Principles are ways of successfully dealing with reality to get what you want out of life.
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, cites principles as his key to success.
In 1975, Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Over forty years later, Bridgewater has grown into the largest hedge fund in the world and the fifth most important private company in the United States (according to Fortune magazine), and Dalio himself has been named to TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way Dalio discovered unique principles that have led to his and Bridgewater’s unique success. It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio, that he believes are the reason behind whatever success he has had. He is now at a stage in his life that he wants to pass these principles along to others for them to judge for themselves and to do whatever they want with them.
Work Principle
Don't oversqueeze a dot.
Remember: A dot is just a dot; what matters is how they add up. Think of each individual dot as an at-bat in baseball. Even great hitters are going to strike out many times, and it would be foolish to evaluate them based on one trip to the plate. That's why stats like on-base percentage and batting average exist.
In other words, any one event has many different possible explanations, whereas a pattern of behavior can tell you a lot about root causes. The number of observations needed to detect a pattern largely depends on how well you get in sync after each observation. A quality discussion of how and why a person behaved a certain way should help you understand the larger picture.
There are certain times, however, where what someone is like will be clear after very few dots. Like knowing whether someone can sing, it doesn’t take a lot of time. Sometimes a person only has to sing a few bars for you to hear how well they can sing. Reasoning is the same—it often doesn’t take a lot of time to figure out if someone can do it.
Work Principle
- Constantly Train, Test, Evaluate, and Sort People
- Don't hide your observations about people.
- Don't oversqueeze a dot.
- Don't hide your observations about people.
Any person or organization can adopt Principles to better achieve their goals.
Learn what Principles are and how they are applied at Principles.com
