Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.

I learned my principles over a lifetime of making a lot of mistakes and spending a lot of time reflecting on them.

I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?” They gave me the humility I needed to balance my audacity.

Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.

I discovered I could do that by expressing my decision-making criteria in the form of algorithms that I could embed into our computers. By running both decision-making systems—i.e., mine in my head and mine in the computer—next to each other, I learned the computer could make better decisions than me because it could process vastly more information than I could, and it could do it faster and unemotionally. Doing that allowed me and the people I worked with to compound our understanding over time and improve the quality of our collective decision making. I discovered that such decision-making systems—especially when believability weighted—are incredibly powerful and will soon profoundly change how people around the world make all kinds of decisions. Our principle-driven approach to decision making has not only improved our economic, investment, and management decisions, it has helped us make better decisions in every aspect of our lives.

I will explain how we’ve coalesced our principles into an idea meritocracy that strives to deliver meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truth and radical transparency. I’ll show you how this works at a granular level and how it can be applied to nearly any organization to make it more effective. As you will see, we are simply a group of people who are striving to be excellent at what we do and who recognize that we don’t know much relative to what we need to know. We believe that thoughtful, unemotional disagreement by independent thinkers can be converted into believability-weighted decision making that is smarter and more effective than the sum of its parts.

As we move toward these goals, we encounter problems, make mistakes, and run up against our own personal weaknesses.

My most obvious weakness was my bad rote memory. I couldn’t, and still can’t, remember facts that don’t have reasons for being what they are (like phone numbers), and I don’t like following instructions.

When I didn’t want to do something, I would fight it, but when I was excited about something, nothing could hold me back.

“You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”

The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered home is that you can never be sure of anything: There are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it’s always best to assume you’re missing something.

To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me.

At one point, I’d lost so much money I couldn’t afford to pay the people who worked with me. One by one, I had to let them go. We went down to two employees—Colman and me. Then Colman had to go. With tears from all, his family packed up and returned to Oklahoma. Bridgewater was now down to just one employee: me.

In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I’d said on Wall $treet Week: “There’ll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was.

Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

Even after my crash, I knew I had to go after the terrific life with all its risks, so the question was how to “cross the dangerous jungle” without getting killed.

Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. 2. Know when not to have an opinion. 3. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. 4. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.

I came to see that people’s greatest weaknesses are the flip sides of their greatest strengths. For example, some people are prone to take on too much risk while others are too risk averse; some are too focused on the details while others are too big-picture. Most are too much one way and not enough another. Typically, by doing what comes naturally to us, we fail to account for our weaknesses, which leads us to crash. What happens after we crash is most important. Successful people change in ways that allow them to continue to take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses and unsuccessful people don’t. Later in the book I will describe specific strategies for change, but the important thing to note here is that beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even embrace your weaknesses.

Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up.

I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

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. You will find that interesting and invaluable, and the richer perspective you gain will help you decide what you should do.

I believe that all organizations basically have two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck.

This looked to me like another one of those fork-in-the-road cases in which I had to choose between one of two seemingly essential but mutually exclusive options: 1) being radically truthful with each other including probing to bring our problems and weaknesses to the surface so we could deal with them forthrightly and 2) having happy and satisfied employees. And it reminded me that when faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.

Put our honest thoughts out on the table, 2. Have thoughtful disagreements in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn, and 3. Have agreed-upon ways of deciding (e.g., voting, having clear authorities) if disagreements remain so that we can move beyond them without resentments.

turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.

Only true shapers consistently move from one success to another and sustain success over decades, and those are the people I want to bring to Bridgewater.

My examination of shapers and my reflections on my own qualities made clear to me that nobody sees the full range of what they need to see in order to be exceptionally successful, though some see a wider range than others.

This exercise reminded me that there are far fewer types of people in the world than there are people and far fewer different types of situations than there are situations, so matching the right types of people to the right types of situations is key.

Said differently, by knowing what someone is like we can have a pretty good idea of what we can expect from them.

I am working with Greg (and others) to develop these management systems in the same way I worked with Greg and others (Bob, etc.) on the investment systems. You are seeing this happen via the development of the Baseball Cards, Dot Collector, Pain Button, testing, job specing, etc.

One of the great things about algorithmic decision making is that it focuses people on cause-effect relationships and, in that way, helps foster a real idea meritocracy. When everyone can see the criteria the algorithms use and have a hand in developing them, they can all agree that the system is fair and trust the computer to look at the evidence, make the right assessments about people, and assign them the right authorities. The algorithms are essentially principles in action on a continuous basis.

Most of my conversations with Wang are at the principle level; he sees the rhyme of history and puts the particulars we speak of in that context. “Unattainable goals appeal to heroes,” he once told me. “Capable people are those who sit there worrying about the future. The unwise are those who worry about nothing. If conflicts got resolved before they became acute, there wouldn’t be any heroes.” His advice has helped me in my planning for Bridgewater’s future. For example, when I asked him about checks and balances of power, he pointed to Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system. I took his advice to heart as I set out to improve Bridgewater’s governance model.

The diagram on the following page shows the archetypal hero’s journey. They typically start out leading ordinary lives in an ordinary world and are drawn by a “call to adventure.” This leads them down a “road of trials” filled with battles, temptations, successes, and failures. Along the way, they are helped by others, often by those who are further along the journey and serve as mentors, though those who are less far along also help in various ways. They also gain allies and enemies and learn how to fight, often against convention. Along the way, they encounter temptations and have clashes and reconciliations with their fathers and their sons. They overcome their fear of fighting because of their great determination to achieve what they want, and they gain their “special powers” (i.e., skills) from both “battles” that test and teach them, and from gifts (such as advice) that they receive from others. Over time, they both succeed and fail, but they increasingly succeed more than they fail as they grow stronger and keep striving for more, which leads to ever-bigger and more challenging battles. Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure (which Campbell calls an “abyss” or the “belly of the whale” experience) that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination. If they do, they undergo a change (have a “metamorphosis”) in which they experience the fear that protects them, without losing the aggressiveness tha...

In gaining this perspective, I began to experience painful moments in a radically different way. Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature’s reminder that there is something important for me to learn. Encountering pains and figuring out the lessons they were trying to give me became sort of a game to me. The more I played it, the better I got at it, the less painful those situations became, and the more rewarding the process of reflecting, developing principles, and then getting rewards for using those principles became. I learned to love my struggles, which I suppose is a healthy perspective to have, like learning to love exercising (which I haven’t managed to do yet).

In my early years, I looked up to extraordinarily successful people, thinking that they were successful because they were extraordinary. After I got to know such people personally, I realized that all of them—like me, like everyone—make mistakes, struggle with their weaknesses, and don’t feel that they are particularly special or great. They are no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much or more than average folks. Even after they surpass their wildest dreams, they still experience more struggle than glory.

Since life brings both ups and downs, struggling well doesn’t just make your ups better; it makes your downs less bad. I’m still struggling and I will until I die, because even if I try to avoid the struggles, they will find me.

Now that my desire to succeed has given way to a desire to help others succeed, that’s become my current struggle. It’s now clear to me that my purpose, your purpose, and the purpose of everything else is to evolve and to contribute to evolution in some small way.

Good principles are effective ways of dealing with reality. To learn my own, I spend a lot of time reflecting. So rather than just giving you my principles, I will share the reflections behind them.

Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.

By doing this, you will begin to understand how the machinery underlying any “another one of those” works and develop a mental map for dealing with it.

That said, I don’t want you to follow my (or anyone’s) principles blindly. I suggest that you think through all the principles available to you from different sources and put together a collection of your own that you can turn to whenever reality sends “another one of those” your way.

1 Embrace Reality and Deal with It

I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.

Learning how reality works, visualizing the things I want to create, and then building them out is incredibly exciting to me. Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilarating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning—just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks and that most of my learning will come from reflecting on them.14 Just as long-distance runners push through pain to experience the pleasure of “runner’s high,” I have largely gotten past the pain of my mistake making and instead enjoy the pleasure that comes with learning from it. I believe that with practice you can change your habits and experience the same “mistake learner’s high.”

1.1 Be a hyperrealist.

a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.

1.2 Truth—or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality—is the essential foundation for any good outcome.

1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.