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Principles

Life and Work
Written by: Ray Dalio
Narrated by: Ray Dalio, Jeremy Bobb
Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins
Categories: Business & Money, Management
4.5 out of 5 stars (763 ratings)

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Publisher's Summary

Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past 40 years to create unique results in both life and business - and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.

In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and has grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater's exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as "an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency". It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio - who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood - that he believes are the reason behind his success.

In Principles, 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. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating "baseball cards" for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they're seeking to achieve.

Here, from a man who has been called both "the Steve Jobs of investing" and "the philosopher king of the financial universe" (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you'll find in the conventional business press.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2017 Ray Dalio (P)2017 Simon & Schuster Audio

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

I'm surprised this book has such great reviews

I'm a casual reader of this genre and found very little original content here. All the principles boil down to common sense with little advice on actual application. The entire book revolves around: identify issues, solve them, voila! it wasn't that hard was it?!

At no point in this book I was persuaded that Dalio's principles actually made his company successful and not simply the fact that he made good calls on the market and made a ton of money... which by the way Dalio seems to make clear is the only definition of greatness that anyone cares about... money.

Dalio also seems completely oblivious to his privileged position and seems to assume everyone has the option to consult 4 Chief of Staff Physicians across the country when validating a medical diagnosis... easy right? why doesn't everyone do it? He often repeats how he started from "nothing"; his version of nothing being married rich with Harvard degree in tow

The biography part of the book is pretty much a long backdoor bragging narrative; in fairness, Dalio warns about it.
The life principles are just common sense with no original take nor any practical approach.
The work principles are the same life principles (literally) but from a work angle. Useful of course if you run your own Fortune 500 company because if you are just an employee (even a high level one) you will have no chance to even try these (almost all revolve around hiring and firing people anyway)

Finally, and perhaps in an effort to sound original, Dalio comes up with his own terms for ideas that already exist but as the book progresses he essentially betrays them. "Radical Transparency" ends up being not even "total transparency", just basically a tad more transparent than other companies?... "Radical open mindness" sure, accept other more "believable" (his word for "credible") people no matter what... unless you are the owner because principle 11 says "always hold the last word".

Anyway, there are better, more practical and evidence based books out there... skip this one.

58 of 66 people found this review helpful

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Overfit

There are some really good ideas in this book but there is so much data that the model is so overfit that it's useless to anyone outside of Bridgewater and I have a feeling it's likely even overfit for Bridgewater itself. It's certainly the result of a lot of careful learning over a lifetime but it has become too rigid.
Also for a book that seems to endorse an 'idea meritocracy' it sure reads like a dictatorship. There were a lot of times when I had to switch to another book because it felt like I was being nagged at by some grandpa saying "If you don't do things my way, you will fail!".
If you have a lot of time and patience to wade through this book, there are some gems to be found but this book has little practical advice or use.

3 of 4 people found this review helpful

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Great listen! Highly recommend to everyone!

This was by far the best book I've ever listened to or read in regards to improving my work life, investment decisions and all reaching to new higher goals. I came away with quite a few ways to improve my approach to life in all its aspects creating a better me : )

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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superb recap of a business well built.

an instruction manual of sorts, for the CEO who grows the company through continuous improvement and objective metrics

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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Great book, could not stop listening

I started listening and had a hard time to stop, finished in only two sessions. I found many of the principles very interesting and several I already use in my daily life.

I believe that it is a must read for new supervisors or those who are in management positions. Some of the teachings I believe would benefit many of the organizations I have been a part of in the past.

Will definitely give it another listen and know that I will pull something new out every listen. I will most likely listen to the audiobook a couple of times a year.

3 of 4 people found this review helpful

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These aren't principles they are rules

My biggest issue with this book is it advocates creating a rule system - not a list of principles. And the rules are specific to Ray's business. As he states, the company you create is a MACHINE, and as such it requires prescribed rules, and not principles under which people can problem solve.

The takeaways that I believe are principles and universal are: full transparency and take time to learn and document from every failure and success, take a top down view of your company when observing how it is working and take a bottom up view on how to solve problems.

Don't get me wrong, I think what Ray has done is amazing and he is without a doubt brilliant, but as a book to immediately help you address "how you can improve your business" with tactical tools, I find this book wanting.

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A few concepts reintegrated in many many ways.

I'm a huge fan of Ray Dalio but I was left unimpressed by this book. Its a self help book, but there are better ones out there. I would say that there are a lot of duplicate points.

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Paradigm Shift in Perspective for Life and Business

Ray shared with us to his interesting view of the world/universe as an evolutionary process that everything/everyone has to be a part of. He discovered his passion on his journey of evolution and develop principles that have been guiding him and his organization toward to his purpose and the organization’s mission.
In the book, not only Ray layouts all the life and work principles he had, he also explains how and why the principles were adopted based on challenges and struggles that he and his peers at Bridgewater had to endure.
Ray talked a lot about how he obtain the goal of meaningful work and meaningful relationships through his core principles of radical transparency and radical truth. In addition, Ray generously share the process of decision making in his life and his organization that had propelled them to excellent. However, Ray’s intention isn’t trying to tell the reader what principles they need to follow. He wants to give the readers a road map to establish their own principles that will help them fulfill their own purpose in life. In doing so, Ray wants to tilt the world by, “even just one degree”, through passing on what he had learn to millions of readers

Thank you Ray!

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Essential learnings

Ray Dalio is a genius in decision making and culture. This book is a gift and he's demonstrated his generosity by sharing this with us.

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Very educational

I liked the way he wrote the book, easy to understand and remember the principles. Learned more than just investing.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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  • Patrick Eberle
  • 2018-06-30

Idea-meritocracy/Principles Reference

This work is a reference to Ray Dalio's principals & a brief history of how he created them to get where he is now.

I throughly enjoyed the first 5 hours of this book. Most everything after seemed redundant. So much so, that Ray often sites the same example for the same points over and over again. These instances took value away from this book's readability and message.

This book is not very clear that it serves as more of a reference and that it is intended to be two reference volumes combined. Albeit, the title's subscript mentions Work & Life. This work reads more like a dictionary after you remove the first few hours of Dalio's life story.

Besides your ability to create a drinking game from the number of times Ray states, "Idea-meritocracy", "Radical Truthfulness", "Believability", & each time he retells you about starting Bridgewater, you will find helpful advice on this book. I have listed general themes below

Ray could've summarized this book into less than a 10 hr read and kept the same quality in the 16 hr behemoth of reiderations. See my recommendation on his YouTube video below. 30 min.

Overall:
This book poses interesting ideas on how to improve life and business results. Obviously Bridgewater stands as a shining example of the success from Ray's points. I find that this melds well with Thinking Fast & Thinking Slow as well as many other jobs on how we think and make decisions. It makes our circle of knowledge a little bit wider on how to meet our goals/be successful. I am not sure I would recommend this book, but I believe it does actively challenge you to improve yourself and your processes in life and business.

What to take away:
Principles are useful for helping us get what we want out of life. They help guide us to meet our goals. You could argue they are algorithms that make us the best we want to be when we follow them.

We can use a 5 step plan to adjust our learn from our mistakes and become better, thus updating ourselves or our Principles.

It's best to write these principles down.

It's best to take the opinion of the whole to make decisions, rather than to think your opinion holds more weight. Seek out experts that are more "Believable" than you and weight their advice higher in their strengths.

Ray's YouTube videos are a greater & FREE synopsis of this book that cuts everything down to 30 minutes. I'd highly recommend reviewing that first of you're interested in this book.

112 of 116 people found this review helpful

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  • Belle Ho
  • 2017-11-16

Insightful but repetitive

I listened to the entire book to understand the context of the principles. However that led me to become easily bored by the constant repetition of the words "idea maritocracy" and "radical honesty". I would suggest skipping to the second portion of the book when the author explains the life and work principles.

53 of 55 people found this review helpful

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  • Dr. Scott K. Moffat
  • 2018-06-30

Could have been much shorter

Slow in topic and performance. I had to listen to it on 2.0x. Some of this is very interesting, but overall it feels rather verbose and repetitive. I understood from the outset that this would be quite different from Shoe Dog, but I was hoping for something a little more exciting Than it turned out to be.

The first part of the book was the most interesting to me. It focuses on the background of the company and its Ascension.

11 of 11 people found this review helpful

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  • Robert F. Jones
  • 2017-10-08

Personal

Two stars - meh
three stars - good
four stars - worth a second read
five stars - life-changing - my top 50 of all time

Worth a second read because the ideas at the core of the book seem contrary to what has been my life experience.

I'd love to spend a couple of days at Bridgewater or extensively interview some longtime employees to find out if it works as the author suggests.

My experience has been that 'Idea Meritocracies' and 'Radical honesty' work great for those at the top, who's positions cannot be threatened because they deem what is valued and right.

I've also always been told that attempting to fit market movements to algorithms cannot predict the really important swings. This is because we cannot properly summarize all of the market conditions that existed historically, nor can we know all of the factors that effect markets currently because our information is incomplete. I should be able to tell if his approach works by comparing Bridgewater's performance to that of its peers, but I have not yet done this.

The author does make a telling comment early in the book, regarding the computational nature of reality. He states that if we knew we had a perfect description of the current state of the universe, we'd be able to predict what would happen next. This is by no means an established fact. Chaos theory, quantum mechanics and and Heisenberg would probably disagree.

I cannot decide if the 'Baseball Card' approach to personnel makes sense. Baseball stats are more objective that job performance or personality types based on standardized tests.
I'd love to believe that keeping stats on everyone would help predict future performance, but as Sabermetrics showed, which stats one calculates and how they are weighted have significant impact on outcomes.

I'd love to believe that his basic assumptions are correct, but I'm really ambivalent. This book raised many more questions than it answered.

If I check the facts and they seem to hold water, I will make changes to my life and thus this would qualify as a five-star book.

189 of 212 people found this review helpful

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  • James Adams
  • 2017-11-22

The Management/CEO’s Handbook

Having fewer reports (zero), than the author, this book - while very interesting, insightful and practical - comes across as directed towards folks way above my pay grade. CEOs and VPs in particular. Still, as a small cog in a very big wheel, I recommend it for both perspective on what good management looks like, and for straight-up honorable principles to live by.

76 of 87 people found this review helpful

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  • Redmond2000
  • 2017-10-01

Bored to Tears

I don't usually give up on a book, especially one being read to me during a long drive when the only other option is silence. But, geesh. Some of the lead up stories to what I thought was the meat forthcoming were interesting but all in all no meat delivered. At least nothing up to the point where I threw up the white hankie and hit the stop button. The advice was generic and lacked the, for instance, this is how you'd apply this. I do know that he knows all about the ins and outs of pork bellies and the crops they eat and weather patterns ad nauseam. And he mentioned many times how he rubbed elbows with the rich and famous. Got it - you're a big deal.

59 of 68 people found this review helpful

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  • Market Maven
  • 2017-10-14

Two-thirds full.

I am a fan of Ray Dalio, the legendary hedge-fund manager. This book has three sections: a bio of Ray, followed by his "life principles," followed then by his "work principles." I found his life story to be very interesting indeed. And his "life principles" were excellent, especially the notion of "radical transparency" and "radical openness" and honestly confronting ones problems. So far great. But I got really bogged down in the third section, his "work principles." This seemed more like a corporate human resources manual than anything one could use in life. Even if you were a CEO or department head of a several hundred person organization, his principles often seemed like cliches. So much depends on what people are charged to do, but he has very little of that. I wish he had spent more time on his investment philosophy. This is where is his genius lies. He is not Tony Robbins. But I did learn from this book to confront my own problems more honestly and directly.

35 of 42 people found this review helpful

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  • Jon David Schein
  • 2017-10-28

phenomenally replete with wisdom

if you're building a business or hold a management role in one or even if you're looking to improve your day-to-day life, I bet this book will serve you well.

15 of 18 people found this review helpful

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  • T. Herman
  • 2017-10-05

Narrow Perspective on Modern Workplace

Some of the ideas here are interesting but this really feels like the thoughts of someone who has been "the boss" their entire career, and never experienced other work cultures. Ray is clearly not shy about conflict and I doubt any introverts have ever worked at Bridgewater. If you were starting a hedge fund with a bunch of alpha males this would be the goto strategy for success but I don't think a lot of this advice carries over to other fields and a lot I would consider harmful for creating a truly creative environment.

14 of 17 people found this review helpful

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  • Mckenzy Germain
  • 2017-10-15

The Blueprint — Lessons From Reformed New Yorker

The Blueprint — 10 Lessons From Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

What makes this book a gold mine for me and like-minded people:

1. Understanding why a meritocratic environment works best for my personality has helped me shed imposter syndrome; mask off.

2. Ray defines a valid solution around a psychological dichotomy and process that stems to eliminate a ton of common misconceptions. Supportive ideologies around the power of numbers & group theory, associated with machine learning seem to be a great formula for creating an effective symbiotic ecosystem. If practiced by those who are open to change and constructive criticism.

3. The opening line made me want to get on plane to NYC, take a train over to CT, give Ray a high five, then head back to the concrete jungle to engage in shenanigans.

4. Machine learning (ai) can have a positive outcome as long as its used as supportive component for analytics and behavioral studies.

5. Ai, when done right, has the ability to yield some highly beneficial outcomes around structuring teams and making business decisions. At the same time, it can aid in studying your personal history, train of thought, and help predict what environments are good for personality.

6. It’s good to be open to constructive criticism.

7. Arguments should occur with the intention of arriving at new learnings, not to generate hatred or sense of detachment from the opposing party.

8. Some personalities just don’t work for the environment or culture that you are trying to creates. And in certain cases YOU actually create the high level of toxicity that destroys the environment that you are attempting to create.

9. The goal of learning is to grow and one day help another elevate themselves by sharing your learnings in an intuitive manner.

10. Mistakes should be embraced in the same we celebrate blessings. For in a lost or failure, we have an opportunity to learn and increase our aptitude around problem solving for that specific issue.

Bonus: never give up and let your humility serve as the honey that will capture the hearts and minds of your counterparts.

23 of 29 people found this review helpful

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  • Pierre Gauthier
  • 2018-03-31

Disappointing!

In this lengthy work, Ray Dalio, the founder and principal owner of the Bridgewater investment firm, publicly shares the principles behind its undeniable success: radical transparency and radical meritocracy.

Though the author claims the contrary in the introduction, the most interesting part of the book is by far the long professional autobiography that makes up the first section.

Sadly, the principles themselves which are presented in the following chapters are too numerous, repetitive and plainly confusing. They remain abstract, very few examples of their application being provided. Overall, the train of thought and general organization is very difficult to follow.

This is particularly true in the audio format, despite the massive PDF that is provided and that connects imperfectly with what is heard. In addition, narration shifts, according to no discernible pattern, from the author himself to a professional reader. These factors give a regrettable amateurish tint to the audiobook.

Also, one wishes the author were more explicit on many points. How practical and truly useful is it to have recordings of all meetings in a firm with 1500 employees available to all? Why does he trust so much psychology which many see as a pseudo-science? Why did he locate his financial firm in suburban Connecticut rather than in Manhattan? How actually connected is the author with the daily operations of his company?

In the end, one wonders if the whole book is not an indulgence to the firm’s founder who recently retired and an investment to maintain its mystique.

8 of 9 people found this review helpful

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  • Massimiliano Neri
  • 2017-11-06

Outstanding catalog of principles

The point is not if you agree with these principles, but rate to explain how the author came up with his principles, and you can develop your ones.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

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  • Myrb
  • 2019-07-28

Excellent!

Didn t like the very first part...which made me put down the book for few weeks..then I continued it and there was it...all I expected from it.
It iq quite complete. I am glad I have the actual book too so I can jump straight to a chapter I want to re read easily.
i like the audionooks a lot- super convenient when carrying big books is not.

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  • tetard_nc
  • 2018-12-30

Principle something really interesting.

I love listening to this as it was really helpful to understand how to create some tools to help you in your everyday decisions. And automate that. Like you are not with your emotion and with logic.

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  • Utilisateur anonyme
  • 2018-11-21

Invaluable.

wonderful.
Clear, real & pragmatic.
The book is rich. It could be studied all life long.

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  • Utilisateur anonyme
  • 2018-10-18

Life changer (if ones follow through)

really inspiring and motivating and I appreciate the initiative of Ray to share a life of leanings for everyone to benefit, courageous and benevolent

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  • Laure Merlin
  • 2018-07-19

life changing, yes I mean it

wow, definitely this book fits the standards of Ray Dalio (not so many of us consistently live up to our own standards, do we?). it's a stinkingly meaningful piece of work, that is bound to support meaningful relationships, using radical transparency. thank you so much, Ray, and please everyone let's read, share and apply as much as we can from it.

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  • Utilisateur anonyme
  • 2018-07-09

an aspiring book which tought a alot

lovely book. it tought me a lot about business and how principles can help to achieve best out of our working process while evolving in the way we mesure progress and learn from our mistakes

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  • Thibault Dollié
  • 2018-05-30

amazing book with many insigths from the best on

to improve your life and work, easy to understand an use thanks to a very practical approach.

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  • Manatee's blues
  • 2018-05-09

Applied meritocracy

the personal story and the illustrations for the principles all is fantastic material for implementation