All principles come from a set of values.Your values are what you consider important and they define who you want to be. However, they are not practical to use when you are faced with tough decisions.For example: You may value to “live a healthy lifestyle”. What does “being healthy” mean in practice? What are the daily decisions you are going to make?Instead of using your values to make decisions, you should defer to principles.To “live a healthy lifestyle”, you need to create a set of principles to guide you: like “I do not eat fast food during the week” and “I exercise 3 times / week”.

Principles = Fundamental Truths

“Principles connect your values to your actions; they are beacons that guide your actions, and help you successfully deal with the laws of reality. It is to your principles that you turn when you face hard choices.”

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Your capacity to achieve goals is all about the systems you implement in your “machine”.To work on your machine, you need to separate your two personalities:<ul><li>The “Designer”. The one who manages and plans the systems to achieve your goals</li><li>The “Doer”. The one who works according to the plan created by the “Designer”</li></ul>Your job as a “Designer” is to look at your yourself as a “Doer” objectively to create the most efficient machine possible. If you are not the best for the job, find a good replacement.

Your Two Yous & Your Machine

Reality + Dreams + Determination = A Successful Life.The quality of your life depends on the quality of the decisions you make.And to make better decisions, you need to adopt “hyperrealism”.Ray describes “hyperrealism” as accepting the reality as it is rather than wishing it was different. Understanding the reality allows you to learn how to work with them rather than fight them, which leads to greater success.

Ray Dalio’s Formula for a Successful Life

Most people adopt pre-packaged principles from parents, religious institutions, or other influential figures without much thought. This exposes you to the risk of inconsistency with your true values. Holding incompatible principles will lead to conflict between values and actions.To make sure your principles and your values are aligned, you need to:<ol><li>Define what do you want</li><li>Ask yourself “what is true?”</li><li>Plan what should be done according to 1 and 2</li></ol>

Where Do Your Principles Come From?

A correct understanding of reality is the essential foundation for any good outcome.<ul><li>Don’t get attached to your views about how things should be; there should always be space for learning.</li><li>Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe. Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.</li><li>“No pain, no gain”. Evolution won’t always feel good.</li><li>Pain + Reflection = Progress. The quality of your life will depend on the decisions you make at those painful moments.</li><li>Weigh second and third-order consequences.</li></ul>

Understand Reality and Deal With It

<ul><li>Know and understand the biggest threat to good decision making - harmful emotions</li><li>Decision making is a two-step process: first learning, then deciding</li><li>Synthesize the situation you're dealing with</li><li>Make your decisions as expected value calculations</li><li>Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding</li><li>Use Principles and convert them into algorithms and have the computer make decisions alongside you.</li></ul>

How to Make Decisions Effectively

<ul><li>Value knowing the truth. You have nothing to fear from knowing it</li><li>Cultivate meaningful work and meaningful relationships</li><li>Foster a culture that allows mistakes and encourages learning from them</li><li>Weight your decision making in a realistic way</li><li>Recognize how to get beyond disagreement</li><li>Remember that WHO is more important than WHAT</li><li>Hire right, because the costs for hiring wrong are huge</li><li>Constantly train, test, evaluate, and sort people</li><li>Identify and don’t tolerate problems</li><li>Diagnose problems to get at their root causes</li><li>Design improvements to your machine to get around your problems</li><li>Do what you set out to do</li></ul>

Work Principles

<ul><li>Working for what he wanted, not for what others wanted him to do</li><li>Coming up with the best independent opinions he could conceive</li><li>Stress-testing his opinions by having the smartest people finding the flaws in his thinking</li><li>Being wary about overconfidence, and good at not knowing</li><li>Embracing reality, experiencing the results of his decisions, and reflecting on what he did to improve.</li></ul>

Ray Dalio’s 5 Guiding Principles

Ray Dalio, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, lays down his rules and frameworks he uses to navigate his life. He calls them principles. Principles are fundamental for decision making and allow you to live a life according to your values. Ray Dalio uses principles to guide his personal life, his relationships or to build businesses.

Ray Dalio’s Principles

"I believe that life consists of an enormous number of choices that come at us and that each decision we make has consequences, so the quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make."

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.” —The New York Times Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals. In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve. Here, from a man who has been called both “the Steve Jobs of investing” and “the philosopher king of the financial universe” (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.

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#1 New York Times Bestseller “Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.” —The New York Times Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals. In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve. Here, from a man who has been called both “the Steve Jobs of investing” and “the philosopher king of the financial universe” (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.

Raymond Dalio (born August 8, 1949) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. Dalio is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds.

RAY DALIO

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