Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.

Every day, each of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to. Without principles we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time. If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result. Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success.

To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained.

My hope is that reading this book will prompt you and others to discover your own principles from wherever you think is best and ideally write them down. Doing that will allow you and others to be clear about what your principles are and understand each other better. It will allow you to refine them as you encounter more experiences and to reflect on them, which will help you make better decisions and be better understood.

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.

With time, my collection of principles became like a collection of recipes for decision making.