Principles In Action

The app idea is great! Kudos to Ray and the dev team great work! The app is super useful as an alternative to the book to navigate principles and find what’s relevant to you when you’re dealing a particular situation. I think Ray Dalio is really trying to make it easy as possible to benefit from his huge experience which is practical and can be applied to anyone’s life no matter their background or industry they work in, and for free! This guy achieved a lot and now he is really focused on simply helping others find wisdom and answers to achieve their own goals too. Wonderful contribution to society, those who use principle know how useful this can be.

Great content. The multimedia aspect really enhances it. BUT...you can’t export anything. All the principles I added and all the notes I made are stuck inside the app. For content you are supposed to use to grow and expand your life, this is a really big negative. So far, I haven’t found a way to work around it effectively. The content and ideas are outstanding. Ray Dalio really has done a great job framing, clarifying and communicating his principles and other groundbreaking ideas. Having those ideas, and anything I add, stuck in the app is a huge limitation. I doubt Ray would like it if he was on this side....

In _Principles_, Dalio synthesizes business management, psychology (even neuroscience), and ethics in a rigorous way, based on decades running a large, successful organization. It was startling to recognize the gap between the obvious wisdom of some of his principles (be upfront about your and others’ weaknesses) and how businesses actually tend to operate. The sections on identifying, testing, and sorting people were great, too. Ultimately there are two ways most people and companies can benefit from the ideas in the book, I think. The first is by adopting idea-meritocratic and transparent values—it’s hard psychologically to make that leap but there aren’t that many other barriers. The second way is by transforming the organization so that every decision is highly data-driven (baseball cards, dot collector, etc)—I think operationally that way is harder to achieve and requires more resources to implement but the long-term benefits seem obvious, too.