Ray Dalio Quotes

the mistake of spending virtually no time on designing because they are preoccupied with execution. Remember: Designing precedes doing!

What I wanted was to have an interesting, diverse life filled with lots of learning - and especially meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I feel that I have gotten these in abundance and I am happy.

Closed-minded people are more likely to make statements than ask questions.

In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time.

If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.

...human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success. I've also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances — and that isn't smart. I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way. You will find that interesting and invaluable, and the richer perspective you gain will help you decide what you should do.

As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” It’s even more important that decision making be evidence-based and logical when groups of people are working together.

Our brains work like computers: They input data and process it in accordance with their wiring and programming. Any opinion you have is made up of these two things: the data and your processing or reasoning

You need people who share your tastes and style but who can also push and challenge each other. The best teams, whether in music, in sports, or in business, do all those things at the same time.

The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.

Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

Learn how much confidence to have in your people — don’t assume it. No manager should delegate responsibilities to people they don’t know well.

Much as I loved the job and the people I worked with, I didn’t fit into the Shearson organization. I was too wild. For example, as a joke that now seems pretty stupid, I hired a stripper to drop her cloak while I was lecturing at a whiteboard at the California Grain & Feed Association’s annual convention. I also punched my boss in the face. Not surprisingly, I was fired. But the brokers, their clients, and even the ones who fired me liked me and wanted to keep getting my advice. Even better, they were willing to pay me for it, so in 1975 I started Bridgewater Associates.

Remember that everyone has opinions and they are often bad. Opinions are easy to produce; everyone has plenty of them and most people are eager to share them — even to fight for them. Unfortunately many are worthless or even harmful, including a lot of your own.

I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.