose success depended on having his players follow his instructions, I needed my players to be independent thinkers who could bang around their different points of view and reach better conclusions than any one of us could come up with on our own. I needed to create an environment in which everyone had the right and the responsibility to make sense of things for themselves and to fight openly for what they think is best—and where the best thinking won out. I needed a real idea meritocracy, not some theoretical version of one. That’s because an idea meritocracy—i.e., a system that brings together smart, independent thinkers and has them productively disagree to come up with the best possible collective thinking and resolve their disagreements in a believability-weighted way—will outperform any other decision-making system.

By radical truth, I mean not filtering one’s thoughts and one’s questions, especially the critical ones. If we don’t talk openly about our issues and have paths for working through them, we won’t have partners who collectively own our outcomes. By radical transparency, I mean giving most everyone the ability to see most everything. To give people anything less than total transparency would make them vulnerable to others’ spin and deny them the ability to figure things out for themselves. Radical transparency reduces harmful office politics and the risks of bad behavior because bad behavior is more likely to take place behind closed doors than out in the open. Some people have called this way of operating radical straightforwardness.

I knew that if radical truth and radical transparency didn’t apply across the board, we would develop two classes of people at the company—those with power who are in the know, and those who aren’t—so I pushed them both to their limits. To me, a pervasive Idea Meritocracy = Radical Truth + Radical Transparency + Believability-Weighted Decision Making.

We have always been unwavering in providing this environment, and we let the people who didn’t like it self-select themselves out of the company.

By being radically truthful and radically transparent, we could see that we all have terribly incomplete and/or distorted perspectives.

Seeing this will help you evolve. At first most people remain stuck in their own heads, stubbornly clinging to the idea that their views are best and that something is wrong with other people who don’t see things their way. But when they repeatedly face the questions “How do you know that you’re not the wrong one?” and “What process would you use to draw upon these different perspectives to make the best decisions?” they are forced to confront their own believability and see things through others’ eyes as well as their own. This shift in perspective is what produces great collective decision making.

Most people initially find this process very uncomfortable. While most appreciate it intellectually, they typically are challenged by it emotionally because it requires them to separate themselves from their ego’s attachment to being right and try to see what they have a hard time seeing. A small minority get it and love it from the start, a slightly larger minority can’t stand it and leave the company, and the majority stick with it, get better at it with time, and eventually wouldn’t want to operate any other way.

IDEA MERITOCRACY = RADICAL TRUTH + RADICAL TRANSPARENCY + BELIEVABILITY-WEIGHTED DECISION MAKING

As Harvard developmental psychologist Bob Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, likes to say, in most companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing their job. For us, that’s terrible. We’ve found that bringing everything to the surface 1) removes the need to try to look good and 2) eliminates time required to guess what people are thinking. In doing so, it creates more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.

Here are the forces behind Bridgewater’s self-reinforcing evolutionary spiral: 1. We went from one independent thinker who wanted to achieve audacious goals to a group of independent thinkers who wanted to achieve audacious goals. 2. To enable these independent thinkers to have effective collective decision making, we created an idea meritocracy based on principles that ensured we would be radically honest and transparent with each other, have thoughtful disagreements, and have idea-meritocratic ways of getting past our disagreements to make decisions. 3. We recorded these decision-making principles on paper and later encoded them into computers and made our decisions based on them. 4. This produced our successes and failures, which produced more learnings, which were written into more principles that were systemized and acted upon. 5. This process resulted in excellent work and excellent relationships that led us to having well-rewarded and happy employees and clients. 6. That led us to be able to bring in more audacious independent thinkers with more audacious goals to strengthen this self-reinforcing upward spiral.

Bridgewater will evolve from where it is now based on what you and others in the next generation of leadership want and how you go about getting it. This book is intended to help you. How you use it is up to you. Whether or not this culture continues is up to you and those who succeed me in the leadership role. It is my responsibility to not be attached to Bridgewater being the way I would want it to be. It is most important that you and others who succeed me make your own independent choices. Like a parent with adult children, I want you all to be strong, independent thinkers who will do well without me. I have done my best to bring you to this point; now is the time for you to step up and for me to fade away.

While these principles are good general rules, it’s important to remember that every rule has exceptions and that no set of rules can ever substitute for common sense. Think of these principles as being like a GPS. A GPS helps you get where you’re going, but if you follow it blindly off a bridge—well, that would be your fault, not the GPS’s. And just as a GPS that gives bad directions can be fixed by updating its software, it’s important to raise and discuss exceptions to the principles as they occur so they can evolve and improve over time.

Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with. Work is either 1) a job you do to earn the money to pay for the life you want to have or 2) what you do to achieve your mission, or some mix of the two. I urge you to make it as much 2) as possible, recognizing the value of 1). If you do that, most everything will go better than if you don’t.

To have an Idea Meritocracy: 1) Put your honest thoughts on the table 2) Have thoughtful disagreement 3) Abide by agreed-upon ways of getting past disagreement

Trust in Radical Truth and Radical Transparency

Radical truth and radical transparency are fundamental to having a real idea meritocracy. The more people can see what is happening—the good, the bad, and the ugly—the more effective they are at deciding the appropriate ways of handling things. This approach is also invaluable for training: Learning is compounded and accelerated when everyone has the opportunity to hear what everyone else is thinking.

In most organizations this kind of strategic decision would typically be kept under wraps until it was a done deal, because bosses generally think it’s bad to create uncertainty among employees. We believe the opposite: that the only responsible way to operate is truthfully and transparently, so that people know what’s really going on and can help us sort through any issues that arise.

For me, not telling people what’s really going on so as to protect them from the worries of life is like letting your kids grow into adulthood believing in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. While concealing the truth might make people happier in the short run, it won’t make them smarter or more trusting in the long run.

As Winston Churchill said, “There is no worse course in leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.” People need to face harsh and uncertain realities if they are going to learn how to deal with them—and you’ll learn a lot about the people around you by seeing how well they do.

Realize that you have nothing to fear from knowing the truth.

Knowing and acting on the truth is what we call the “big deal” at Bridgewater. It’s important not to get hung up on all those emotion- and ego-laden “little deals” that can distract you from the overall mission.

Have integrity and demand it from others.

Integrity comes from the Latin word integritas, meaning “one” or “whole.” People who are one way on the inside and another way on the outside—i.e., not “whole”—lack integrity; they have “duality” instead. While presenting your view as something other than it is can sometimes be easier in the moment (because you can avoid conflict, or embarrassment, or achieve some other short-term goal), the second- and third-order effects of having integrity and avoiding duality are immense. People who are one way on the inside and another on the outside become conflicted and often lose touch with their own values. It’s difficult for them to be happy and almost impossible for them to be their best.

Aligning what you say with what you think and what you think with what you feel will make you much happier and much more successful. Thinking solely about what’s accurate instead of how it is perceived pushes you to focus on the most important things. It helps you sort through people and ...

Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them directly and don’t try people without accusing them to their faces.

Criticism is welcomed and encouraged at Bridgewater, but there is never a good reason to bad-mouth people behind their backs. It is counterproductive and shows a serious lack of integrity, it doesn’t yield any beneficial change, and it subverts both the person being badmouthed and the environment as a whole. Next to being dishonest, it is the worst thing you can do in our community.

Don’t let loyalty to people stand in the way of truth and the well-being of the organization.

In some companies, employees hide their employer’s mistakes, and employers do the same in return. This is unhealthy and stands in the way of improvement because it prevents people from bringing their mistakes and weaknesses to the surface, encourages deception, and eliminates subordinates’ right of appeal.

I believe in a healthier form of loyalty founded on openly exploring what is true. Explicit, principled thinking and radical transparency are the best antidotes for self-dealing. When everyone is held to the same principles and decision making is done publicly, it is difficult for people to pursue their own interests at the expense of the organization’s. In such an environment, those who face their challenges have the most admirable character; when mistakes and weaknesses are hidden, unhealthy character is rewarded instead.

Create an environment in which everyone has the right to understand what makes sense and no one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up.

As someone I worked with once explained, “It’s simple—just don’t filter.”

If you agree that a real idea meritocracy is an extremely powerful thing, it should not be a great leap for you to see that giving people the right to see things for themselves is better than forcing them to rely on information processed for them by others.

Eventually, for people who get used to it, living in a culture of radical transparency is more comfortable than living in the fog of not knowing what’s going on and not knowing what people really think.

If we were handling things well, our transparency would make that clear (provided, of course, that all parties are reasonable, which isn’t something you can always take for granted), and if we were handling things badly, our transparency would ensure that we would get what we deserve, which, in the long run, would be good for us.

I’ve learned that the people whose opinions matter most are those who know us best—our clients and our employees—and that our radical transparency serves us well with them.

Use transparency to help enforce justice. When everyone can follow the discussion leading up to a decision—either in real time in person or via taped records and email threads—justice is more likely to prevail. Everyone is held accountable for their thinking and anyone can weigh in on who should do what according to shared principles. Absent such a transparent process, decisions would be settled behind closed doors by those who have the power to do whatever they want. With transparency, everyone is held to the same high standards.

Share the things that are hardest to share. While it might be tempting to limit transparency to the things that can’t hurt you, it is especially important to share the things that are most difficult to share, because if you don’t share them you will lose the trust and partnership of the people you are not sharing with. So, when faced with the decision to share the hardest things, the question should not be whether to share but how.