Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

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.

“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.”

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.

Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning.

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.

beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even embrace your weaknesses.

Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.

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

Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. That’s bad, because it is more important to understand and deal with the bad stuff since the good stuff will take care of itself.

Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.

Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way.

Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.

Seeing things from the top down is the best way to understand ourselves and the laws of reality within the context of overarching universal laws.

To try to figure out the universal laws of reality and principles for dealing with it, I’ve found it helpful to try to look at things from nature’s perspective.

Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.

nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them.

Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.

Life doesn’t give a damn about what you like. It’s up to you to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it and then find the courage to carry it through.

Watching people struggle and having others watch you struggle can elicit all kinds of ego-driven emotions such as sympathy, pity, embarrassment, anger, or defensiveness.

What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know at the moment.

you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.

We are born with attributes that can both help us and hurt us, depending on their application.

Having expectations for people

without knowing what they are like is a sure way to get in trouble.

using pain to trigger quality reflections.