Top 12 Quotes From Principles: Life and Work By Ray Dalio

Best Quotes From Principles By Ray Dalio – Learn How to Systemize Your Decision Making:

1. 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.

2. I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

3. The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered home is that you can never be sure of anything. There are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it’s always best to assume you’re missing something.

4. There are two parts of each person’s brain: the upper-level logical part and the lower-level emotional part. I call these the ‘two yous’. They fight for control of each person. How that conflict is managed is the most important driver of our behaviors.

5. It’s important not to let our biases stand in the way of our objectivity. To get good results, we need to be analytical rather than emotional.

6. To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.

7. Because of the different ways that our brains are wired, we all experience reality in different ways and any single way is essentially distorted. This is something that we need to acknowledge and deal with. So if you want to know what is true and what to do about it, you must understand your own brain.

8. Brain plasticity is what allows your brain to change its ‘soft wiring’…recent research has suggested that a wide variety of practices – from physical exercise to studying to meditation – can lead to physical and physiological changes in our brain that affect our abilities to think and form memories.

9. Doing the things that will reduce your instinctual defensiveness takes practice, and requires operating in an environment that reinforces open-mindedness.

10. Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible. It’s the probabilities that matter.

11. Mistakes will cause you pain, but you shouldn’t try to shield yourself or others from it. Pain is a message that something is wrong and it’s an effective teacher that one shouldn’t do that wrong thing again. To deal with your own and others’ weaknesses well you must acknowledge them frankly and openly and work to find ways of preventing them from hurting you in the future.

12. Remember this: The pain is all in your head. If you want to evolve, you need to go where the problems and the pain are. By confronting the pain, you will see more clearly the paradoxes and problems you face. Reflecting on them and resolving them will give you wisdom. The harder the pain and the challenge, the better.

Commentary on the Top 12 Quotes From Principles By Ray Dalio:

Ray Dalio is the founder of a highly-successful hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, that manages well over one hundred billion dollars in assets. What’s unique about Dalio and his company is that he’s cultivated a culture of radical truth. As you can probably imagine, this type of culture isn’t a great fit for everybody, but Dalio values honesty over everything else. The feelings and egos of individual employees take a back seat to reality. It’s clear that truthfulness is Ray’s highest priority in both life and work.

In fact, his fundamental principle is:

1. What Do You Want?
2. What is True?
3. What Should You Do to Achieve #1 in Light of #2?

This method of thinking based on radical truth is exactly what has allowed him to generate even more dynamic principles. He has been able to leverage his greatest ones with the power of computers by turning them into algorithms. The end result of this difficult process is being able to make great decisions. And at it’s absolute core, leading a great life is about making the best possible decisions over-and-over again.

It’s extremely clear, especially within the financial markets, that the biggest barrier to good decision making is our own mind. Natural defense mechanisms and biases block us from having an objective view of ourselves and circumstances. But by better understanding how our mind works, we can actually adjust our thought patterns, feelings, and behaviors in order to be more effective in the market and in life. It’s no wonder that Dalio has had a consistent meditation practice for decades.

Another one of Dalio’s principles is rather simple yet extremely robust:  Pain + Reflection = Progress. This is a critical concept because most people try to avoid pain at all costs and completely wipe it from their memory. But there’s no growth in that type of approach. All that really does is extend suffering and hold us back. But if we really reflect on the pain, it can tell us everything. We need to shift how we view pain and failure because learning from our mistakes is precisely how we can make the most progress. 

Overall, Dalio has been able to boil down his life, business, and market experiences into 4 main principles:

1. Embrace Reality and Deal With It
2. Be Radically Open-Minded
3. Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently
4. Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively

So, are you ready to start operating by principles and systemizing your decision making processes like billionaire Ray Dalio?

Learn More in the Trading Success Framework Course

Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)

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