Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I’ve also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances – and that isn’t smart. I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way. You will find that interesting and invaluable, and the richer perspective you gain will help you decide what you should do.”

— Ray Dalio

402. “Be an imperfectionist.”

— Ray Dalio

403. “Moreover, I recognized that managers who do not understand people’s different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations, which is like a foreman not understanding how his equipment will behave. That insight led us to explore psychometric testing as a way of learning how people think differently.”

— Ray Dalio

404. “Having everyone randomly probe everyone else is an unproductive waste of time.”

— Ray Dalio

405. “Focusing strictly on the logical cause-effect relationships was what allowed us to see what was really going on.”

— Ray Dalio

406. “Wekanesses don’t matter if you find solutions to them.”

— Ray Dalio

407. “Some decisions are best made after acquiring more information; some are best made immediately.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

409. “My fear of being wrong pushed me to seek out other smart folks to poke holes in my view.”

— Ray Dalio

410. “It is more practical to be honest about one’s uncertainties, mistakes, and weaknesses than to pretend they don’t exist. It is also more important to have good challengers than good followers.”

— Ray Dalio

411. “Just as our physical attributes determine the limits of what we are able to do physically – some people are tall and others are short, some muscular and others weak – our brains are innately different in ways that set the parameters of what we are able to do mentally.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

413. “Watch out for people who think it’s embarrassing not to know. They’re likely to be more concerned with appearances than actually achieving the goal; this can lead to ruin over time.”

— Ray Dalio

414. “Because most people are more emotional than logical, they tend to overreact to short-term results; they give up and sell low when times are bad and buy too high when times are good.”

— Ray Dalio

415. “We believe that thoughtful, unemotional disagreement by independent thinkers can be converted into believability-weighted decision making that is smarter and more effective than the sum of its parts.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

417. “Closed-minded people focus much more on being understood than on understanding others. When people disagree, they tend to be quicker to assume that they aren’t being understood than to consider whether they’re the ones who are not understanding the other person’s perspective. Open-minded people always feel compelled to see things through others’ eyes.”

— Ray Dalio

418. “History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially.”

— Ray Dalio

419. “I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way.”

— Ray Dalio

420. “It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them.”

— Ray Dalio

421. “Don’t lower the bar.”

— Ray Dalio

422. “Any damn fool can make it complex.”

— Ray Dalio

423. “Avoid setting goals based on what you think you can achieve.”

— Ray Dalio

424. “While it’s easier to avoid confrontations in the short run, the consequences of doing so can be massively destructive in the long term. It’s critical that conflicts actually get resolved – not through superficial compromise, but through seeking the important, accurate conclusions.”

— Ray Dalio

425. “Use transparency to help enforce justice.”

— Ray Dalio

426. “From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn’t be evolving. Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we’re perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them.”

— Ray Dalio

427. “It is a fundamental law of nature that you get stronger only by doing difficult things.”

— Ray Dalio

428. “Be an imperfectionist. Perfectionists spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of the important things.”

— Ray Dalio

429. “Recognize that while most people prefer compliments, accurate criticism is more valuable. You’ve heard the expression “no pain no gain.”

— Ray Dalio

430. “My family, my extended family of co-workers, and my work have all been extremely important to me.”

— Ray Dalio

431. “Encounters like these have taught me that human greatness and terribleness are not correlated with wealth or other conventional measures of success.”

— Ray Dalio

432. “Inexperienced people can have great ideas too, sometimes far better ones than more experienced people.”

— Ray Dalio

433. “Acknowledging your weaknesses is not the same as surrendering to them. It’s the first step toward overcoming them. The pains you are feeling are “growing pains” that will test your character and reward you as you push through them.”

— Ray Dalio

434. “The brains that we were born with had learned that snakes are dangerous and flowers are not.”

— Ray Dalio

435. “If conflicts got resolved before they became acute, there wouldn’t be any heroes.”

— Ray Dalio

436. “El trabajo y las relaciones significativos eran, y son, mis objetivos principales, y lo subordinaba todo a ellos. Ganar dinero era una consecuencia accidental de lo anterior.”

— Ray Dalio

437. “Gaining open-mindedness doesn’t mean losing assertiveness. In fact, because it increases one’s odds of being right, it should increase one’s confidence.”

— Ray Dalio

438. “Most people call something bad if it is bad for them or bad for those they empathize with, ignoring the greater good.”

— Ray Dalio

439. “It takes a genius to make it simple.” Think of Picasso. He.”

— Ray Dalio

440. “I have tried to convey the approach that worked for me – an idea meritocracy in which meaningful work and meaningful relationships are the goals and radical truth and radical transparency are the ways of achieving them – so that you can decide what, if any of it, is of use to you.”

— Ray Dalio

441. “I got a lot out of my bad times, not just because they gave me mistakes to learn from but also because they helped me find out who my real friends were – the friends who would be with me through thick and thin.”

— Ray Dalio

442. “Don’t try to find solutions yet. Your focus in this step is strictly on listing the problems.”

— Ray Dalio

443. “So I learned to be radically open-minded to allow others to point out what I might be missing.”

— Ray Dalio

444. “Aristotle defined tragedy as a terrible outcome arising from a person’s fatal flaw – a flaw that, had it been fixed, instead would have led to a wonderful outcome.”

— Ray Dalio

445. “Evolve or die. This evolutionary cycle is not just for people but for countries, companies, economies – for everything. And it is naturally self-correcting as a whole, though not necessarily for its parts.”

— Ray Dalio

446. “Go to the pain rather than avoid it.”

— Ray Dalio

447. “His advice has helped me in my planning for Bridgewater’s future. For example, when I asked him about checks and balances of power, he pointed to Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system. I took his advice to heart as I set out to improve Bridgewater’s governance model.”

— Ray Dalio

448. “But a note of caution is in order too: When thoughts and instructions come to me from my subconscious, rather than acting on them immediately, I have gotten into the habit of examining them with my conscious, logical mind.”

— Ray Dalio

449. “We diagnosed why in the same way an engineer would diagnose why a machine is operating suboptimally so it could be reengineered to perform better.”

— Ray Dalio

450. “The worst thing you can be is a phony, because if you’re a phony you will lose people’s trust.”

— Ray Dalio