One of my all-time favorite readings is “Principles” by Ray Dalio (Trades, Portfolio). I think everyone should read it, whether or not you are an investor. Mr. Dalio stated in the forward that he wanted us to think for ourselves – to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true and 3) what to do about it.
Among all the principles Dalio generously shared, the principle truth – “more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality” is the one that has the most impact on me. In this article, I’d like to share with the readers a few quotes I jogged down while reading this principle.
- Truth is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.
- I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us. For example, I have found that by looking at what is rewarded and punished and why, universally – i.e., in nature as well as in humanity – I have been able to learn more about what is “good” and “bad” than by listening to most people’s views about good and bad.
- I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature’s laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.
- Understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it (and yourself) evolve. What is bad and most punished are those things that don’t work because they are at odds with the laws of the universe and they impede evolution.
- I believe that the desire to evolve, i.e., to get better, is probably humanity’s most pervasive driving force. Enjoying your job, a craft, or your favorite sport comes from the innate satisfaction of getting better. Though most people typically think they are striving to get things (e.g., toys, better houses, money, status, etc.) that will make them happy, that is usually not the case. Instead, when we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied. It is natural for us to seek other things to seek to make the things we have better. In the process of seeking, we continue to evolve and we contribute to be evolution of all that we have contact with. The things we are striving for are just the bait to get us to chase after them in order to make us evolve, and it is the evolution and not the reward itself that matters to us and those around us.
- Self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic: more than anything else, it is pursuit of self-interest that motivates people to push themselves to do the difficult things that benefit them and that contribute to society. In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted – NOT how much they desired to make money. Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted and largely unrelated to their desire to make money. There are many people who have made a lot of money who never made making a lot of money their primary goal. Instead, they simply engage in the work that they were doing, produced what society wanted, and got rich into it. And there are many people who really wanted to make a lot of money but never produced what the society wanted and they didn’t make a lot of money. In other words, there is an excellent correlation between giving society what it wants and making money, and almost no correlation between the desire to make a lot of money and how much money one makes. I know this is true for me – I never worked to make a lot of money, and if I had I would have stopped ages ago because of the law of diminishing returns. I know that the same is true for all the successful, healthy people I know.
- Some of the most successful people are typically those who see the changing landscape and identify how to best adapt to it.
- It is extremely important to one’s happiness and success to know oneself – most importantly to understand one’s own values and abilities – and then to find the right fits. We all have things that we value that we want and we all have strengths and weaknesses that affect our paths for getting them. The most important quality that differentiates successful people from unsuccessful people is our capacity to learn and adapt to these things.
- However, typically defensive, emotional reactions – i.e., ego barriers – stand in the way of this progress. These reactions take place in the part of the brain called the amygdala. As a result of them, most people don’t like reflecting on their weaknesses even though recognizing them is an essential step toward preventing them from causing them problems. Most people especially dislike others exploring their weaknesses because it makes them feel attacked, which produces fight for flight reactions; however, having others help one find one’s weaknesses is essential because it’s very difficult to identify one’s own. Most people don’t like helping others explore their weaknesses, even though they are willing to talk about them behind their backs. For these reasons most people don’t do a good job of understanding themselves and adapting in order to get what they want most out of life. In my opinion, that is the biggest single problem of mankind because it, more than anything else, impedes people’s abilities to address all other problems and it is probably the greatest source of pain for most people.
- Aristotle defined tragedy as a bad outcome for a person because of a fatal flaw that he can’t get around. So it is tragic when people let ego barriers lead them to experience bad outcomes.
