Ray Dalio on Work Quotes

"Don’t worry about looking good—worry about achieving your goals."

"Think for yourself while being radically open-minded."

"A great organization has both great people and a great culture."

"If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not smart, you are not going to keep it."

"Manage as someone who’s designing and operating a machine to achieve a goal."

"The person who is willing to look at their own mistakes is the person who will improve."

"The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down."

"Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life."

"Pain + Reflection = Progress."

"To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what's true."

"If you don’t look back at yourself a year ago and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was,’ then you haven’t learned much."

"To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be an independent thinker."

"Look at the patterns of those mistakes to see if they have a cause."

"The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be."

"Work is either 1) a way to make the money you need to enjoy your life or 2) a way to achieve a mission you’re passionate about."

"Meditation has been the single most important reason for whatever success I’ve had."

"Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what is really true."

"Don’t let yourself be a victim of your circumstances."

"I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want."

"Hire right, because the penalties of hiring wrong are huge."

"Triangulate your view with believable people who are willing to disagree."

"Create a machine that works. A great routine is a machine for progress."

"The quality of your life depends on the quality of your decisions."

"Create a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them."

"Reality is a beautiful machine."

"I just want to be right—I don’t care if the right answer comes from me."

"Great partnerships come from sharing both values and interests."

"Great people are those who have high-character and great capabilities."

"Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and change."

"Strive to achieve a lot and strive to fail well."

"Weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions to them."

"I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well."

"Mental models are the ways that we think things work. They are the engines that drive our decision-making."