- Principles: 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 –> consistently operate according to principles that can be clearly explained
- If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life
- The key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well – being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game
- Reflect on and write down your decision-making criteria whenever you make a decision –> systemize your decision making
- Develop your own principles
- Think for yourself: 1) what do you want? 2) what is true? 3) what are you going to do about it?
Part I: where I’m coming from
- Independent thinker inclined to take risks in search of rewards. I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure
- You have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money
- 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 sth
- I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less, as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. Making money was an incidental consequence of meaningful work and meaningful relationships
- Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? How to cross the dangerous jungle without getting killed?
- In retrospect, my crash was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it gave me the humility I needed –> shifted my mindset from thinking “I’m right” to asking myself “How do I know I’m right?”
- I just want to be right – I don’t care if the right answer comes from me
- There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you
Systemize timeless and universal principles + Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside
- (If you work hard and creatively) You can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want –> reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones
- Be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way
- I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense: having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do sth
- We made the most of our mistakes because we got in the habit of viewing them as opportunities to learn and improve
- Make mistakes within your range of expectations
- We should bring problems and disagreements to the surface to learn what should be done to make things better –> build an “error/issue log”
- The greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you
- I clearly hadn’t done a good enough job of finding and training others to whom I could delegate my responsibilities. Despite all of my and Bridgewater’s amazing achievements, I had not achieved this highest level of success
- Shapers: people who drive change and build lasting organizations. I wanted to know about the qualities and principles of all shapers
- Independent thinkers
- Strong mental maps of how things should be done
- Extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it
- Wider range of vision than most people – see both big picture and granular details
- Simultaneously creative, systematic and practical
- Assertive and open-minded
- Passionate about what they are doing
- Want to have a big beneficial impact on the world
- Extreme determination to achieve their goals
Systemizing idea meritocracy
- The same types of people in the same types of circumstances are going to produce the same types of results
- Connect the dots between what people are like and the outcomes they produce
- Algorithmic decision making
- Reinforce good habits and good thinking. The good habits come from thinking repeatedly in a principled way
Looking back from a higher level
- Watching the same things happen again and again (“another one of those”), I began to see reality as a gorgeous perpetual motion machine, in which causes become effects that become causes of new effects
- Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature’s reminder that there is something important for me to learn
- Successful people make mistakes, struggle with their weaknesses and don’t feel that they are particularly special or great. They are no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much or more than average folks. Even after they surpass their wildest dreams, they still experience more struggle than glory
- I cannot say that having an intense life filled with accomplishments is better than having a relaxed life filled with savoring, though I can say that being strong is better than being weak, and that struggling gives one strength
- The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it
- Purpose: evolve and contribute to evolution
- Get the most out of each unit of effort you put in
- Cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time à look to the patterns to understand the cause-effect relationships and to learn principles
The satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well
Basado en Principles. Ray Dalio. Editorial Simon & Schuster (2017)
