Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “Typically, people’s conflicting beliefs or conflicting interests make them unable to see things through another’s eyes. That’s not good and it doesn’t make sense.”

— Ray Dalio

202. “Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal.”

— Ray Dalio

203. “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

— Ray Dalio

204. “Everyone has weaknesses. They are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make. Knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them is the first step on the path to success.”

— Ray Dalio

205. “Whatever success I’ve had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know.”

— Ray Dalio

206. “Understanding, accepting, and working with reality is both practical and beautiful. I have become so much of a hyperrealist that I’ve.”

— Ray Dalio

207. “Build great metrics. Metrics show how the machine is working by providing numbers and setting off alert lights in a dashboard. Metrics are an objective means of assessment and they tend to have a favorable impact on productivity.”

— Ray Dalio

208. “When offered the choice of being fair with you or taking more for themselves, most people will take more for themselves.”

— Ray Dalio

209. “Being hyperrealistic will help you choose your dreams wisely and then achieve them.”

— Ray Dalio

210. “Specifying our investment decision-making criteria in algorithms and running historical data through them, or specifying our work principles in algorithms and using them to aid in management decision making, are just bigger and more complicated versions of that smart thermostat.”

— Ray Dalio

211. “It’s important not to let our biases stand in the way of our objectivity. To get good results, we need to be analytical rather.”

— Ray Dalio

212. “The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly.”

— Ray Dalio

213. “If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.”

— Ray Dalio

214. “There are two parts of each person’s brain: the upper-level logical part and the lower-level emotional part. I call these the “two yous.” They fight for control of each person. How that conflict is managed is the most important driver of our behaviors. That fighting was the biggest reason for the problems Bob, Giselle, and Dan raised. While the logical part of people’s brains could easily understand that knowing one’s weaknesses is a good thing.”

— Ray Dalio

215. “Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.”

— Ray Dalio

216. “Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decision.”

— Ray Dalio

217. “One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners than shun losers. True friends are the opposite.”

— Ray Dalio

218. “Reality is optimizing for the whole – not for you. Contribute to the whole and you will likely be rewarded.”

— Ray Dalio

219. “So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that.”

— Ray Dalio

220. “Imagine a world in which you can use technology to connect to a system in which you can input the issue you’re dealing with and have exchanges about what you should do and why with the highest-rated thinkers in the world.”

— Ray Dalio

221. “Learn about your people and have them learn about you through frank conversations about mistakes and their root causes.”

— Ray Dalio

222. “People who can accurately sort probabilities from possibilities are generally strong at “practical thinking”;.”

— Ray Dalio

223. “Daily Observations.”

— Ray Dalio

224. “Mistakes will cause you pain, but you shouldn’t try to shield yourself or others from it. Pain is a message that something is wrong and it’s an effective teacher that one shouldn’t do that wrong thing again.”

— Ray Dalio

225. “The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly. If you’re constantly learning and improving, your evolutionary process will look like the one that’s ascending.”

— Ray Dalio

226. “The more open- minded you are, the less likely you are to deceive yourself – and the more likely it is that others will give you honest feedback.”

— Ray Dalio

227. “Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

229. “To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you. A step below that is doing things well yourself, and worst of all is doing things poorly yourself.”

— Ray Dalio

230. “Remember not to be overconfident in your assessments, as it’s possible you are wrong.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

232. “This way of thinking about risk caused many investors to increase their exposures beyond what would normally be seen as prudent. They looked at the recent volatility in their VAR calculations, and by and large expected it to continue moving forward. This is human nature and it was dumb because past volatility and past correlations aren’t reliable forecasts of future risks.”

— Ray Dalio

233. “When faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.”

— Ray Dalio

234. “Pay for the person, not the job. Look at what people in comparable jobs with comparable experience and credentials make, add some small premium over that, and build in bonuses or other incentives so they will be motivated to knock the cover off the ball. Never pay based on the job title alone.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

236. “Typically, by doing what comes naturally to us, we fail to account for our weaknesses, which leads us to crash. What happens after we crash is most important. Successful people change in ways that allow them to continue to take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses and unsuccessful people don’t.”

— Ray Dalio

237. “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 unacceptable downside.”

— Ray Dalio

238. “Understand that a great manager is essentially an organizational engineer.”

— Ray Dalio

239. “If you’ve learned anything from this book I hope it’s that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and everyone has an important role to play in life. Nature made everything and everyone for a purpose. The courage that’s needed the most isn’t the kind that drives you to prevail over others, but the kind that allows you to be true to your truest self, no matter what other people want you to be.”

— Ray Dalio

240. “My approach was to hire, train, test, and then fire or promote quickly, so that we could rapidly identify the excellent hires and get rid of the ordinary ones, repeating the process again and again until the percentage of those who were truly great was high enough to meet our needs.”

— Ray Dalio

241. “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. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

— Ray Dalio

242. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

244. “Remember that most people will pretend to operate in your interest while operating in their own.”

— Ray Dalio

245. “Meditate. I practice Transcendental Meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight. I’m not saying that you have to meditate in order to develop this perspective; I’m just passing along that it has helped me and many other people and I recommend that you seriously consider exploring it.”

— Ray Dalio

246. “Distinguish big problems from small ones. You only have so much time and energy; make sure you are investing them in exploring the problems that, if fixed, will yield you the biggest returns. But at the same time, make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they’re not symptoms of larger ones.”

— Ray Dalio

247. “I believe that the ability to objectively self-assess, including one’s own weaknesses, is the most influential factor in whether a person succeeds, and that a healthy organization is one in which people compete not so much against each other as against the ways in which their lower-level selves get in the way.”

— Ray Dalio

248. “Clearly assign responsibilities. Eliminate any confusion about expectations and ensure that people view their failures to complete their tasks and achieve their goals as personal failures.”

— Ray Dalio

249. “Since life brings both ups and downs, struggling well doesn’t just make your ups better; it makes your downs less bad.”

— Ray Dalio

250. “Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.”

— Ray Dalio