Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

There is nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it.

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.

Reality is optimizing for the whole—not for you.

Go to the pain rather than avoid it.

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.

If you know that you are blind, you can figure out a way to see, whereas if you don’t know that you’re blind, you will continue to bump into your problems.

most people fail to do this because they hold on to bad opinions that could easily be rectified by going above themselves to objectively look down at their situation and weigh what they and others think about it.

Our biggest barriers for doing this well are our ego barrier and our blind spot barrier. The ego barrier is our innate desire to be capable and have others recognize us as such. The blind spot barrier is the result of our seeing things through our own subjective lenses; both barriers can prevent us from seeing how things really are.

have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question,

have demonstrated that they can logically explain the cause-effect relationships behind their conclusions.

If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done. I have seen some people who have repeatedly failed at something hold strongly to their opinions of how it should be done, even when their opinions are at odds with those who have repeatedly done it successfully.

Remember that everyone has opinions and they are often bad. Opinions are easy to produce; everyone has plenty of them and most people are eager to share them—even to fight for them. Unfortunately many are worthless or even harmful,

including a lot of your own.

Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning.

Don’t hold opinions about things you don’t know anything about.