Ray Dalio AMA

It's a little bit cultish.

I’m a real person and I read the book and I enjoyed it. I will say any “self-help” style book like his just has quotes like that and you can never tell if they are legit.

If you’ve read the “hard thing about hard things”, i found it pretty similar. It’s a mix of an autobiography as well as listing out his main life principles. It gets repetitive sometimes and I wish he’d get more specific in the details but overall I recommend it. Especially if you are in some sort of leadership or management position

Principles no one is actually using - “In the end, my search failed to produce a single organization that adopted the principles in a Bridgewater-like manner” https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b184ggn6dd6090...

This is in stark contrast with John Doerr’s recent book, Measure What Matters, which is only examples of implementation.

I had a personal impression that the PDF which was supposedly internal and then released into a publicly accessible host was more substantial than the book, which was disappointing. There were a couple of value-addeds that let me know that if Dalio's honest, then I'm going in the right direction - like using a cognitive assistant to coordinate my thinking. Yet there's a lot of implementation-level blanks to be filled which require some searching to find adequate procedural advice.

But you're right all around. There probably wouldn't be anything that will severely compromise a trade since to build up the model towards that trade, even if it follows some vaguely general learning procedure like Ray espouses, will have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of labor costs and would have millions of dollars of opportunity costs on the line if people got in on the action. Why risk it?

Its a good book, with some useful insights, some interesting vignettes from the author's well lived life. He comes across as someone who genuinely wants to help others by teaching the system he developed - which he obviously regards as a key to his success and happiness. I don't see why being a billionaire should make him reticent to do this.

Mr Dalio wrote the book because he is interested in optimizing business results, and learning how people work together best and why.

If you’ve started a business, or manage people in a business, this book is worth more than many MBA courses.

The fact that a person with his exceptional track record decided to share much of the Bridgewater “secret sauce” is rare, and a real treat.

I read it, and thought it was really good. I took a bunch of notes on it and wrote down some of my favorite principles. Here are two and the notes I took on them:

1. Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine; and know you have ability to alter machines to produce better outcomes.

- distinguish between you as the designer of your machine, and you as a worker within your machine

- it's much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it

"To be successful, the "designer/manager you" has to be objective about what the "worker you" is really like, not believing in him more than he deserves, or putting him in jobs he shouldn't be in. Instead of having this strategic perspective, most people operate emotionally and in the moment; their lives are a series of undirected emotional experiences, going from one thing to the next."

2. reality exists at different levels; each gives valuable perspectives

- we're constantly seeing things at different levels and navigating between them

  - > i want meaningful work
  - >> i want to be a doctor
  - >>> i need to go to med school
  - >>>> i need to get good science grades
  - >>>>> i need to stay in tonight and study

- when line of reasoning is jumbled, it's often because speaker has gotten caught up in below the line details without connecting them back to major points

- only go below the line if it's necessary to illustrate something about a major points, and make sure you synthesize and tie things back

I was struggling with hiring and growing my team and Principles has a great section that helped me out.

Hire for values, abilities, and skills in that order. I went from having no idea what I was doing to having a decent blueprint.

He also writes that when you find the right person for the role there is almost an audible click. Whether for better or for worse, I am now always on the lookout for that click.

The book is great because it's very well organized with an index.

You can also see for yourself the key points in this pdf: https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt

Thanks. My first question was going to be: Who are you?

> stolen from Googles ... Wikipedia

Stolen from Wikipedia then.

Two corrections. It's "The Lessons of History", and it covers 5000 years, not 500.

> A: If you have my book Principles, there’s one about this idea, Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want.

Sounds obvious but if you've ever worked for an organization or with an individual that prioritizes by buckets or labels ('Urgent', 'Extremely Urgent') versus a queue (a Trello column)†, then you've seen how non-obvious and pervasive this can be.

Agreed, a more detailed answer may have been more useful.

†Full disclosure: I have.

dalio’s best advice has nothing to do with financial investment. it’s organizational dynamics

> A: Think about how to rotate your portfolio to buy that which is cheap and sell that which is expensive.

Buy low, sell high. How enlightening this guy is...

A: I’d just dive in and place bets know how to learn from my experiences. I wrote about how to do that in my book, which is largely about how to convert mistakes into learned principles that work, and how to save these principles and use them in computers so that your thinking is not constrained by your brain’s capacity to juggle a lot of things at the same time.

There is no better learning than that which comes from experiences and quality reflections on those experiences. It doesn’t matter whether you do it at a hedge fund, or any other place, but I would recommend that you do it around other smart people who help you brainstorm on the best answer.

You've selectively trimmed down his responses to the most generic-sounding lines.

The general theme in the AMA is to jump in, accept you'll make mistakes, think critically about what succeeds and fails, and leverage technology to automatically apply what you learn.

Or, from another article, "working for what he wants, not what others want him to do, coming up with independent opinions and testing them on intelligent people, being wary about overconfidence, and reflecting on his mistakes."

This is the antithesis of "expect a billionaire hedge fund manager to spoon feed you specific investing strategies on a Reddit AMA."

I'm sorry but this is superb advice, all three. It took me most of my life to learn to prioritize. He might have expanded a bit (focus is always about saying no, not about what you elevate), but he's right in all three cases.