Ray Dalio Quotes

Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design.

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

When faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven't figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.

If you want to have a community of people who have both high-quality, long-term relationships and a high sense of personal responsibility, you can’t allow a sense of entitlement to creep in.

Don’t worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal.

the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.

Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know.

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

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.

Liberal” had ceased to mean being in favor of progress and had come to mean “paying people not to work.

The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others’ weaknesses again and again. People who do this fail because they are stubbornly stuck in their own heads.

Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.

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.

Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.

nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them.