Ray Dalio Quotes

Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them directly and don’t try people without accusing them to their faces.

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.

When a problem occurs, conduct the discussion at two levels: 1) the machine level (why that outcome was produced) and 2) the case-at-hand level (what to do about it).

Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. You must be willing to do things in the unique ways you think are best

no matter what asset class one held, there would come a time when it would lose most of its value. This included cash, which is the worst investment over time because it loses value after adjusting for inflation and taxes.

Learning how to make decisions in the best possible way and learning to have the courage to make them comes from a) going after what you want, b) failing and reflecting well through radical open-mindedness, and c) changing/evolving to become ever more capable and less fearful. In the final chapter of this section, Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively, I shared some more granular principles for how to do all of the above and weigh your options in specific situations to determine the right path to follow.

if everyone understood the basics, then economic policymakers would be able to do the right things a lot faster and with less angst in the future. That led me to make a thirty-minute video, How the Economic Machine Works, which I released in 2013. Besides explaining how the economy works it provides a template that helps people assess their economies and gives them guidance about what to do and what to expect during a crisis.

The challenges you face will test and strengthen you. If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something.

first principle: • Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 . . . . . . and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.

Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible. It’s the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in terms of its likelihood and prioritized.

Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it

When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: 1. You can deny them (which is what most people do). 2. You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change). 3. You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. 4. Or, you can change what you are going after.

Being radically truthful and transparent with your colleagues and expecting your colleagues to be the same with you ensures that important issues are apparent instead of hidden. It also enforces good behavior and good thinking, because when you have to explain yourself, everyone can openly assess the merits of your logic.

Great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor.