#43 Ray Dalio: Principles: Life and Work

**David Senra** (0:00)
Before I begin telling you what I think, I want to establish that I'm a dumb shit who doesn't know much relative to what I need to know. Whatever success I've had in my life has more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know. The most important thing I learned is an approach to life based on principles that helps me find out what's true and what to do about it.
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that get you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
Every day, each one of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to.
Without principles, we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time.
If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result.
Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success.
To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained. Unfortunately, most people can't do that, and it is very rare for people to write their principles down and share them. That is a shame. I would love to know what principles guided Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill, Leonardo da Vinci, and others so I could clearly understand what they were going after and how they achieved it and could compare their different approaches.
My hope is that reading this book will prompt you and others to discover your own principles from wherever you think is best and ideally write them down.
Okay, so that is from the introduction of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Principles, Life and Work by Ray Dalio.
So I found this book because eventually online and other various podcasts, the praise for this book was just so effusive that I finally had to relent and read it. I experienced something very similar with the founder of Nike's book, Shoe Dog, and I usually find that when there's like a crescendo of positive responses from something, whether it be a podcast or a book, that it's usually worth at least testing out and seeing that if I agree with that. And so similar to Shoe Dog, Principles did not disappoint.
Actually, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. If you're new here, welcome to Founders. My name is David, and the premise of this podcast is simple. Every week, I read a biography or autobiography of someone that has built a company, and I share the ideas that I learned in the book that you can hopefully use in your own life.
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