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jackwwang 's review for:
Principles: Life and Work
by Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio, founder of the largest and arguably most successful hedge fund in the world, tells the story of his life, and shares his approach to work, building organizations, dealing with people, and life in general. Is it a biography? Is it Self help? A life coach in book for? Business and org theory? Yes.
His life story is in many ways, a bit dull, at least in the way that it's told. It's work hard, success, work hard, more success, with a handful of failures which Dalio duly learns life lessons from. Through his story though we get a peak into Dalio's worldview, which in a nutshell is, reductive materialist humanism with a healthy dose of sunny glass-half-full optimism. Dalio worships reason and critical thought, these are to Dalio the hammers, and the world is made of nails. As such he breezily applies his formula (set goals, identify problems, diagnose root causes, design plan, execute) to everything. Implicit (actually explicitly, he actually says so), is his belief that there is nothing that cannot be understood with enough resources and diligence. He writes at one point if there were a computer large enough with enough data about the world, it will be able to predict the future perfectly. Everything therefore, to Dalio, is a machine, with understandable inputs and outputs. Company? In goes people and culture, out comes products, services, profits. Human beings? In goes genetics, environment, food, learning, out comes everything life gives us. He’s not wrong, but the outlook is so coldly materialist... determinist? Fatalism? Or maybe naively empirical. It's his conviction that the world is fundamentally knowable, that although he recognizes what he is ignorant of, those shadows are just shadows where knowledge has not yet penetrated, in his mind there is no such thing as unknowable mysteries, this makes the world that much more... approachable? It energizes you to engage the world and to solve it like a game, but in its reductionism I can’t help but imagine it reduces ones picture of the world from hr technicolor that the mysterious adds, to a colder empirical greyscale rendering. Another disturbing aspect is that some of Dalio's musings start to sound a lot like social darwinism when he talks about his admiration for the evolutionary process.
The second half is geared more towards answering: how does one build and maintain a truly meritocratic organization. There are plenty of interesting ideas here, and they are all at their core simple (although often powerful) ideas, but at the end of the day what Dalio leaves unstated, is that not all (or even most) organizations SHOULD be, or would benefit from, functioning as the type of radical meritocracy he cherishes. Also a fair amount of his advice is really just lean management theory restated in different works.
Dalio's advice is also often specific and practical in unexpected ways. He gives oddly specific timelines, like establishing 18 months as how long it takes to practice and change a habit, or that it takes 6-12 months of close contact to learn what a person is like.
A couple of principles that I found especially thought-provoking:
Beware of false binary choices (there's usually a third way for the creative)
Realize that you are both everything and nothing
Weight second and third-order consequences
Spend lavishly on time to getting in sync (time up front to get on the same page with someone you're working with)
2-minute rule: to avoid interruptions, give people 2 minutes to explain their thinking before jumping in
For complex decisions, a group of 3-5 is better than less or more
Be generous and expect generosity from others
Everyone thinks what they do is more important than it is
Assign people the job of perceiving problems (quality assurance should be independent from making the widget)
Don't start with generalizations, be specific
Organize departments by goals not functions, and avoid matrixed orgs
His life story is in many ways, a bit dull, at least in the way that it's told. It's work hard, success, work hard, more success, with a handful of failures which Dalio duly learns life lessons from. Through his story though we get a peak into Dalio's worldview, which in a nutshell is, reductive materialist humanism with a healthy dose of sunny glass-half-full optimism. Dalio worships reason and critical thought, these are to Dalio the hammers, and the world is made of nails. As such he breezily applies his formula (set goals, identify problems, diagnose root causes, design plan, execute) to everything. Implicit (actually explicitly, he actually says so), is his belief that there is nothing that cannot be understood with enough resources and diligence. He writes at one point if there were a computer large enough with enough data about the world, it will be able to predict the future perfectly. Everything therefore, to Dalio, is a machine, with understandable inputs and outputs. Company? In goes people and culture, out comes products, services, profits. Human beings? In goes genetics, environment, food, learning, out comes everything life gives us. He’s not wrong, but the outlook is so coldly materialist... determinist? Fatalism? Or maybe naively empirical. It's his conviction that the world is fundamentally knowable, that although he recognizes what he is ignorant of, those shadows are just shadows where knowledge has not yet penetrated, in his mind there is no such thing as unknowable mysteries, this makes the world that much more... approachable? It energizes you to engage the world and to solve it like a game, but in its reductionism I can’t help but imagine it reduces ones picture of the world from hr technicolor that the mysterious adds, to a colder empirical greyscale rendering. Another disturbing aspect is that some of Dalio's musings start to sound a lot like social darwinism when he talks about his admiration for the evolutionary process.
The second half is geared more towards answering: how does one build and maintain a truly meritocratic organization. There are plenty of interesting ideas here, and they are all at their core simple (although often powerful) ideas, but at the end of the day what Dalio leaves unstated, is that not all (or even most) organizations SHOULD be, or would benefit from, functioning as the type of radical meritocracy he cherishes. Also a fair amount of his advice is really just lean management theory restated in different works.
Dalio's advice is also often specific and practical in unexpected ways. He gives oddly specific timelines, like establishing 18 months as how long it takes to practice and change a habit, or that it takes 6-12 months of close contact to learn what a person is like.
A couple of principles that I found especially thought-provoking:
Beware of false binary choices (there's usually a third way for the creative)
Realize that you are both everything and nothing
Weight second and third-order consequences
Spend lavishly on time to getting in sync (time up front to get on the same page with someone you're working with)
2-minute rule: to avoid interruptions, give people 2 minutes to explain their thinking before jumping in
For complex decisions, a group of 3-5 is better than less or more
Be generous and expect generosity from others
Everyone thinks what they do is more important than it is
Assign people the job of perceiving problems (quality assurance should be independent from making the widget)
Don't start with generalizations, be specific
Organize departments by goals not functions, and avoid matrixed orgs