Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

You can only truly solve your problems by removing their root causes, and to do that, you must distinguish the symptoms from the disease.

Your values determine what you want, i.e., your goals. Also keep in mind that the 5 Steps are iterative.

First and foremost, have humility so you can get what you need from others!

Maybe they acquired them from being taught; maybe they were blessed with an especially large dose of common sense.

Humility can be even more valuable than having good mental maps if it leads you to seek out better answers than you could come up with on your own.

The person who has good mental maps and a lot of open-mindedness will always

beat out the person who doesn’t have both.

two

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

For example, when someone gets “angry with himself,” his prefrontal cortex is sparring with his amygdala (or other lower-level parts of his brain25).

When you try to explain your behavior, your explanations don’t make any sense.

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

Those who adapt do so by a) teaching their brains to work in a way that doesn’t come naturally (the creative person learns to become organized through discipline and practice, for instance), b) using compensating mechanisms (such as programmed reminders), and/or c) relying on the

It requires you to replace your attachment to always being right with the joy of learning what’s true.

Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know.

First take in all the relevant information, then decide.

It will just broaden your perspective as you make them.

Don’t worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal.

they have weaknesses and blind spots, and they always seek to learn more so that they can get around them.

To be radically open-minded, you need to be so open to the possibility that you could be wrong that you encourage others to tell you so.

I define believable

people as those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question—who have a strong track record with at least three successes—and have great explanations of their approach when probed.

Use questions rather than make statements.

Conduct the discussion in a calm and dispassionate manner, and encourage the other person to

Remember, you are not arguing; you are openly explo...

Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable. If you’re calm, collegial, and respectful you will do a ...

You’ll get better at this wit...

most disagreements aren’t threats as much as opportunities for learning.

People who change their minds because they learned something are the winners, whereas those who stubbornly refuse to learn are the losers.

you should hold and explore conflicting possibilities in your mind while moving fluidly toward whatever is likely to be true based on what you learn.

It doesn’t pay to be open-minded with everyone. Instead, spend your time exploring ideas with the most believable people you have access to.

Being able to thoughtfully disagree would so easily lead to radically improved decision making in all areas—public policy, politics, medicine, science, philanthropy, personal

relationships, and more.

Smart people who can thoughtfully disagree are the greatest teachers, far better than a professor assigned to

stand in front of a board and lecture at you. The knowledge I acquire usually leads to principles that I develop and refine for similar cases that arise in the future.

To recap: Over the course of forty-eight hours, I had gone from a likely death sentence to a likely cure that would essentially involve disemboweling me, and then finally to a simple, and only slightly inconvenient, way of watching for abnormalities and removing them before they could cause any harm. Was this doctor wrong?

is simply that it pays to be radically open-minded and triangulate with smart people.

raise your probabilities of making the right decisions by open-mindedly triangulating with believable people.

Open-minded people are more curious about why there is disagreement. They

Open-minded people genuinely believe they could be wrong;

Open-minded people always feel compelled to see things through others’ eyes.

Open-minded people know when to make statements and when to ask questions.

Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well—they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and

Open-minded people approach everything with a deep-seated fear that they may be wrong.

Regularly use pain as your guide toward quality reflection.

practice Transcendental Meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity.

Instead, they make their decisions based on what their deep-seated subconscious mind wants and then they filter the evidence to make it consistent with those desires. It is possible to become aware of this subconscious process happening and to catch yourself,

Do everything in your power to help others also be open-minded.

Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable.

While that took frankness and open-mindedness and was a big step forward, it wasn’t recorded and systematically converted into adequate changes, so the same people kept making the same sort of mistakes, over and over again.