PRINCIPLES: LIFE AND WORK (BY RAY DALIO)

Book Review/Top 05 Takeaways of "Principles: Life and Work" by Ray Dalio. This is the Healthy Mind - Think Big.

Takeaway No. 1: Create principles - systemize your decision-making.

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals. Imagine if you wanted to build muscles at the gym. Without any principles, you'd just go there and do stuff aimlessly. You'd probably have no regularity in your schedule whatsoever. We're back at the iron temple! It's almost 2 a.m. in the morning, and it's been 37 days since the last time, but ... who cares? And no routine for proper progression. Furthermore, you'd probably miss out on the concept of "balanced workouts". With principles, this becomes much easier. You work out according to them and change the principles in case they don't help you to become stronger. Having principles for basic-level problems allows you to focus your energy and brainpower on those of higher levels of difficulty, making you more efficient. Moreover, having principles allows you to diagnose problems that might occur along your way to greatness. Perhaps increasing your rep weight by five percent each week was a sound principle when you were a beginner, but would only cause overload and injuries at an advanced level. Identifying such problems becomes much easier if you have clearly stated principles, and it's helpful if you write them down too. See principles as rules that govern a machine in a discipline where you want to become successful. See yourself as an engineer, whose primary task is to keep evaluating these principles against reality and updating them according to the empirical data that you gather.

Dalio suggests creating principles for everything in your life. He also suggests writing them down as an important step to make sure that you express them explicitly, and not in some vague way that neither you nor anyone else can understand. He encourages us to write down every important encounter that we had and compile them into a list. Develop principles for each category of encounters. Stress test them the next time you come across "another one of those", and update the principle if necessary.

Must Read: Do You Know Which Principles Of Living Life Will Work Every Day?

Here are a few famous investment principles: "Invest in your circle of competence", "Use a margin of safety", "Talk to people!", "If you like the store, chances are you'll love the stock". And Ray Dalio himself: "15 to 20 uncorrelated streams of income can reduce your risk, without reducing your expected returns." This is the holy grail of investing, according to Dalio.

Takeaway No. 2: The five-step process to ultimate success. 

This is the five-step process to get what you want out of life. 

1: Have clear goals 

2: Identify and don't tolerate the problems that stand in the way of you from achieving those goals. 

3: Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. 

4: Design plans that will get you around them. 

5: Do what is necessary to push these designs through to results. 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Let's dive deeper into each of them. Life is a smorgasbord of opportunities, and this causes many people to fail before they even get started. Setting and achieving goals always means that you must reject other interesting alternatives as well. I've been terrible at this before, because I didn't want to accept the fact that I couldn't become Warren Buffett or Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Phelps, Eiichiro Oda, and Synyster Gates, simultaneously during one lifetime. I'm still having a hard time accepting this. When setting your goals, don't be afraid to shoot for the moon. If you limit your goals to what you know that you can achieve, you will always set the bar too low.

Must Read: Persistence unlock the doors of success

Every problem that you face is an opportunity to improve. Remember - pain + reflection = progress Every time you identify a problem you're one step closer or becoming better. So celebrate! However, finding out about weakness and then doing nothing about it, is just as bad as not identifying it in the first place. Sure, thinking about problems that aren't easily fixable will make you anxious but ignoring them should make you more anxious still. Before you concentrate on what to do about it, you must focus on what is. You must find the root cause of the issues. A root cause is typically described with an adjective, not a verb. 

Here's an example: "My stocks had a worse performance than the S&P 500 this year because I picked the wrong stocks." That's not really a root cause, let's dig deeper. "Okay. I picked the wrong stocks because I don't have a proper investing system." That's closer, but not good enough. "I don't have a proper investing system because I'm not educated on the subject well enough, yet." That's good. When designing the plan, make sure to replay what you have done, which brought you to where you are today. Then visualize what must be done for you and others in the future so that your goals are reached. Write down your plan so that everyone can see it. A word of caution here - many fail at this step because they are preoccupied with execution. Designing precedes doing. There are many paths that will lead to you achieving your goals. You only need to find one that works. For this step, you must grit your teeth and you must form awesome habits. Create to-do lists that are organized and tick off items in order from most important to least important. Establish metrics that allow you to see if you are on the right track.

Must Read: 11 Life-Changing Habits and Routines that can lead you to success

Takeaway No. 3: Be radically open-minded. 

Have you ever found yourself in a discussion where you stubbornly hold on to something and later realize that you were completely wrong? I've done so on multiple occasions, especially when it comes to music. I've lost probably $100 in different bets because of this. Not life-changing losses, of course, but it highlights our third takeaway - the importance of letting your ego go, and listening to what other people have to say. Sometimes, the reason why they disagree with you (believe it or not!) is that they are right. After all, with two opposing conclusions, at least one must be wrong. 

Here are a few signs that you might be closed-minded, which is the opposite of what you want to be according to Dalio. 

You don't want your ideas to be challenged. 

You make statements more often than you ask questions. 

You block others from speaking. 

You focus more on being understood than understanding others. 

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

In Dalio's own words: "To be efficient, you must not let your need to right be more important than you need to find out what's true." "If you are too proud of what you know, or how good you are at something, you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential." Most people find this very difficult They aren't interested in understanding what others are thinking, because too much of their energy is dedicated to telling everyone what they themselves are thinking. Stop worrying about if you're looking good or not. Looking good won't allow you to reach your goals. But finding the truth, on the other hand, will. 

A great tool for becoming radically open-minded that Dalio presents in the book is to always ask yourself if you are the master or the disciple. You shouldn't block Warren Buffett out when you're having a discussion on investing. Neither should you try to convince Arnold Schwarzenegger that your way of lifting weights is superior to what he did? And you probably shouldn't block Synyster Gates out when he tries to teach you an awesome lick on the guitar. Realize when you are the disciple and must focus on asking questions. But also when the opposite is true, and you must be the one making statements. Another way of becoming more open-minded is to see pain as a cue for being more reflective. When your ideas are being questioned, you will go into a defensive stance, which is painful. By being aware of it when it happens, you can remind yourself that this is a situation in which you must force yourself to be more open-minded.

Must Read: Learn The Power and Secret of Discipline

Takeaway No. 4: How to handle your weaknesses.

We all have our weaknesses ... For instance - I'm not good at brushing my teeth with my non-dominant hand. I'm not good at Tindering and cooking at the same time. And I'm downright awful at doing covers of Celine Dion in the shower. When you encounter your weaknesses you have 4 choices: 

Photo by Ravi Kumar on Unsplash

1: Deny them. This is the most common approach, but it SUCKS. Especially if the skill in question is necessary for success within the field you've picked. You'll bang your head bloody against the wall in frustration out of not getting anywhere. 

2. Accept them and work at them to convert them into strengths. If this is a viable option, it is the best one to go for. But let's face it. We were given a set of abilities at birth that we only can change to a certain degree. A dwarf will never become an elite NBA player, but he might make a h**l of an actor. 

3: Accept them and find ways around them. This path is probably used the least and that's a shame. A workaround could, for instance, be outsourcing certain problems on the path toward your goal to other people that are naturally more gifted for that specific task. 

4. Change what you're going after. This is another solution that isn't used widely, but it makes perfect sense. By changing the goal, your weaknesses might not be weaknesses anymore, and perhaps you can find even more joy in another discipline anyway. Remember that you can never dig yourself out of a hole.

Must Read: Do You Know Which Principles Of Living Life Will Work Every Day?

Takeaway No. 5: Learn how to synthesize well. 

Synthesis is the process of converting a lot of data into an accurate picture of reality. This requires the usage of takeaway number 3 - being radically open-minded and it enhances the effectiveness of takeaway number 1 - building your principles to systemize decision-making. Becoming great at synthesizing is a three-step process.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

1: Synthesize the situation at hand. Well surprise, surprise! Every day you are faced with thousands of pieces of information. We must learn to distinguish which data is important and which isn't. Who or what you're listening to is an important part of this. Don't believe in everything you hear, and value great higher than new. 

2: Synthesize the situation through time. Categorize outcomes in different buckets. Note if they had a positive or negative impact and collect them over time. The development of outcomes within specific areas over time will reveal important information. For example, let's say that you've recently changed your diet to consider if it improves your overall well-being. You could categorize it into three buckets, perhaps, looks, mood, and social. By taking notes on outcomes within these areas and rating them on a scale from good to bad, you can see how the decision to change diet has affected you. In this specific case, the diet seems to have improved looks but greatly reduced your mood. When synthesizing, you must ask yourself if it is worth it or not. 

3: Navigate levels efficiently. Google Earth is a great example here. When judging if you want to travel to a specific hotel, you could zoom in on it and check out how it looks up close. Then, you could zoom out a bit to see the surroundings. And perhaps zooming out, even more, to see what you could visit if you hire a car. All these pieces are essential to take a well-informed decision on if the hotel makes for a good vacation or not. Make sure that you are navigating between the different levels of abstraction without changing the observed variable. Also, remember that some variables require you to go deeper. In our case, B and D. While others might only require a higher-level view to gather the important information - in our case A and C.

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The suggestion to summarize this book came from one of my subscribers and it's an intention of mine to make this blog interactive so that those of you who read can contribute to the content that we'll see here in the future. Therefore, if you have a suggestion for a book on investing, personal finance, or money management that you want me to review, please leave a comment. I will consider every proposal, and I will prioritize those that most people seem to root for. In the meantime, don't forget to check out my latest posts. Also, if you want to see more posts like this one in the future, don't forget to follow Healthy Mind - Think Big. Take care guys!