Take a photo of a barcode or cover
dunguyen 's review for:
Principles: Life and Work
by Ray Dalio
This was a fairly dense read. That was my first thought as the book is incredibly crammed of the wisdom of Ray Dalio who's one of the most successful hedge fund managers. The book is divided into two parts, life and work and deals with Dalio's principles or values for both. The life principles were the most interesting for me and I enjoyed reading about his life and the principles he drew of them. One issue I found was that it read a bit too much of hindsight bias, that the principles he has now from a lifetime of experience was created from every single mistake that he made during his life. Did he never have a day where he didn't learn some insight of that day? Anyway the principles themselves are quite sensible. If you read enough self-help books as I have there's nothing quite new about any of this.
For work principles it's a different story. A lot of the organizational principles noted here and the descriptions of the implementation is simply a manual of how they work in Bridgewater. Which is interesting but then again, it's a sample size of 1 so while most of it sounds like common sense, some other principles just seems very specific and perhaps hard to replicate. Dalio does caution that it's not necessarily all of it that needs to be implemented but it's still hard to not think that perhaps he thinks that Bridgewater is the pinnacle of work.
Overall the book is chockfull of interesting content although it's a complete slog to get through and it repeats itself so many times as the principles are organized after main principles but there's themes going through the book that cause a lot of the repetition.
For work principles it's a different story. A lot of the organizational principles noted here and the descriptions of the implementation is simply a manual of how they work in Bridgewater. Which is interesting but then again, it's a sample size of 1 so while most of it sounds like common sense, some other principles just seems very specific and perhaps hard to replicate. Dalio does caution that it's not necessarily all of it that needs to be implemented but it's still hard to not think that perhaps he thinks that Bridgewater is the pinnacle of work.
Overall the book is chockfull of interesting content although it's a complete slog to get through and it repeats itself so many times as the principles are organized after main principles but there's themes going through the book that cause a lot of the repetition.