Leadership Library
Decision Systems

Principles

Ray Dalio · 2017

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About

Bridgewater's founder shares the life and work principles behind his success.

SK's perspective

The idea of writing down your own principles and running life like a machine is transformative.

Key learnings

  • Embrace reality and deal with it.
  • Pain + reflection = progress.
  • Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.
  • Believe in the power of principles you write down.
  • Use believability-weighted decision-making.

Make it a ritual

Codify your recurring decisions into written principles you actually re-use.

Professional life

  • Each time you solve a problem, write the principle so future-you reuses it.
  • After any pain point, spend five minutes reflecting to extract the lesson.

Personal life

  • Keep a personal 'principles' doc; add one line a week.
  • Seek out one person who'll disagree with you honestly this week.

Buy the book (Amazon) · curated talks on YouTube. — © Ray Dalio. Summary is our own.

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