100 Deep Ray Dalio Quotes On Investing And Leadership

1. “As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.”

2. “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. Most people make bad decisions because they are so certain that they’re right that they don’t allow themselves to see the better alternatives that exist. Radically open-minded people know that coming up with the right questions and asking other smart people what they think is as important as having all the answers. They understand that you can’t make a great decision without swimming for a while in a state of “not knowing.” That is because what exists within the area of “not knowing” is so much greater and more exciting than anything any one of us knows.”

3. “In my early years the psychology of the 1960s U.S. was aspirational and inspirational—to achieve great and noble goals. It was like nothing I have seen since. One of my earliest memories was of John F. Kennedy, an intelligent, charismatic man who painted vivid pictures of changing the world for the better—exploring outer space, achieving equal rights, and eliminating poverty. He and his ideas had a major effect on my thinking. The United States was then at its peak relative to the rest of the world, accounting for 40 percent of its economy compared to about 20 percent today; the dollar was the world’s currency; and the U.S. was the dominant military power. Being “liberal” meant being committed to moving forward in a fast and fair way, while being “conservative” meant being stuck in old and unfair ways—at least that’s how it seemed to me and to most of the people around me. As we saw it, the U.S. was rich, progressive, well managed, and on a mission to improve quickly at everything. I might have been naive but I wasn’t alone.”

4. “their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle”

5. “Reading Duhigg’s book taught me that if you really want to change, the best thing you can do is choose which habits to acquire and which to get rid of and then go about doing that. To help you, I recommend that you write down your three most harmful habits. Do that right now. Now pick one of those habits and be committed to breaking it. Can you do that? That would be extraordinarily impactful. If you break all three, you will radically improve the trajectory of your life. Or you can pick habits that you want to acquire and then acquire them. The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness.”

6. “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.”

7. “Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.18 Everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the entire galaxy is evolving. While everything apparently dies or disappears in time, the truth is that it all just gets reconfigured in evolving forms. Remember that energy can’t be destroyed—it can only be reconfigured. So the same stuff is continuously falling apart and coalescing in different forms. The force behind that is evolution. For example, the primary purpose of every living thing is to act as a vessel for the DNA that evolves life through time. The DNA that exists within each individual came from an eternity ago and will continue to live long after its individual carriers pass away, in increasingly evolved forms.”

8. “I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it – a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future.”

9. “I realized that all of them—like me, like everyone—make mistakes, struggle with their weaknesses, and don’t feel that they are particularly special or great. They are no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much or more than average folks. Even after they surpass their wildest dreams, they still experience more struggle than glory. This has certainly been true for me. While I surpassed my wildest dreams decades ago, I am still struggling today. In time, I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well. To understand what I mean, imagine your greatest goal, whatever it is—making a ton of money, winning an Academy Award, running a great organization, being great at a sport. Now imagine instantaneously achieving it.

10. “In thoughtful disagreement, both parties are motivated by the genuine fear of missing important perspectives. Exchanges in which you really see what the other person is seeing and they really see what you are seeing—with both your “higher-level yous” trying to get to the truth—are immensely helpful and a giant source of untapped potential. To do this well, approach the conversation in a way that conveys that you’re just trying to understand.26 Use questions rather than make statements. Conduct the discussion in a calm and dispassionate manner, and encourage the other person to do that as well. Remember, you are not arguing; you are openly exploring what’s true. Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable. If you’re calm, collegial, and respectful you will do a lot better than if you are not. You’ll get better at this with practice.”

11. “However, rather than blindly following the computer’s recommendations, I would have the computer work in parallel with my own analysis and then compare the two. When the computer’s decision was different from mine, I would examine why. Most of the time, it was because I had overlooked something. In those cases, the computer taught me. But sometimes I would think about some new criteria my system would’ve missed, so I would then teach the computer. We helped each other.”

12. “If you choose to push through this often painful process of personal evolution, you will naturally “ascend” to higher and higher levels. As you climb above the blizzard of things that surrounds you, you will realize that they seem bigger than they really are when you are seeing them up close; that most things in life are just “another one of those.” The higher you ascend, the more effective you become at working with reality to shape outcomes toward your goals. What once seemed impossibly complex becomes simple. a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. If you don’t let up on yourself and instead become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a faster pace. That’s just the way it is. Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life—you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion. The irony is that if you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure. The pain is the signal! Like switching from not exercising to exercising, developing the habit of embracing the pain and learning from it will “get you to the other side.” By “getting to the other side,” I mean that you will become hooked on: • Identifying, accepting, and learning how to deal with your weaknesses, • Preferring that the people around you be honest with you rather than keep their negative thoughts about you to themselves, and • Being yourself rather than having to pretend to be strong where you are weak. b. Embrace tough love. In my own life, what I want to give to people, most importantly to people I love, is the power to deal with reality to get what they want. In pursuit of my goal to give them strength, I will often deny them what they “want” because that will give them the opportunity to struggle so that they can develop the strength to get what they want on their own. This can be difficult for people emotionally, even if they understand intellectually that having difficulties is the exercise they need to grow strong and that just giving them what they want will weaken them and ultimately lead to them needing more help.23 Of course most people would prefer not to have weaknesses. Our upbringings and our experiences in the world have conditioned us to be embarrassed by our weaknesses and hide them. But people are happiest when they can be themselves. If you can be open with your weaknesses it will make you freer and will help you deal with them better. I urge you to not be embarrassed about your problems, recognizing that everyone has them. Bringing them to the surface will help you break your bad habits and develop good ones, and you will acquire real strengths and justifiable optimism. This evolutionary process of productive adaptation and ascent—the process of seeking, obtaining, and pursuing more and more ambitious”

13. “to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.”

14. “d. In designing your organization, remember that the 5-Step Process is the path to success and that different people are good at different steps. Assign specific people to do each of these steps based on their natural inclinations. For example, the big-picture visionary should be responsible for goal setting, the taste tester should be assigned the job of identifying and not tolerating problems, the logical detective who doesn’t mind probing people should be the diagnoser, the imaginative designer should craft the plan to make the improvements, and the reliable taskmaster should make sure the plan gets executed. Of course, some people can do more than one of these things—generally people do two or three well. Virtually nobody can do them all well. A team should consist of people with all of these abilities and they should know who is responsible for which steps.”

15. “Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping. Bill Gates has been a shaper in both business and philanthropy, as was Andrew Carnegie. Mike Bloomberg has been a shaper in business, philanthropy, and government. Einstein, Freud, Darwin, and Newton were giant shapers in the sciences. Christ, Muhammad, and the Buddha were religious shapers. They all had original visions and successfully built them out.”

16. “It’ll be decades—and maybe never—before the computer can replicate many of the things that the brain can do in terms of imagination, synthesis, and creativity. That’s because the brain comes genetically programmed with millions of years of abilities honed through evolution. The “science” of decision making that underlies many computer systems remains much less valuable than the “art.”

17. “gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History.”

18. “To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. For example, if you come up with something the world values, you almost can’t help but be rewarded. Conversely, reality tends to penalize those people, species, and things that don’t work well and detract from evolution.17”

19. “Everyone fails. Anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you’re paying attention to—I guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things. The people I respect most are those who fail well. I respect them even more than those who succeed. That is because failing is a painful experience while succeeding is a joyous one, so it requires much more character to fail, change, and then succeed than to just succeed. People who are just succeeding must not be pushing their limits. Of course the worst are those who fail and don’t recognize it and don’t change.”

20. “In my early years, I looked up to extraordinarily successful people, thinking that they were successful because they were extraordinary. After I got to know such people personally, I realized that all of them—like me, like everyone—make mistakes, struggle with their weaknesses, and don’t feel that they are particularly special or great. They are no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much or more than average folks. Even after they surpass their wildest dreams, they still experience more struggle than glory. This has certainly been true for me. While I surpassed my wildest dreams decades ago, I am still struggling today. In time, I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.”

21. “People with good work habits have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make themselves do what needs to be done. By contrast, people with poor work habits almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them, or they can’t bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don’t like to do (or are unable to do).”

22. “I believe that all organizations basically have two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck. I wanted to surround myself with people who needed what I needed, which was to make sense of things for myself. I spoke frankly, and I expected those around me to speak frankly. I fought for what I thought was best, and I wanted them to do so as well. When I thought someone did something stupid, I said so and I expected them to tell me when I did something stupid. Each of us would be better for it. To me, that was what strong and productive relationships looked like. Operating any other way would be unproductive and unethical.”

23. “But most people lack the courage to confront their own weaknesses and make the hard choices that this process requires. Ultimately, it comes down to the following five decisions: 1. Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what is really true. 2. Don’t worry about looking good—worry instead about achieving your goals. 3. Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second- and third-order ones. 4. Don’t let pain stand in the way of progress. 5. Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone but yourself.”

24. “The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered home is that you can never be sure of anything: There are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it’s always best to assume you’re missing something. This lesson changed my approach to decision making in ways that will reverberate throughout this book—and to which I attribute much of my success. But I would make many other mistakes before I fully changed my behavior.”

25. “To acquire principles that work, it’s essential that you embrace reality and deal with it well. Don’t fall into the common trap of wishing that reality worked differently than it does or that your own realities were different. Instead, embrace your realities and deal with them effectively. After all, making the most of your circumstances is what life is all about. This includes being transparent with your thoughts and open-mindedly accepting the feedback of others. Doing so will dramatically increase your learning.”

26. “Having a reserve currency is great while it lasts because it gives a country exceptional borrowing and spending power and significant power over who else in the world gets the money and credit needed to buy and sell internationally. However, having a reserve currency typically sows the seeds of a country ceasing to be a reserve currency country. That is because it allows the country to borrow more than it could otherwise afford to borrow, and the creation of lots of money and credit to service the debt debases the value of the currency and causes the loss of its status as a reserve currency. The loss of its reserve currency status is a terrible thing because having a reserve currency is one of the greatest powers a country can have because it gives the country enormous buying power and geopolitical power.”

27. “Debating takes time, and that time increases exponentially depending on the number of people participating in the discussion, so you have to carefully choose the right people in the right numbers to suit the decision that needs to be made. In any discussion try to limit the participation to those whom you value most in light of your objectives. The worst way to pick people is based on whether their conclusions align with yours.”

28. “In my own life, what I want to give to people, most importantly to people I love, is the power to deal with reality to get what they want. In pursuit of my goal to give them strength, I will often deny them what they “want” because that will give them the opportunity to struggle so that they can develop the strength to get what they want on their own. This can be difficult for people emotionally, even if they understand intellectually that having difficulties is the exercise they need to grow strong and that just giving them what they want will weaken them and ultimately lead to them needing more help.23 Of course most people would prefer not to have weaknesses.”

29. “It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.”

30. “Sometimes we forge our own principles and sometimes we accept others' principles, or holistic packages of principles, such as religion and legal systems. While it isn't necessarily a bad thing to use others' principles - it's difficult to come up with your own, and often much wisdom has gone into those already created - adopting pre-packaged principles without much thought exposes you to the risk of inconsistency with your true values.”

31. “a. View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you. Though it won’t feel that way at first, each and every problem you encounter is an opportunity; for that reason, it is essential that you bring them to the surface. Most people don’t like to do this, especially if it exposes their own weaknesses or the weaknesses of someone they care about, but successful people know they have to. b. Don’t avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at. Thinking about problems that are difficult to solve may make you anxious, but not thinking about them (and hence not dealing with them) should make you more anxious still. When a problem stems from your own lack of talent or skill, most people feel shame. Get over it. I cannot emphasize this enough: Acknowledging your weaknesses is not the same as surrendering to them. It’s the first step toward overcoming them. The pains you are feeling are “growing pains” that will test your character and reward you as you push through them.”

32. “if everyone understood the basics, then economic policymakers would be able to do the right things a lot faster and with less angst in the future. That led me to make a thirty-minute video, How the Economic Machine Works, which I released in 2013. Besides explaining how the economy works it provides a template that helps people assess their economies and gives them guidance about what to do and what to expect during a crisis.”

33. “Distinguish open-minded people from closed-minded people. Open-minded people seek to learn by asking questions; they realize that what they know is little in relation to what there is to know and recognize that they might be wrong. Closed-minded people always tell you what they know, even if they know hardly anything about the subject being discussed. They are typically made uncomfortable by being around those who know a lot more about a subject, unlike open-minded people who are thrilled by such company.”

34. “Most likely your associates are equally reluctant to point out your mistakes, because they don’t want to hurt you. You all need to get over this. More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is their willingness to look at themselves and others objectively and understand the root causes standing in their way.”

35. “Se você está pronto para desistir de todas as outras coisas e estudar a história e o background completos do mercado e das principais companhias cujas ações estejam sendo negociadas — se puder fazer tudo isso com o mesmo zelo com que um estudante de medicina se dedica à anatomia, tiver o sangue-frio de um jogador, o sexto sentido de um vidente e a coragem de um leão, então há uma mínima chance.”

36. “Once we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that matters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible.”

37. “Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary—you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially. There is comparatively little age- and seniority-based hierarchy.”

38. “I cannot say that having an intense life filled with accomplishments is better than having a relaxed life filled with savoring, though I can say that being strong is better than being weak, and that struggling gives one strength. My nature being what it is, I would not have changed my life, but I can’t tell you what is best for you. That is for you to choose. What I have seen is that the happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.”

39. “Imagine que, para ter uma vida grandiosa, seja preciso atravessar uma floresta cheia de perigos. Você pode ficar em segurança onde está e ter uma vida comum ou pode arriscar a travessia da floresta e ter uma vida incrível. Como você refletiria a respeito dessa escolha? Reserve um momento para pensar nisso porque é o tipo de decisão que, de alguma forma, todos temos que tomar.”

40. “Truth be known, forecasts aren’t worth very much, and most people who make them don’t make money in the markets. . . . This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all of the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome. . . . We believe that market movements reflect economic movements. Economic movements are reflected in economic statistics. By studying the relationships between economic statistics and market movements, we’ve developed precise rules for identifying important shifts in the economic/market environment and in turn our positions. In other words, rather than forecasting changes in the economic environment and shifting positions in anticipation of them, we pick up these changes as they’re occurring and move our money around to keep in those markets which perform best in that environment.”

41. “The first step is a cue—some “trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use,” according to Duhigg. Step two is the routine, “which can be physical or mental or emotional.” Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is “worth remembering for the future.” Repetition reinforces this loop until over time it becomes automatic. This anticipation”

42. “b. Constantly think about how to produce leverage. Leverage in an organization is not unlike leverage in the markets; you're looking for ways to achieve more with less. At Bridgewater, I typically work at about 50:1 leverage, meaning that for every hour I spend with each person who works for me, they spend about fifty hours working to move the project along. At our sessions, we go over the vision and the deliverables, then they work on them, and then we review the work, and they move forward based on my feedback- and we do that over and over again. The people who work for me typically have similar relationships with those who work for them, though their ratios are typically between 10:1 and 20:1. I am always eager to find people who can do things nearly as well as (and ideally better than) I can so that I can maximize my output per hour. p515”

43. “In other words, I just want to be right—I don’t care if the right answer comes from me. So I learned to be radically open-minded to allow others to point out what I might be missing. I saw that the only way I could succeed would be to: 1. Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. 2. Know when not to have an opinion. 3. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. 4. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.”

44. “Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it so that you or anyone else gets the biggest piece. The best negotiations are the ones with someone in which I say, “You should take more,” and they argue back, “No you should take more!” People who operate this way with each other make the relationship better and the pie bigger—and both benefit in the long run.”

45. “The marginal benefits of having more fall off pretty quickly. In fact, having a lot more is worse than having a moderate amount more because it comes with heavy burdens. Being on top gives you a wider range of options, but it also requires more of you. Being well-known is probably worse than being anonymous, all things considered. And while the beneficial impact one can have on others is great, when you put it in perspective, it is still infinitesimally small. For all those reasons, I cannot say that having an intense life filled with accomplishments is better than having a relaxed life filled with savoring, though I can say that being strong is better than being weak, and that struggling gives one strength.”

46. “A second is large internal conflicts within countries — the largest since 1930-45. They are due to the largest wealth and value differences since that period. The conflicts most threatening to our system are those between populists of the right and the left. This conflict will have big implications for taxes, how the wealth pie is divided, and how well our system works.”

47. “Reality exists at different levels and each of them gives you different but valuable perspectives. It’s important to keep all of them in mind as you synthesize and make decisions, and to know how to navigate between them. Let’s say you’re looking at your hometown on Google Maps. Zoom in close enough to see the buildings and you won’t be able to see the region surrounding your town, which can tell you important things. Maybe your town sits next to a body of water. Zoom in too close and you won’t be able to tell if the shoreline is along a river, a lake, or an ocean. You need to know which level is appropriate to your decision.”

48. “Unlike in school, in life you don’t have to come up with all the right answers. You can ask the people around you for help – or even ask them to do the things you don’t do well. In other words, there is almost no reason not to succeed if you take the attitude of: total flexibility – good answers can come from anyone or anywhere (and in fact, there are far more good answers ‘out there’ than there are in you); and total accountability – regardless of where the good answers come from, it’s your job to find them.”

49. “Understand the power of the “cleansing storm.” In nature, cleansing storms are big infrequent events that clear out all the overgrowth that’s accumulated during good times. Forests need these storms to be healthy—without them, there would be more weak trees and a buildup of overgrowth that stifles other growth. The same is true for companies. Bad times that force cutbacks so only the strongest and most essential employees (or companies) survive are inevitable and can be great, even though they seem terrible at the time.”

50. “From very early on, whenever I took a position in the markets, I wrote down the criteria I used to make my decision. Then, when I closed out a trade, I could reflect on how well these criteria had worked. It occurred to me that if I wrote those criteria into formulas (now more fashionably called algorithms) and then ran historical data through them, I could test how well my rules would have worked in the past. Here’s how it worked in practice: I would start out with my intuitions as I always did, but I would express them logically, as decision-making criteria, and capture them in a systematic way, creating a mental map of what I would do in each particular situation. Then I would run historical data through the systems to see how my decision would have performed in the past and, depending upon the results, modify the decision rules appropriately.”

51. “I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” ― Ray Dalio

52. “I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

53. “Know that nobody can see themselves objectively. While we should all strive to see ourselves objectively, we shouldn’t expect everyone to be able to do that well. We all have blind spots; people are by definition subjective. For this reason, it is everyone’s responsibility to help others learn what is true about themselves by giving them honest feedback, holding them accountable, and working through disagreements in an open-minded way.”

54. “It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.”

55. “Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.” ― Ray Dalio

56. “a. If you ask someone a question, they will probably give you an answer, so think through to whom you should address your questions. I regularly see people ask totally uninformed or nonbelievable people questions and get answers that they believe. This is often worse than having no answers at all. Don't make that mistake. You need to think through who the right people are. If you're in doubt about someone's believablilty, find out.

57. “Throughout history, when the most powerful countries have roughly comparable power, typically there are international conflicts over wealth, power, and ideologies,” he said. “We’re seeing that now between Russia and NATO, China and the U.S., and other countries. That’s changing the world order in important ways that we haven’t seen since 1930-45."

58. “Bad outcomes don’t just happen; they occur because specific people make, or fail to make, specific decisions. A good diagnosis always gets to the level of determining what it is about those people that led to the bad outcomes. This can be uncomfortable but if someone isn’t suited for a job, they need to be moved out of it so that the same mistakes won’t keep occurring. Of course, nobody is perfect; everyone makes mistakes. So it is important to look at people’s track records and their specific strengths and weaknesses in doing a diagnosis.”

59. “Embrace Reality and Deal with It 1.1 Be a hyperrealist. a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. 1.2 Truth—or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality—is the essential foundation for any good outcome. 1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent. a. Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. b. Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. c. Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships. 1.4 Look to nature to learn how reality works. a. Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are. b. To be “good,” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. c. Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything. d. Evolve or die. 1.5 Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward. a. The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals. b. Reality is optimizing for the whole—not for you. c. Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. d. Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing—and decide what you want to be. e. What you will be will depend on the perspective you have. 1.6 Understand nature’s practical lessons. a. Maximize your evolution. b. Remember “no pain, no gain.” c. It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one’s limits, which is painful. 1.7 Pain + Reflection = Progress. a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. b. Embrace tough love. 1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences. 1.9 Own your outcomes. 1.10 Look at the machine from the higher level. a. Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes. b. By comparing your outcomes with your goals, you can determine how to modify”

60. “By recognizing the higher-level consequences nature optimizes for, I’ve come to see that people who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second- and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision making.”

61. “Early on in the top, some parts of the credit system suffer, but others remain robust, so it isn’t clear that the economy is weakening. So while the central bank is still raising interest rates and tightening credit, the seeds of the recession are being sown. The fastest rate of tightening typically comes about five months prior to the top of the stock market. The economy is then operating at a high rate, with demand pressing up against the capacity to produce. Unemployment is normally at cyclical lows and inflation rates are rising. The increase in short-term interest rates makes holding cash more attractive, and it raises the interest rate used to discount the future cash flows of assets, weakening riskier asset prices and slowing lending.”

62. “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.”

63. “One of the things meditation gives you is creativity because creativity really comes from the subconscious brain – intuition, imagination – so it’s not like you can go there and say, ‘I’m going to go be creative now.’ Maybe you can, but the real way you get creativity is, you know, you’re taking a hot shower and great ideas come to you from the subconscious. Essentially, meditation opens a pipeline between the conscious and the subconscious.”

64. “f. Identifying the fact that someone else doesn't know what to do doesn't mean that you know what to do. It's one thing to point out a problem; it's another to have an accurate diagnosis and a quality solution. As described earlier, the litmus test for a good problem solver is 1) they are able to logically describe how to handle the problem and 2) they have successfully solved similar problems in the past. p489”

65. “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.”

66. “Most people who haven’t had direct contact with the leadership of their own and other countries form their views based on what they learn in the media, and become quite naive and inappropriately opinionated as a result. That’s because dramatic stories and gossip draw more readers and viewers than does clinical objectivity. Also, in some cases “journalists” have their own ideological biases that they are trying to advance. As a result, most people who see the world through the lens of the media tend to look for who is good and who is evil rather than what the vested interests and relative powers are and how they are being played out. For example, people tend to embrace stories about how their own country is moral and the rival country is not, when most of the time these countries have different interests that they are trying to maximize. The best behaviors one can hope for come from leaders who can weigh the benefits of cooperation, and who have long enough time frames that they can see how the gifts they give this year may bring them benefits in the future.”

67. “Never say anything about a person you wouldn’t say to them directly, and don’t try people without accusing them to their face. Badmouthing people behind their backs shows a serious lack of integrity and is counterproductive. It doesn’t yield any beneficial change, and it subverts both the people you are badmouthing and the environment as a whole.”

68. “done. Every time I go to China, we meet for sixty to ninety minutes. We talk about what’s happening in the world, and how that relates to thousands of years of history and the never-changing nature of mankind. We discuss a wide range of other topics as well, ranging from physics to artificial intelligence. We are both keenly interested in how most everything happens over and over again, the forces behind those patterns, and the principles that work and don’t work in dealing with them. I gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History. All these books showed how the same things happened over and”

69. “Once I understood that it’s all physiological, many things became clearer to me. While I used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize that they weren’t intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked.”

70. “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.”

71. “(BDO) October 22: The Dollar Squeeze A debt is a short cash position—i.e., a commitment to deliver cash that one doesn’t have. Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and because of the dollar surplus recycling that has taken place over the past few years…lots of dollar denominated debt has been built up around the world. So, as dollar liquidity has become tight, there has been a dollar squeeze. This squeeze…is hitting dollar-indebted emerging markets (particularly those of commodity exporters) and is supporting the dollar. When this short squeeze ends, which will happen when either the debtors default or get the liquidity to prevent their default, the US dollar will decline. Until then, we expect to remain long the USD against the euro and emerging market currencies. The actual price of anything is always equal to the amount of spending on the item being exchanged divided by the quantity of the item being sold (i.e., P = $/Q), so a) knowing who is spending and who is selling what quantity (and ideally why) is the ideal way to get at the price at any time, and b) prices don’t always react to changes in fundamentals as they happen in the ways characterized by those who seek to explain price movements in connection with unfolding news. During this period, volatility remained extremely high for reasons that had nothing to do with fundamentals and everything to do with who was getting in and out of positions for various reasons—like being squeezed, no longer being squeezed, rebalancing portfolios, etc. For example, on Tuesday, October 28, the S&P gained more than 10 percent and the next day it fell by 1.1 percent when the Fed cut interest rates by another 50 basis points. Closing the month, the S&P was down 17 percent—the largest single-month drop since October 1987.”

72. “Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.”

73. “One of those heroes I have been fortunate enough to learn from and, I hope, help is China’s Wang Qishan, who has been a remarkable force for good for decades. To explain what he is like and the journey that took him to the top of China’s leadership would take more of this book than I can spare. In brief, Wang is a historian, a very high-level thinker, and a very practical man. I have rarely known a person to be both extremely wise and extremely practical. A leading shaper of the Chinese economy for decades who is also responsible for eliminating corruption, he is known to be a no-nonsense man who can be trusted to get stuff done.”

74. “realized again that what I didn’t know was much greater than what I did, in this case not knowing how to transition out of the founder-leader role. So I reached out to some of the greatest experts I could speak with for advice. Perhaps the best advice we received came from management expert Jim Collins, who told us that “to transition well, there are only two things that you need to do: Put capable CEOs in place and have a capable governance system to replace the CEOs if they’re not capable.” That was what I had failed to do and what”

75. “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.”

76. “big forces to worry about: growth and inflation. Each could either be rising or falling, so I saw that by finding four different investment strategies—each one of which would do well in a particular environment (rising growth with rising inflation, rising growth with falling inflation, and so on)—I could construct an asset-allocation mix that was balanced to do well over time while being protected against unacceptable losses. Since that strategy would never change, practically anyone could implement it.”

77. “...human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success. I've also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances--and that isn't smart. I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way. You will find that interesting and invaluable, and the richer perspective you gain will help you decide what you should do.”

78. “Fast talking can be especially effective when it’s used against people worried about appearing stupid. Don’t be one of those people. Recognize that it’s your responsibility to make sense of things and don’t move on until you do. If you’re feeling pressured, say something like “Sorry for being stupid, but I’m going to need to slow you down so I can make sense of what you’re saying.” Then ask your questions. All of them.”

79. “Distingue entre tú como diseñador de tu maquinaria y como operario de esta. Una de las cosas más difíciles de hacer de forma objetiva es verse como un individuo en determinadas circunstancias (la maquinaria) para obrar como diseñador y gestor de las mismas. La gran mayoría se limita a mantener la perspectiva de operario dentro de la máquina. Si reconoces las diferencias entre esos dos roles, y que ser un buen diseñador/gestor es mucho más importante que ser un buen operario, vas por buen camino. Para triunfar, el «yo diseñador/controlador» ha de comprender objetivamente cómo es el «yo trabajador»; no se debe confiar en este más de lo que merece ni encargarle tareas ajenas a su forma de ser. En vez de adoptar esta visión estratégica, la mayoría de las personas se comportan guiadas por las emociones y según el momento; sus vidas son una serie de experiencias emocionales sin rumbo fijo, y van saltando de una cosa a la siguiente. Si quieres examinar tu vida y sentir que has logrado tus objetivos, no puedes proceder así.”

80. “Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20 percent is. The 80/20 Rule states that you get 80 percent of the value out of something from 20 percent of the information or effort. (It’s also true that you’re likely to exert 80 percent of your effort getting the final 20 percent of value.) Understanding this rule saves you from getting bogged down in unnecessary detail once you’ve gotten most of the learning you need to make a good decision.”

81. “It occurred to me that if I wrote those criteria into formulas (now more fashionably called algorithms) and then ran historical data through them, I could test how well my rules would have worked in the past. Here’s how it worked in practice: I would start out with my intuitions as I always did, but I would express them logically, as decision-making criteria, and capture them in a systematic way, creating a mental map of what I would do in each particular situation. Then I would run historical data through the systems to see how my decision would have performed in the past and, depending upon the results, modify the decision rules appropriately.”

82. “When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: 1. You can deny them (which is what most people do). 2. You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change). 3. You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. 4. Or, you can change what you are going after.”

83. “When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: 1. You can deny them (which is what most people do). 2. You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change). 3. You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. 4. Or, you can change what you are going after. Which solution you choose will be critically important to the direction of your life. The worst path you can take is the first.”

84. “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.

85. “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.” ― Ray Dalio

86. “I believe that all organizations basically have two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck. I wanted to surround myself with people who needed what I needed, which was to make sense of things for myself. I spoke frankly, and I expected those around me to speak frankly. I fought for what I thought was best, and I wanted them to do so as well.”

87. “Assess believability by systematically capturing people’s track records over time. Every day is not a new day. Over time, a body of evidence builds up, showing which people can be relied on and which cannot. Track records matter, and at Bridgewater tools such as Baseball Cards and the Dot Collector make everyone’s track records available for scrutiny.”

88. “Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches. While not perfect, these assessments have been invaluable. (In fact, I have been adapting and refining them to help us in our recruiting and management.) The answers these shapers provided to the standardized questions gave me objective and statistically measurable evidence about their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.”

89. “Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up. Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you, though you might not see them at the time. The most important thing you can do is to gather the lessons these failures provide and gain humility and radical open-mindedness in order to increase your chances of success. Then you press on. My final lesson was perhaps the most important one, because it has applied again and again throughout my life. At first, it seemed to me that I faced an all-or-nothing choice: I could either take on a lot of risk in pursuit of high returns (and occasionally find myself ruined) or I could lower my risk and settle for lower returns. But I needed to have both low risk and high returns, and by setting out on a mission to discover how I could, I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at odds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you. As difficult as this was, I eventually found a way to have my cake and eat it too. I call it the “Holy Grail of Investing,” and it’s the secret behind Bridgewater’s success.”

90. “Be clear on whether you are arguing or seeking to understand and think about which is most appropriate based on your and others' believability. If both parties are peers, it's appropriate to argue. But if one person is clearly more knowledgeable than the other, it is preferable for the less knowledgeable person to approach the more knowledgeable one as a student and for the more knowledgeable person to act as a teacher. Doing this well requires you to understand the concept of believability. I define believable people as those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question- who have a strong track record with at least three successes- and have great explanations of their approach when probed.

91. “I believe that there are an infinite number of laws of the universe and that all the progress or dreams achieved come from operating in a way that is consistent with them. These laws and the principles of how to operate in harmony with them have always existed. They gave us these laws by nature. Man did not make them and cannot invent them. You can only hope to understand them and use them to get what you want.

92. “Around this time, McDonald’s had conceived of a new product, the Chicken McNugget, but they were reluctant to bring it to market because of their concern that chicken prices might rise and squeeze their profit margins. Chicken producers like Lane wouldn’t agree to sell to them at a fixed price because they were worried that their costs would go up and they would be squeezed. As I thought about the problem, it occurred to me that in economic terms a chicken can be seen as a simple machine consisting of a chick plus its feed. The most volatile cost that the chicken producer needed to worry about was feed prices. I showed Lane how to use a mix of corn and soymeal futures to lock in costs so they could quote a fixed price to McDonald’s. Having greatly reduced its price risk, McDonald’s introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.”

93. “Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.”

94. “Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less—as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs.”

95. “This way of thinking about risk caused many investors to increase their exposures beyond what would normally be seen as prudent. They looked at the recent volatility in their VAR calculations, and by and large expected it to continue moving forward. This is human nature and it was dumb because past volatility and past correlations aren’t reliable forecasts of future risks.”

96. “Thanks both to the help he received and his own great character, Paul worked through this and is now better off than if he hadn’t fallen into his abyss, because he developed strengths he didn’t have but needed. Paul was once wild—staying out till all hours, disorganized, smoking marijuana and drinking—but he now faithfully takes his meds, meditates, goes to bed early, and avoids drugs and alcohol. He had loads of creativity but lacked discipline. Now he has plenty of both. As a result, he is more creative now than he was before and is happily married, the father of two boys, an accomplished filmmaker, and a crusader helping those who struggle with bipolar disorder.”

97. “I believe that our society’s ‘mistake-phobia’ is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.”

98. “So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not. In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement and movement toward what I wanted.”

99. “La única manera de triunfar consistía en: 1. Buscar a la gente más inteligente que estuviera en desacuerdo conmigo, para tratar de entender su razonamiento. 2. Saber cuándo no se debe tener opinión. 3. Desarrollar, poner a prueba y sistematizar principios atemporales y universales. 4. Ponderar el riesgo de manera que se maximicen las ventajas y se minimicen las desventajas.”

100. I don’t even know what a hedge fund is! What we’re called and how we’re categorized, by our basic structure, doesn’t capture the essence of what we are. I trade long and short, ‘Does that make me a hedge fund?’ No. I consider myself a financial engineer. I started trading commodities. Then commodities became various futures, which evolved into various swaps and derivatives. I could separate things in a way that was unique. I evolved.

101. “I. Utilize the "two-minute rule" to avoid persistent interruptions. The two-minute rule specifies that you have to give someone an uninterrupted two minutes to explain their thinking before jumping in with your own. This ensures that everyone has time to fully crystallize and communicate their thoughts without worrying they will be misunderstood or drowned out by a louder voice.

102. If I got a haircut, the barber would be talking about stocks. If I got my shoes shined, the shoeshine guy would be talking about stocks. I didn’t know if I could do it, but it looked very interesting to me. I saw all these names in the paper and figured it must be easy because I only have to pick one that goes up. If that didn’t happen and I lost money, I could have easily ended up in another field.

103. “Inexperienced people can have great ideas too, sometimes far better ones than more experienced people. That’s because experienced thinkers can get stuck in their old ways. If you’ve got a good ear, you will be able to tell when an inexperienced person is reasoning well. Like knowing whether someone can sing, it doesn’t take a lot of time. Sometimes a person only has to sing a few bars for you to hear how well they can sing. Reasoning is the same—it often doesn’t take a lot of time to figure out if someone can do it.”

104. “Some people spend a lot of time and effort accomplishing very little while others do a lot in the same amount of time. What differentiates people who can do a lot from those who can't is creativity, character and wisdom. Those with more creativity invent ways to do things more effectively (for instance by finding good people, good technologies, and/or good designs). Those with more character are better able to wrestle with their challenges and demands. And those with more wisdom can maintain their equanimity by going to the higher level and looking down on themselves and their challenges to properly prioritize, realistically design, and make sensible choices. p522”

105. “To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount. Since I was both an investor and an entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approach to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.”

106. “While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less—as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that. In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (“ Grains and Oilseeds,” “Livestock and Meats,” “Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our business. Today, almost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Observations are read, reflected on, and argued about by clients and policymakers around the world. I’m still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people don’t care to read them or I die.”

107. “From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn't exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn't be evolving. Organisms, organizations and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we're perfect, it makes sends to find our imperfections and deal with them. You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed- or you won't and you will fail. p145”

108. “When countries negotiate with one another, they typically operate as if they are opponents in a chess match or merchants in a bazaar in which maximizing one’s own benefit is the sole objective. Smart leaders know their own countries’ vulnerabilities, take advantage of others’ vulnerabilities, and expect the other countries’ leaders to do the same. Most people who haven’t had direct contact with the leadership of their own and other countries form their views based on what they learn in the media, and become quite naive and inappropriately opinionated as a result. That’s because dramatic stories and gossip draw more readers and viewers than does clinical objectivity. Also, in some cases “journalists” have their own ideological biases that they are trying to advance. As a result, most people who see the world through the lens of the media tend to look for who is good and who is evil rather than what the vested interests and relative powers are and how they are being played out. For example, people tend to embrace stories about how their own country is moral and the rival country is not, when most of the time these countries have different interests that they are trying to maximize. The best behaviors one can hope for come from leaders who can weigh the benefits of cooperation, and who have long enough time frames that they can see how the gifts they give this year may bring them benefits in the future.”

109. “Every day, each of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to. Without principles we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time. If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result. Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success. All successful people operate by principles that help them be successful, though what they choose to be successful at varies enormously, so their principles vary. To”

110. “I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense, which I suppose was related to my having started Bridgewater two years out of school myself, and my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something. It seemed to me, young people were creating sensible innovation that was exciting.”

111. “It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.” ― Ray Dalio

112. “Still, most of our encounters with reality fall under one category or another and the number of those categories is not enormous. If you were to write down what type of encounter you have every time you have one (e.g., the birth of a child, the loss of a job, a personal disagreement) and compile them in a list, it would probably total just a few hundred items and only a few of them would be unique to you.”

113. “His advice has helped me in my planning for Bridgewater’s future. For example, when I asked him about checks and balances of power, he pointed to Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system. I took his advice to heart as I set out to improve Bridgewater’s governance model.”

114. “Investors think independently, anticipate things that haven’t happened yet, and put real money at stake with their bets. Policymakers come from environments that nurture consensus, not dissent, that train them to react to things that have already occurred, and that prepare them for negotiations, not placing bets. Because they don’t benefit from the constant feedback about the quality of their decisions that investors get, it’s not clear who the good and bad decision makers among them are.”

115. “Duhigg’s core idea is the role of the three-step “habit loop.” The first step is a cue—some “trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use,” according to Duhigg. Step two is the routine, “which can be physical or mental or emotional.” Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is “worth remembering for the future.”

116. “While there is no one best way to make decisions, there are some universal rules for good decision making. They start with: 5.1 Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding). Learning must come before deciding. As explained in Chapter One, your brain stores different types of learning in your subconscious, your rote memory bank, and your habits.”

117. “Don’t be a perfectionist, because perfectionists often spend too much time on little differences at the margins… at the expense of other big, important things. Be an effective imperfectionist. Solutions that broadly work well (e.g., how people should contact each other in the event of crises) are generally better than highly-specialized solutions (e.g., how each person should contact each other in the event of every conceivable crisis).”

118. “I have been very lucky because I have had the opportunity to see what it's like to have little or no money and what it's like to have a lot of it. I'm lucky because people make such a big deal of it and, if I didn't experience both, I wouldn't be able to know how important it really is for me. I can't comment on what having a lot of money means to others, but I do know that for me, having a lot more money isn't a lot better than having enough to cover the basics.”

119. “Ultimately, it comes down to the following five decisions: 1. Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what is really true. 2. Don’t worry about looking good—worry instead about achieving your goals. 3. Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second- and third-order ones. 4. Don’t let pain stand in the way of progress. 5. Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone but yourself.”

120. “Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it. Be wary of relying on anything else. Unfortunately, numerous tests by psychologists show that the majority of people follow the lower-level path most of the time, which leads to inferior decisions without their realizing it. As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” It’s even more important that decision making be evidence-based and logical when groups of people are working together. If it’s not, the process will inevitably be dominated by the most powerful rather than the most insightful participants, which is not only unfair but suboptimal. Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.”

121. “Meditate. I practice Transcendental Meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight. I’m not saying that you have to meditate in order to develop this perspective; I’m just passing along that it has helped me and many other people and I recommend that you seriously consider exploring it.”

122. “I believe there are an infinite number of laws of the universe and that all progress or dreams achieved come from operating in a way that's consistent with them. These laws and the principles of how to operate in harmony with them have always existed. We were given these laws by nature. Man didn't and can't make them up. He can only hope to understand them and use them to get what he wants.”

123. “Because I believed that the choice was between accelerating inflation and deflationary depression, I was holding both gold (which performs well in accelerating inflation) and bonds (which perform well in deflationary depressions). Up until that point, gold and bonds had moved in opposite directions, depending on whether inflation expectations rose or fell. Holding those positions seemed much safer than holding alternatives like cash, which would lose value in an inflation environment, or stocks, which would crash in a depression.”

124. “In Bridgewater’s early days, everyone knew each other, so being radically transparent was easy—people could attend the meetings they wanted to and communicate with each other informally. But as we grew, that became logistically impossible, which was a real problem. How could people engage productively with the idea meritocracy if they didn’t know everything that was going on? Without transparency, people would spin whatever happened to suit their own interests, sometimes behind closed doors. Problems would be hidden instead of brought to the surface where they could be resolved.”

125. “Unlike in school, in life you don't have to come up with all the right answers. You can ask the people around you for help - or even ask them to do the things you don't do well. In other words, there is almost no reason not to succeed if you take the attitude of 1) total flexibility - good answers can come from anyone or anywhere (and in fact, as I have mentioned, there are far more good answers 'out there' than there are in you) and 2) total accountability: regardless of where the good answers come from, it's your job to find them.”

126. “The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment. Typically, high past returns simply imply that an asset has become more expensive and is a poorer – not better – investment.”

127. “The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, analyzes details, and excels at linear analysis. “Left-brained” or “linear” thinkers who are analytically strong are often called “bright.” 2. The right hemisphere thinks across categories, recognizes themes, and synthesizes the big picture. “Right-brained” or “lateral” thinkers with more street smarts are often called “smart.”

128. “In order to be successful as both an investor and an entrepreneur, one has to be an independent thinker and bet against the consensus and be right. Because the consensus is built into the price, and if you’re not an independent thinker in the markets, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not an independent thinker as an entrepreneur starting out, you’re not going to bring anything special.”

129. “I have been very lucky because I have had the opportunity to see what it’s like to have little or no money and what it’s like to have a lot of it. I’m lucky because people make such a big deal of it and, if I didn’t experience both, I wouldn’t be able to know how important it really is for me. I can’t comment on what having a lot of money means to others, but I do know that for me, having a lot more money isn’t a lot better than having enough to cover the basics.”

130. “one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/20,000 of the Earth’s existence. In”

131. “Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary—you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially.”

132. “Know what your people are like and what makes them tick, because your people are your most important resource. Develop a full profile of each person’s values, abilities, and skills. These qualities are the real drivers of behavior, so knowing them in detail will tell you which jobs a person can and cannot do well, which ones they should avoid, and how the person should be trained.”

133. It was one of the most dramatic economic events ever, a very big deal and I was at the epicentre of it on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange… He [Nixon. was spinning political speak, but what he was saying was that the U.S. has defaulted on its debts. And it got me thinking about what money is. What are dollars if they are not tied to gold?

134. “You will never handle everything perfectly: Mistakes are inevitable and it’s important to recognize and accept this fact of life. The good news is that every mistake you make can teach you something, so there’s no end to learning. You’ll soon realize that excuses like “that’s not easy” or “it doesn’t seem fair” or even “I can’t do that” are of no value and that it pays to push through.”

135. “If you’ve learned anything from this book I hope it’s that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and everyone has an important role to play in life. Nature made everything and everyone for a purpose. The courage that’s needed the most isn’t the kind that drives you to prevail over others, but the kind that allows you to be true to your truest self, no matter what other people want you to be.”

136. “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 these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelihood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change—starting by learning a better way of handling the natural aggressiveness I’ve always shown in going after what I wanted. Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.”

137. “What Ray doesn’t do as well: Ray sometimes says or does things to employees which makes them feel incompetent, unnecessary, humiliated, overwhelmed, belittled, oppressed, or otherwise bad. The odds of this happening rise when Ray is under stress. At these times, his words and actions toward others create animosity toward him and leave a lasting impression. The impact of this is that people are demotivated rather than motivated. This reduces productivity and the quality of the environment. The effect reaches far beyond the single employee. The smallness of the company and the openness of communication means that everyone is affected when one person is demotivated, treated badly, not given due respect. The future success of the company is highly dependent on Ray’s ability to manage people as well as money. If he doesn’t manage people well, growth will be stunted and we will all be affected.”

138. “Principles are concepts that can be applied over and over again in similar circumstances as distinct from narrow answers to specific questions. Every game has principles that successful players master to achieve winning results. So does life. Principles are ways of successfully dealing with the laws of nature or the laws of life. Those who understand more of them and understand them well know how to interact with the world more effectively than those who know fewer of them or know them less well.”

139. “I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.”

140. “There are two parts of each person’s brain: the upper-level logical part and the lower-level emotional part. I call these the “two yous.” They fight for control of each person. How that conflict is managed is the most important driver of our behaviors. That fighting was the biggest reason for the problems Bob, Giselle, and Dan raised. While the logical part of people’s brains could easily understand that knowing one’s weaknesses is a good thing”

141. “and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History. All these books showed how the same things happened over and over again throughout history.”

142. “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.”