Ray Dalio quotes

More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively
-- Ray Dalio

#People #Looks #Willingness

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

#Intellectual #Arrogant #Fields

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Jobs #Attitude

Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.
-- Ray Dalio

#Pain #Limits #Way

There is nothing to fear from truth....Being truthful is essential to being an independent thinker and obtaining greater understanding of what is right.
-- Ray Dalio

#Independent #Understanding #Essentials

For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.
-- Ray Dalio

#Meaningful #Sex #Sleep

I have found that by looking at what is rewarded and punished, and why, universally - i.e., in nature as well as in humanity - I have been able to learn more about what is "good" and "bad" than by listening to most people's views about good and bad.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Humanity #Growth

Though how nature works is way beyond man's ability to comprehend, I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Reality #Growth

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Reality #People

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Dream #Believe

I believe that understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it evolve.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Believe #Understanding

If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don't face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Growth #Important

People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #People #Growth

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Growth #Life Is Like

By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn't give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Responsibility #Giving

Once you accept that playing the game will be uncomfortable, and you do it for a while, it will become much easier (like it does when getting fit). When you excel at it, you will find your ability to get what you want thrilling.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Growth #Fit

You'll see that excuses like "That's not easy" are of no value and that it pays to "push through it" at a pace you can handle. Like getting physically fit, the most important thing is that you keep moving forward at whatever pace you choose, recognizing the consequences of your actions.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Moving #Growth

I believe that for the most part, achieving success - whatever that is for you - is mostly a matter of personal choice and that, initially, making the right choices can be difficult.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Believe #Choices

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Worry #People

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Pain #Fighting

There is an excellent correlation between giving society what it wants and making money, and almost no correlation between the desire to make money and how much money one makes.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Giving #Growth

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Mean #Opportunity

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Risk #Growth

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Successful #Winning

When there is pain, the animal instinct is 'fight or flight' (i.e., to either strike back or run away) - reflect instead. When you can calm yourself down, thinking about the dilemma that is causing you pain will bring you to a higher level and enlighten you, leading to progress.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Running #Pain

Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Thinking #Growth

There are far more good answers "out there" than there are in you.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Growth #Personal Growth

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
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Running #Successful

I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Integrity #Real

I've learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Mistake #Reflection

Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Understanding #Growth

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Work Out #Growth

People who excel at book learning tend to call up from memory what they have learned in order to follow stored instructions. Others who are better at internalized learning use the thoughts that flow from their subconscious. The experienced skier doesn't recite instructions on how to ski and then execute them; rather, he does it well "without thinking," in the same way he breathes without thinking. Understanding these differences is essential.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Memories #Book

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.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #People #Growth

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, i.e. a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future.
-- Ray Dalio

#Life #Mistake #People