Ray Dalio Quotes

Every leader must decide between 1) getting rid of liked but incapable people to achieve their goals and 2) keeping the nice but incapable people and not achieving their goals.

You don’t achieve happiness by getting rid of your problems – you achieve it by learning from them.

The evolutionary process of productive adaption and ascent — the process of seeking, obtaining, and pursuing more and more ambitious goals — does not just pertain to how individuals and society move forward. It is equally relevant when dealing with setbacks, which are inevitable. At some point in your life you will crash in a big way. You might fail at your job or with your family, lose a loved one, suffer a serious accident or illness, or discover the life you imagined is out of reach forever. There are a whole host of ways that something will get you . At such times, you will be in pain and might think that you don’t have the strength to go on. You almost always do, however; your ultimate success will depend on you realizing that fact, even though it might not seem that way at the moment.

This is why many people who have endured setbacks that seems devastating at the time ended up happy as (or even happier than) they originally were after they successfully adapted to them. The quality of your life will depend on the choices you make at those painful moments. The faster one appropriately adapts, the better. No matter what you want out of life, your ability to adapt and move quickly and efficiently through the process of personal evolution will determine your success and your happiness. If you do it well, you can cahnge your psychological reaction to it so that what was painful can become something you crave.

As David Eagleman describes it in his wonderful book Incognito: Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia — hundreds of billions of them. Each one of them is as complex as a city. . . . The cells [neurons] are connected in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given billions of neurons, this means that there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Because most people are more emotional than logical, they tend to overreact to short-term results; they give up and sell low when times are bad and buy too high when times are good. I find this is just as true for relationships as it is for investments — wise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel, jumping into things when they’re hot and abandoning them when they’re not.

Don’t hire people just to fit the first job they will do; hire people you want to share your life with.