Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Don’t put the expedient ahead of the strategic.”

— Ray Dalio

252. “Avoid fixating on irrelevant details.”

— Ray Dalio

253. “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

254. “While in the past I would encounter problems, figure out their causes, and design my own ways to get around them, others who think differently than I do will make different diagnoses and designs. My job as mentor was to help them be successful at that.”

— Ray Dalio

255. “The best behaviors one can hope for come from leaders who can weigh the benefits of cooperation, and who have long enough time frames that they can see how the gifts they give this year may bring them benefits in the future.”

— Ray Dalio

256. “My business has always been a way to get me into exotic places and allow me to meet interesting people. If I make any money from those trips, that’s just icing on the cake.”

— Ray Dalio

257. “Beware of group-think: The fact that no one seems concerned doesn’t mean nothing is wrong.”

— Ray Dalio

258. “Being radically truthful and transparent with your colleagues and expecting your colleagues to be the same with you ensures that important issues are apparent instead of hidden. It also enforces good behavior and good thinking, because when you have to explain yourself, everyone can openly assess the merits of your logic.”

— Ray Dalio

259. “Understanding what is true is essential for success, and being radically transparent about everything, including mistakes and weaknesses, helps create the understanding that leads to improvements.”

— Ray Dalio

260. “I read Charles Duhigg’s best-selling book The Power of Habit, which really opened my eyes.”

— Ray Dalio

261. “People who run companies are faced with important choices every day. How they make those choices determines the character of the company, the quality of its relationships, and the outcomes it produces.”

— Ray Dalio

262. “Beyond Religion.”

— Ray Dalio

263. “Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.”

— Ray Dalio

264. “Fast talkers are people who articulately and assertively say things faster than they can be assessed as a way of pushing their agenda past other people’s examination or objections. Fast talking can be especially effective when it’s used against people worried about appearing stupid.”

— Ray Dalio

265. “Force yourself and the people who work for you to do difficult things. It’s a basic law of nature: You must stretch yourself if you want to get strong.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

267. “The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals.”

— Ray Dalio

268. “Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it. Whether you tolerate it because you believe it cannot be solved, because you don’t care enough to solve it, or because you can’t muster enough of whatever it takes to solve it, if you don’t have the will to succeed, then your situation is hopeless. You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity.”

— Ray Dalio

269. “Remember that everyone must be overseen by a believable person who has high standards.”

— Ray Dalio

270. “The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others’ weaknesses again and again. People who do this fail because they are stubbornly stuck in their own heads.”

— Ray Dalio

271. “Be willing to “shoot the people you love.” It is very difficult to fire people you care about.”

— Ray Dalio

272. “It seems to me that if you look back on yourself a year ago and aren’t shocked by how stupid you were, you haven’t learned much. Still, few people go out of their way to embrace their mistakes. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

— Ray Dalio

273. “Holding wrong opinions in one’s head and making bad decisions based on them instead of having thoughtful disagreements is one of the greatest tragedies of mankind.”

— Ray Dalio

274. “A proper goal is something that you really need to achieve. Desires are things that you want that can prevent you from reaching your goals.”

— Ray Dalio

275. “Governance is the oversight system that removes the people and the processes if they aren’t working well. It is the process that checks and balances power to assure that the principles and interests of the community as a whole are always placed above the interests and power of any individual or faction. Because power will rule, power must be put in the hands of capable people in key roles who have the right values, do their jobs well, and will check and balance the power of others.”

— Ray Dalio

276. “Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships.”

— Ray Dalio

277. “Think of every decision as a bet with a probability and a reward for being right and a probability and a penalty for being wrong. Normally a winning decision is one with a positive expected value, meaning that the reward times its probability of occurring is greater than the penalty times its probability of occurring, with the best decision being the one with the highest expected value.”

— Ray Dalio

278. “Look to nature to learn how reality works. All the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn’t create these laws, but by understanding them we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals.”

— Ray Dalio

279. “If you are disappointed because you can’t be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody can do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team? When he fails to dribble and shoot well, would you think badly of him? Should he feel humiliated? Imagine all the areas in which Einstein was incompetent, and imagine how hard he struggled to excel even in the areas in which he was the best in the world.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

281. “Don’t mistake opinions for facts.”

— Ray Dalio

282. “It doesn’t pay to be open-minded with everyone. Instead, spend your time exploring ideas with the most believable people you have access to.”

— Ray Dalio

283. “You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”

— Ray Dalio

284. “The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered home is that you can never be sure of anything: There are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it’s always best to assume you’re missing something. This lesson changed my approach to decision making in ways that will reverberate throughout this book – and to which I attribute much of my success. But I would make many other mistakes before I fully changed my behavior.”

— Ray Dalio

285. “Avoid getting sucked down. This occurs when a manager is pulled down to doing the tasks of a subordinate without acknowledging the problem.”

— Ray Dalio

286. “Regularly use pain as your guide toward quality reflection.”

— Ray Dalio

287. “Remember that a good plan should resemble a movie script.”

— Ray Dalio

288. “Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are. 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 than emotional.”

— Ray Dalio

289. “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. For example, if you come up with something the world values, you almost can’t help but be rewarded. Conversely, reality tends to penalize those people, species, and things that don’t work well and detract from evolution.17.”

— Ray Dalio

290. “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

291. “Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing – and decide what you want to be.”

— Ray Dalio

292. “Relationships have to be genuine, not forced;.”

— Ray Dalio

293. “Consider second- and third-order consequences, not just first-order ones.”

— Ray Dalio

294. “Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.”

— Ray Dalio

295. “Ultimately, to help people succeed you have to do two things: First let them see their failures so clearly that they are motivated to change them, and then show them how to either change what they are doing or rely on others who are strong where they are weak.”

— Ray Dalio

296. “Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”

— Ray Dalio

297. “Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

299. “An excellent skier is probably going to be a better ski coach than a novice skier. Believability applies to management too. The better your track record, the more value you can add as a coach.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio