Principles summary

You don’t have to be a professional athlete to put athletic training methods to work. In fact, thinking of life as a game can help keep you focused on getting results and reaching your goals.

This perspective can also make it easier to get through any of the bad times as well. Even the best athletes have dry spells. So it’s wise to remember that life won’t be one long winning streak. When things aren’t going perfectly, it’s best to keep calm until things turn around.

The author, Ray Dalio, is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, an investment firm that practices another of Dalio’s principles of doing business: extreme truth and transparency.

Radical truth is about making sure that important issues don’t remain hidden, which means creating an environment where employees feel free to speak their mind. This kind of transparency is a safeguard against poor decisions, since coworkers will constantly be exchanging criticisms, making improvements and catching mistakes before they happen.

Being dishonest isn’t always a malicious act. Indeed, people are often most dishonest when attempting to be kind.

Once, the author was considering promoting an employee to Department Head. He knew that many of this employee’s coworkers felt he deserved the job. However, when the author looked at the company’s performance tracking system, which contained hundreds of pieces of data on every employee, the evidence told a different story – the employee being considered for promotion simply didn’t have the right qualities for the job.

When you have a goal in place for your business, you can start to think of your employees as parts within an engine – an engine that’s powering your company, or machine, down the path toward its goal.

For the author, his goal was to provide clients with the best possible return on their investments, and he often felt like a mechanic, popping open the hood to improve the engine of his Bridgewater machine.

As you move toward your goals, it’s only a matter of time before problems arise. But there’s no reason to panic or be deterred by these bumps in the road. Developing solutions for problems is how many companies improve. In other words, most problems will end up providing fuel for your machine. 

However, if you hope to turn problems into advantages, you need to design your business so that problems get noticed and solutions get implemented as quickly as possible.