Black and white portrait of Ray Dalio: Narrator and Creator of Life Principles

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.

Life Principle

What you will be will depend on the perspective you have.

Where you go in life will depend on how you see things and who and what you feel connected to (your family, your community, your country, mankind, the whole ecosystem, everything). You will have to decide to what extent you will put the interests of others above your own, and which others you will choose to do so for. That's because you will regularly encounter situations that will force you to make such choices.

While such decisions might seem too erudite for your taste, you will make them either consciously or subliminally, and they will be very important.

For me personally, I now find it thrilling to embrace reality, to look down on myself through nature's perspective, and to be an infinitesimally small part of the whole. My instinctual and intellectual goal is simply to evolve and contribute to evolution in some tiny way while I'm here and while I am what I am. At the same time, the things I love most--my work and my relationships--are what motivate me. So, I find how reality and nature work, including how I and everything will decompose and recompose, beautiful--though emotionally I find the separation from those I care about difficult to appreciate.

Life Principle

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Life Principles

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