Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships, and I believed that being radically truthful and radically transparent were required to get those.

Above all else, my wishes for you are that: 1) You can make your work and your passion one and the same; 2) You can struggle well with others on your common mission to produce the previously mentioned rewards; 3) You can savor both your struggles and your rewards; and 4) You will evolve quickly and contribute to evolution in significant ways.

I of course hope that

you

come up with good principles of your own that you will systematically follow to produce outcomes that vastly exceed your expectations.

Baseball Cards, which are a simple way of presenting a person’s strengths and weaknesses and the evidence behind them

The Issue Log is our primary tool for recording our mistakes and learning from them. We use it to bring all problems to the surface, so we can put them in the hands of problem solvers to make systematic improvements.

The Issue Log is a good example of a tool that changed habits and perceptions.

Pain+Reflection=Progress.

That prompted me to create the Pain Button.

The moment someone experiences pain is the best time for them to record what the pain is like, but it’s a bad time to reflect because it’s hard to keep a clear head.

Disputes need clear paths toward resolution.

The Dispute Resolver provides paths for resolving disagreements in an idea-meritocratic way. It asks a series of questions used to guide the people through the resolution process.

For years, I have asked each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief email of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections.

Over the last few years, I’ve developed this into a software application that pulls these updates into a dashboard, which makes them much easier to track, record metrics, and respond to than dealing with dozens of separate email threads.

How often have you ended a meeting with everybody saying we should do this or that, but then everybody walks off and nothing actually happens because people lose track of what was agreed upon?

The Contract Tool is a simple app that lets people make and monitor their commitments to each other. It helps both the people who requested things, and those who are required to provide those things, to easily stay on top of them.

As the saying goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

At Bridgewater, we talk about four helpful steps to creating good metrics: 1) know what goal your business is achieving, 2) understand the process for getting to the goal (your “machine” with its people and design), 3) identify the key parts in the process that are the best places to measure, so you know how your machine is working to achieve that goal, and 4) explore how to create levers, tied to those key metrics, that allow you to adjust your process and change your outcomes.