Ray Dalio Quotes

“1+1=3. Two people who collaborate well will be about three times as effective as each of them operating independently.”

“Above all else, I want you to think for yourself, to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true and 3) what to do about it.”

“Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

“Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you.”

“Beware of statements that begin with 'I think that...'
Just because someone thinks something doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Build the organization around goals rather than tasks.”

“Choose your habits well. Habit is probably the most powerful tool in your brain’s toolbox.”

“Closed-minded people don’t want their ideas challenged.”

“Don’t have anything to do with closed-minded people. Being open-minded is much more important than being bright or smart.”

“Don’t hire people just to fit the first job they will do; hire people you want to share your life with.”

“Don’t just pay attention to your job; pay attention to how your job will be done if you are no longer around.”

“Don’t let the little things divide you when your agreement on the big things should bind you.”

“Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible. It’s the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in terms of its likelihood and prioritized.”

“Evaluate accurately, not kindly.”

“Even the richest people feel short of the money they need to do the things they want to do.”

“Every leader must decide between getting rid of liked but incapable people to achieve their goals and keeping the nice but incapable people and not achieving their goals.

Whether or not you can make these hard decisions is the strongest determinant of your own success.”

“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.”

“Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.”

“Great people are hard to find so make sure you think about how to keep them.”

“Having nothing to hide relieves stress and builds trust.”

“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. And the people one meets at the top aren’t necessarily more special than those one meets at the bottom or in between.”

“He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.”

“Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.”

“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.”

“I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game. This way of learning and improving has been best for me because of what I’m like and because of what I do.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”