Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained. Unfortunately, most people can’t do that. And it’s very rare for people to write their principles down and share them. That is a shame. I would love to know what principles guided Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, and others so I could clearly understand what they were going after and how they achieved it and could compare their different approaches. I’d like to know which principles are most important to the politicians who want me to vote for them and to all the other people whose decisions affect me. Do we have common principles that bind us together—as a family, as a community, as a nation, as friends across nations? Or do we have opposing principles that divide us? What are they? Let’s be specific. This is a time when it is especially important for us to be clear about our principles.

For Campbell, a “hero” isn’t a perfect person who always gets things right. Far from it. A hero is someone who “found or achieved or [did] something beyond the normal range of achievement,” and who “has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.”

Tbe journey of the heroe