Principles – Ray Dalio

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ISBN:978-1-5011-2402-0
Verdict: 👍👍 👍 👍 

Seldom a business book comes along that one both enjoys and learns from, here we have one of those books. 

 Don’t be mislead by the title, it is more than just a cluster of great principles, it’s the foundations for an approach Ray adopted to build his amazing multi billion-dollar business with great insights into how he grew it.


The principles are summariesed in the middle of the book (p272) for the both Life and Work principles discussed in the book – my favorite two principles are ;
Life: Principle 5.1– Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively – Recognize that 1) The biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning then deciding).   p276   
Work: Principle 4.4– Get and Stay in Sync – If its your meeting to run, manage the conversation.   p282 

With so many nuggets of wisdom in this book I can only recommend that one reads the book cover to cover. However heres a few;

·      Discovering Risk Parity.. cash, which is the worst investment  p69
·      Try, fail, diagnose, redesign and try again  p118
·      Nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference.   p134

At the end of the book Ray puts it all together in a few pages with the notion that  for an organisation to adopt a idea meritocracy its people to do three things - p540;
  1. Put their honest thoughts on the table for everyone to see 
  2. Have thoughtful disagreements where there are quality back-and-forth in which people evolve their thinking to come uop with the best collective answers possible and
  3. Abide by idea-meritocratic ways of getting past the remaining disagreements (such as believability-weighted decision making)

For me p537 presents a great summary of life choices i,e why we work with others - heres a picture ; 
When my highlighter 📝is used excessively, it's a good indicator of the value I got from a book, and this book was spoilt by many a bright yellow highlight on near every other page.

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