Ray Dalio Quotes

Over the course of our lives, we make millions and millions of decisions that are essentially bets, some large and some small. It pays to think about how we make them because they are what ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

Bob Kegan called Bridgewater “a form of proof that the quest for business excellence and the search for personal realization need not be mutually exclusive — and can, in fact, be essential to each other.

If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done

Understand the differences between managing, micromanaging, and not managing.

Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.

Recognize that having an effective idea meritocracy requires that you understand the merit of each person’s ideas.

Train, guardrail, or remove people; don’t rehabilitate them.

Most people assume that the challenges that go along with growing a large business are greater than those of growing a smaller one. That is not true. Going from a five-person organization to a sixty-person organization was just as challenging as going from a sixty-person organization to a seven-hundred-person organization — and from a seven-hundred-person organization to a 1,500-person one.

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.

Unattainable goals appeal to heroes,

Getting a lot of attention for being successful is a bad position to be in.

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

Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning. Having open-minded conversations with believable people who disagree with you is the quickest way to get an education and to increase your probability of being right.

Above all else, I want you to think for yourself, to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true and 3) what to do about it

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy — if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.” In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I’d said on Wall $ treet Week: “There’ll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was. Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one’s own currency can be successfully restructured with the government’s help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stimulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognize the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal. Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached. Staring at th