Principles by Ray Dalio

[Puming Fang]

Introduction:  Ray Dalio is the founder of the world's biggest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates. In this book, Dalio shares what he's learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book's hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of "radical truth" and "radical transparency", include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams.

Takeaways:

1. Truth is the essential  foundation for producing good outcomes. By truth, I don't mean anything more than the way the world works. I believe that we were given the laws of reality by nature. Humans didn't create them, but we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals. Realizing them made me a hyperrealist, by which I mean I became someone who has discovered the great rewards of deeply understanding, accepting, and working with reality as it is and not as I wish it could be.

2. Learning what's true. To get it, I need to replace the joy of being proven right with the joy of learning what's true. This need prompted me to seek out the most thoughtful people I could find who disagreed with me. I didn't care about their conclusions. I just wanted to see things through their eyes and to have them see things through my eyes. So together we could hash things out to discover what's true. In other words, what I wanted most from them is thoughtful disagreement. Going from seeing things through just my eyes to  seeing things through the eyes of these thoughtful people was like going from seeing things in black and white to seeing them in color, the world lit up.

3. Everything is a machine. The structure and evolution of galaxies, the formation of our own solar system, the makeup of Earth's geography and ecosystems, our economies and markets, and each of us, we individually are machines made of different machines. Our circulatory system, our nervous system, that produce our thoughts, our dreams, our motions, and all the other aspects of our distinct characters, all of these different machines, evolve together through time to produce the reality we encounter every day, and I realized that I was just one tiny bit in one nanosecond deciding what I should do.