262 Quotes by Ray Dalio

The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness.

It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value – its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. 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. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.

I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.

Clearly assign responsibilities. Eliminate any confusion about expectations and ensure that people view their failures to complete their tasks and achieve their goals as personal failures.

In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.

If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.

To test if you are worrying too much about looking good, observe how you feel when you find out you’ve made a mistake or don’t know something.

If you just keep doing, you will burn out and grind to a halt.