Ray Dalio Quotes

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.

People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don't know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.

I think the greatest tragedy of mankind is that people have ideas and opinions in their heads but don't have a process for properly examining these ideas to find out what's true. That creates a world of distortions.

Life is like a game where you seek to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving your goals. You get better at this game through practice. The game consists of a series of choices that have consequences. You can't stop the problems and choices from coming at you, so it's better to learn how to deal with them.

The best advice I can give you is to ask yourself what do you want, then ask 'what is true' - and then ask yourself 'what should be done about it.' I believe that if you do this you will move much faster towards what you want to get out of life than if you don't!

Success is not in obtaining the thing. Because there's always another thing. And then you look back on it, and for me, through my evolution, yes I have success by most measures - but for me, when it comes to the greatest joy of reward, there's an emotional element and there's an intellectual element. Emotionally, my greatest joy was the personal relationships I've had. That was the greatest joy. Intellectually, my satisfaction was that I do feel I've evolved well and I'm doing my best to contribute toward evolution.

In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand there's inflation and growth - it can go higher and lower - and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your total portfolio that gets you balanced.

When I say I believe in radical truth and radical transparency, all I mean is we take things that ordinarily people would hide, and we put them on the table, particularly mistakes, problems, and weaknesses. We put those on the table, and we look at them together. We don't hide them.

If you don't own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

You have to put yourself in my shoes as a person who believes in radical truth and in being radically transparent, not in seeing things through somebody else's eyes.

Successful people ask for the criticism of others and consider its merit.

Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there's an education level that plays into the mix and so if it's inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.

Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them - i.e., reflecting - if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.

Each person assesses each other person's credibility on different dimensions, because people are strong and weak in different things.

A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.

The world is still in deleveraging.

School typically doesn't prepare young people for real life - unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.

I think the President of the United States must operate by rules. I think our judicial system must operate by the rules. You have to operate by the rules of the system, and if you don't, if you pull rank, then you lose all your credibility.

One of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads - often theories that are critical of others - that they won't test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people's backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation.

I don't think there is such a thing as the perfect system.

I have a bad rote memory, but I tend to learn through my experiences. And then when I went into the markets, and then starting my business as an entrepreneur, that affected my thinking a lot, too, because 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.

As Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, says, in most work places everyone is working two jobs. The first is whatever their actual job is; the second consists of managing others' impressions of them, especially by hiding weaknesses and inadequacies - which is an enormous waste of energy.

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.

Some people who are creative are not reliable and vice versa; some see big pictures while others see details, etc. All of them are important to have on well-orchestrated teams.

That's what I mean by radical truth. I mean accepting reality.

I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.

Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.

Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

Watch out for people who think it's embarrassing not to know.

To have an idea meritocracy, one needs to do three things. First, they have to put their honest thoughts on the table, for everyone to look at and everyone to work through. Second, they need to have thoughtful disagreement, by which there are quality exchanges, in which there's open mindedness and the realization that no one has all the right answers. And you can work through that and get to better answers because good collective decision making is better than any individual decision making. And third, you have to have ways of getting past the disagreements if they remain.

Be wary of the arrogant intellectual who comments from the stands without having played on the field.

Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it's a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

You should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don't know what the future is going to hold.

The economy is like a machine.

We wouldn't be successful if we didn't have independent thinkers who can argue and then resolve their arguments.

Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.

When you think that it's too hard, remember that in the long run, doing the things that will make you successful is a lot easier than being unsuccessful

Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I've had.

I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature's laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.

The expression I use: Pain + Reality = Progress. Whenever I would have a painful mistake, I started to view that as puzzles that would give me gems if I could solve the puzzle. So, it made me thoughtful - what should I do differently next time? That was the puzzle. And the gem was some principle for handling the same thing when it came along again, and then I would write it down. And by writing it down and referring to it, and also being able to show it to other people so that we could agree that that was a good way of handling that thing - that was very, very powerful.

Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

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.

I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.

Forget about what the technology is. Just understand the motivation behind it.

Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.

It is a law of nature that you must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult things.

Meditation gives you two things: equanimity and creativity. And it does that by taking one from their conscious mind, where there's all that noise and chaos and so on, into the subconscious mind where there's quiet and where creativity emanates from. You have a mantra, and when you repeat it over and over again, all those thoughts go away because you shift them to that mantra. And then eventually that sound disappears, and then you're left not conscious or unconscious - you're left in this subconscious state, and by opening that up, first of all you get control of it.