- Bridgewater Associates, L.P. Co-Chief Investment Officer & Co-Chairman Ray Dalio recently shared the top principles selected by the social media community
Bridgewater Associates, L.P. Co-Chief Investment Officer & Co-Chairman Ray Dalio has a goal of passing the knowledge that he acquired which helped him throughout his career. And one of his favorite things about social media is hearing from his followers about the principles that they found to be most valuable.
Several weeks ago, Dalio asked his followers to share which principles they found to be the most impactful. These are the top principles shared by Dalio’s social media community:
1.) Pain + Reflection = Progress
The first principle points out that there is no way to avoid pain especially if you are going after ambitious goals.
2.) Own Your Outcomes
Life gives you so many decisions to make and so many opportunities to recover from mistakes. If you handle them well, then you can have a terrific life.
3.) Prioritize: While You Can Have Virtually Anything You Want, You Can’t Have Everything You Want
“Life is like a giant smorgasbord with more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste,” wrote Dalio. “Choosing a goal often means rejecting some things you want in order to get other things that you want or need even more. Some people fail at this point before they’ve even started. Afraid to reject a good alternative for a better one, they try to pursue too many goals at once, achieving few or none of them. Don’t get discouraged and don’t let yourself be paralyzed by all the choices. You can have much more than what you need to be happy. Make your choice and get on with it.”
4.) Triangulate Your View With Believable People Who Are Willing To Disagree
When you question experts individually and encourage them to have thoughtful disagreement with each other, then you can raise the probability of being right and become much more educated. This is especially true when the experts disagree with Dalio or with each other. “Smart people who can thoughtfully disagree are the greatest teachers, far better than a professor assigned to stand in front of a board and lecture at you,” explained Dalio.
5.) Evolve Or Die
Dalio said that this evolutionary cycle is not just for people but for countries, companies, economies — for everything. “And it is naturally self-correcting as a whole, though not necessarily for its parts,” Dalio noted. “For example, if there is too much supply and waste in a market, prices will go down, companies will go out of business, and capacity will be reduced until the supply falls in line with the demand, at which time the cycle will start to move in the opposite direction.”
Dalio also cited the principles that were ranked from 6 to 10:
#6: Have Clear Goals
#7: Meditate – Dalio practices Transcendental Meditation and believes it enhanced his open-mindedness
#8: Fail Well – Everyone fails and anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you are paying attention to.
#9: Be Radically Open-Minded And Radically Transparent – None of us are born knowing what is true: We either have to discover what is true for ourselves or believe and follow others. So the key is to know which path will yield better results.
#10: Be A Hyperrealist – Understanding, accepting, and working with reality is “practical and beautiful.” Dalio has become so much a hyperrealist that he learned to appreciate the beauty of all realities, even the harsh ones.
