Ray Dalio
Principles: Life & Work is a notable work by Ray Dalio, the American financier, investor, hedge fund manager, and entrepreneur.
Born on August 1, 1949, in Jackson Heights, Dalio attended Herricks High School before going on to study at LIU Post. He later completed his education at Harvard Business School. A holder of United States citizenship, he has worked across several overlapping professional roles — as an investor, a financier, a hedge fund manager, and a philanthropist — and founded Bridgewater Associates, the firm with which his name became most closely associated over the course of his career.
Dalio's role as founder of Bridgewater Associates defined the institutional shape of his professional life, and Principles: Life & Work stands as the written record he chose to place before a general readership. Alongside his work in finance, he has engaged in philanthropy, a dimension of his activity that runs alongside rather than separate from his identity as an entrepreneur and investor.
In 2025, Dalio completed his full exit from Bridgewater Associates. Following that departure, he assumed the role of chief investment officer of the Dalio Family Office, shifting the context of his work from Bridgewater to the oversight of his own family's holdings. That concrete transition — from the firm he founded to a family office operating under his name — marks the most recent chapter in a career that has encompassed founding, managing, writing, and giving.
Quotes by Ray Dalio
I'm going to give away a lot more than half my money. I'd be happy to give that to the government if the government put together programs that were like I'm giving away to charity, in which I believe the money is effectively used to help people.
I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I'll come out of it refreshed and centered and that's how I'll feel and it'll carry through the day.
If it didn't happen in your life before, then you're not paying attention you don't think it's possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.
Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it's a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.
Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
Maintain 'baseball cards' and/or 'believability matrixes' for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.
I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.
When people get at each other's throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.
In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it's disruptive and it's a problem.