Ray Dalio “is an American billionaire investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. Dalio is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds.” In his book, titled ‘Principles‘, Dalio articulates the principles (surprising, right?) that allowed him to become the man he is today, as well as to build one of the most successful businesses in the world. The book includes three parts, the first is author’s autobiography, the second enumerates his principles related to life in general, and the third, the largest part, expounds the principles related to business and management.
Thankfully, both principles parts have a short and a long versions. Personally, I read only a part of the autobiography (then I got bored and moved on), personal principles completely, and the brief variant of the working principles.
The autobiography part is optional; the author himself encourages the reader to skip it if he sees fit. From what I managed to read some lessons could be drawn, but all in all there’s too much water.
The other two parts are the complete opposite: there is no water at all, it is basically a manual for a person to go by in life as well as in work, at that which principles to abide and which to ignore is entirely at a person’s discretion; it’s not a rigid system where you take all, or take none – it’s a flexible set of parameters that can be adapted to a particular person or particular situation.
All the things Dalio writes in the personal principles part I managed to come to on my own, meaning he makes a lot of sense all in all. For me it wasn’t much use, for reason stated above, but it would definitely be of great interest to many other people, for all the author’s statements are not only correct and useful, but well formulated and quite precise, too. That being said, I’m not sure they could be perceived fully by a person, whose life experience does not allow him or her to comprehend those things; I have a suspicion that simply reading those principles on paper won’t make a lot of difference by itself, other than, perhaps, providing the reader with a guidebook – but then again, it should be taken seriously for that to happen.
As for the working principles, most of them have to do with building a successful company, which in Dalio’s opinion, basically comes down to creating a proper corporate atmosphere, and chosing the right people. He writes a lot about both these things, as well as some others – this 3rd part is the largest in the book. I read only a short version of it, for I have nowhere to apply those thing at the current moment, but even from that I could tell that here Dalio, too, makes a lot of sense. In fact, I believe, this book can be generally used by achieving businessmen who want to build an efficiently working mechanism of a company.
At the same time reading this book won’t be a lot of fun – although written in vivid, breathing language, it’s way too practical to enjoy. In other words, it’s an instrument, not a source of knowledge.
P.S.: Russian translation of the book kind of sucks. Clearly, the translator was rushed into producing the result, and that affected the quality of the text very much negatively. It’s still readable, though, so – recommended (only to be used for intended purpose).
Author: Ray Dalio
Original language: English
Translator: Yuliya Konstantinova
Published: 2017 (2018)
Reading period: October 2018
Cognitive quality: 4+ out of 5
Entertaining quality: 3- out of 5
Links: (author) | (book)
(v. 4.5)
®shoomow, 2018
Cinegmatic 