55+ Ray Dalio Quotes on Success, Investing, and Life Lessons

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 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.

Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.

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

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.

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.

It is far more common for people to allow their egos to stand in the way of learning.

The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.

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

The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.

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.

Truth – more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality – is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.

If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done.

Pain + Reflection = Progress.

If you don’t look at yourself and think, ‘Wow how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.

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

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.

Remember that the only purpose of money is to get you what you want, so think hard about what you value and put it above money. How much would you sell a good relationship for? There’s not enough money in the world to get you to part with a valued relationship.

It’s more important to do big things well than to do the small things perfectly.

Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

Some people go through life collecting all kinds of observations and opinions like pocket lint, instead of just keeping what they need. They have ‘detail anxiety’, worrying about unimportant things.

The people who work for you should constantly challenge you. Don’t hire people just to fit the first job they will do; hire people you want to share your life with.

The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.

Unattainable goals appeal to heroes.

If you don’t own gold, you know neither history nor economics.

To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.

The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness.

Most of life’s greatest opportunities come out of moments of struggle; it’s up to you to make the most of these tests of creativity and character.

Remember that in great partnerships, consideration and generosity are more important than money.

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

Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.

Great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor.

Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.

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.

Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

There are two broad approaches to decision-making: evidence/logic-based (which comes from the higher-level brain) and subconscious/emotion-based (which comes from the lower-level animal brain).

Thoughtful disagreement is not a battle; its goal is not to convince the other party that he or she is wrong and you are right, but to find out what is true and what to do about it.

Recognize that having an effective idea of meritocracy requires that you understand the merit of each person’s ideas.

You must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.

The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.

I believe that all organizations basically have two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck.

Managers who do not understand people’s different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations.

I came to see that people’s greatest weaknesses are the flip sides of their greatest strengths.

In most companies, people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing their job.

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.

Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to the unacceptable downside.

Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them directly and don’t try people without accusing them of their faces.

To be ‘good’ something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded.

If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.

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

Remember that weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions.

Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have flexibility and self-accountability.

Most fundamental work principle: Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with.

If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.