Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “Daily Observations.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

210. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

227. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

229. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

231. “Build the organization around goals rather than tasks.”

— Ray Dalio

232. “Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.”

— Ray Dalio

233. “As much as I love and have benefited from artificial intelligence, I believe that only people can discover such things and then program computers to do them. That’s why I believe that the right people, working with each other and with computers, are the key to success.”

— Ray Dalio

234. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

235. “There were only two big forces to worry about: growth and inflation.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

237. “In order to match a person to the design, start by creating a spec sheet so that there will be a consistent set of criteria that can be applied from recruiting through performance reviews. Bridgewater’s spec sheets use the same bank of qualities as our Baseball Cards.”

— Ray Dalio

238. “Bob Kegan called Bridgewater “a form of proof that the quest for business excellence and the search for personal realization need not be mutually exclusive – and can, in fact, be essential to each other.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

240. “Speak frankly, listen with an open mind, consider the views of other believable and honest people, and try to get in sync about what’s going on with the person and why. Remember not to be overconfident in your assessments, as it’s possible you are wrong.”

— Ray Dalio

241. “If you just keep doing, you will burn out and grind to a halt.”

— Ray Dalio

242. “Keep your strategic vision the same while making appropriate tactical changes as circumstances dictate.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

244. “While the right design is essential, it is only half the battle. It is equally important to put the right people in each of those positions.”

— Ray Dalio

245. “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

246. “Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control. Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control,” and studies consistently show that people who have it outperform those who don’t.”

— Ray Dalio

247. “You don’t want the people you work with to merely pay lip service.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

249. “I cannot emphasize enough how important the selection, training, testing, evaluation, and sorting out of people is.”

— Ray Dalio

250. “Reality, in turn, will send you loud signals about how well your principles are working by rewarding or punishing you, so you will learn to fine-tune them accordingly.”

— Ray Dalio