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Ray Dalio

What We Can Learn From Ray Dalio?

Do you wish you could figure out your life- from a newly found thinking superpower and then go on to have a better life?

Or, do you think your life could be better if you only knew how to make better decisions?

If thoughts like these run through your mind, then you are a part of the 8 billion people living who have these same thoughts.

Life is unique for its endless supply of problems, many self-made. We all live with these problems; new ones resurface when some of them are solved.

If you do master yourself and can avert problems that come from your decisions completely- you still have to face the ones that come from no fault of yours.

The truth is a life without any form of problem isn’t realistic. Problems in themselves are needed. and if you think they leave you helpless and weak, then you're wrong. Problems make us strong!

Living without problems is in itself a bigger problem. A life without problems will be empty and boring.

Imagine how it would feel, bunking from your office and doing nothing at home for a few days. You would soon feel the urge to meet your colleagues and gossip with them, leading to feelings of tension from talking about office politics. In other words, you would create a problem for yourself.

Hence the key is not to wish for life- one created where there are no problems. The goal should be to develop and build ourselves into problem-solving geniuses.

We don't need to be extra smart or have an excellent IQ to solve these problems, but we need the insight to go through them, learn from them and get ahead in our life journey.

The easiest way to learn how to solve problems is to study the lives of so-called successful people to understand how they solve their own problems.

I believe in learning from other people’s lives instead of wishing I had their life- irrespective of how beautiful it is.

And here, let us look closely at the life of Ray Dalio.

Learnings from the life of Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio is one of the most successful hedge Fund Managers in the World. His current net worth is over 17 billion dollars which is continuously increasing year by year, if not day by day.

By the time you read this, his net worth may be different due to market dynamics, but he will still be one of the world's wealthiest people.

So, how did he get to be so successful?

I think the easiest and most trustworthy way to get an exact answer is by reading about him. And if you get a book written by himself, it will do wonders. Interestingly, Ray Dalio has written several books,
In his book Principles for Success, Ray Dalio shares his life and struggles. He came from a humble beginning.
What he has now, he got through a lifelong journey of failing continuously, learning from failures, and increasing his chances by not repeatedly making the same mistake that caused him to fail.

When we fail, we fill ourselves with self-doubts. We start punishing ourselves, and some people even kill themselves. If you do this, you're an Instant loser in this world. You will have no respect.

We often forget that the best path or the best moments of our lives are yet to come, and what we need to do is get up, accept reality, and do it just one more time. And this time, with better strategies, a better mindset.

In Ray Dalio's words, terrible things will happen to all of us; they will either profoundly improve or ruin us depending on how we handle them.

Ray Dalio experienced similar things in 1982 when he lost everything he had to market.
His employees had to leave him because he could no longer pay them. He had nothing left to start with and had to borrow from his father to pay his bills. It looked like he would never recover again, and his dream of running a successful business had to come to a complete stop.

It was something he never imagined. He was not ready for it. People with such severe conditions often fall prey to depression.
However, Ray did not give in to depression or thoughts of killing himself. He built back his fortune from scratch.

Ray Dalio's life is an excellent example of staying calm regardless of the conditions. We may face situations when it looks like we're ruined, and now all the paths are closed.

Ray Dalio's life experience also teaches us that success never comes to anyone easily. You have to fail, plan better after failure, try again, fail again, fail better, and keep failing until all the failures open up a path to success.

Ray Dalio, even with so many hardships in his early life, has achieved what many people can only dream of.

  • Ray Dalio and his team predicted the 2008 market crash and avoided investing in securities with a lot of debt in their portfolios. This decision kept them ahead of their rivals, and while other funds lost money, Dalio's investors and subscribers lost the least and even earned.
  • He earned close to 2 billion dollar compensation in a year because his hedge fund earned a whopping 14 % returns in 2018.
  • He is one of the frontier philanthropists who is ahead of his time helping people in need. His family has donated over 6 billion dollars to various charitable foundations throughout his life. This goodwill gesture to the community is one of his greatest contributions to improving the lives of people around him.

Anyone who is so much successful will be busy all the time. Still, Ray Dalio gets time to write books and share his knowledge Some of the other most popular books of Ray Dalio are:

Principles: Your Guided Journal: 

Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises

Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

Principles

So, are you ready to build yourself to be a problem solver?