Principles by Ray Dalio

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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.

Unattainable goals appeal to heroes.

To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.

First principle: Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2. And do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.

The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.

It’s more important to do big things well than to do the small things perfectly.

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.

Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

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.

If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done.

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.

I just want to be right—I don’t care if the right answer comes from me.

Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.

The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.

Having the basics—a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sex—is most important, and those things don’t get much better when you have a lot of money or much worse when you have less.

Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers.

I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

The challenges you face will test and strengthen you. If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

Getting the right people in the right roles in support of your goal is the key to succeeding at whatever you choose to accomplish.