đź5 Principles For Financial Success By Billionaire Investor Ray Dalio
âAbove all else, I want you to think for yourself.â
Ray Dalio is an American billionaire who founded Bridgewater Associates â the worldâs largest hedge fund which manages over $160 billion.
Itâs fair to say we can learn a great deal from Ray Dalio when it comes to achieving financial and professional success.
Fortunately, Ray Dalio has shared his most important lessons and principles for success in his best-selling book, Principles.

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Fail Forward
âIf youâre not failing, youâre not pushing your limits, and if youâre not pushing your limits, youâre not maximizing your potential,â said Ray Dalio.
When you look at the most successful investors and business owners, you quickly see one thing they have in common:
They all failed a bunch of times â and they got better because of each failure.
School taught us that failure is bad. If you made a mistake, youâd get a bad grade. This wired our brains to avoid failure at all costs.
But failure is actually how we learn, grow, and evolve. As Ray Dalio said, âMistakes are the path to progress.â
Failures contain valuable lessons and unique insights that make us smarter, better, and stronger. Thatâs why we should see each failure as a stepping stone to success.
As said in Principles:
âIf you treat mistakes as learning opportunities that yield rapid improvements you should be excited by them. But if you treat them as bad things, you will make yourself and others miserable, and you wonât grow.â
Instead of fearing failure, we should embrace it.
Fail, but fail forward.
Upgrade Your Habits
Habits can make or break your life. As Ray Dalio said in his book Principles:
âChoose your habits well. Habit is probably the most powerful tool in your brainâs toolbox.â
Your daily habits determine your level of success in your career, health, and finances.
So if you want better results in any area of your life, youâll need to choose better daily habits.
When it comes to building wealth, here are some powerful habits to consider:
Investing consistently
Working on a side-hustle
Learning high-income skills
Stop making impulsive purchases
Following a monthly expense budget
Asking $30,000 questions, not $3 questions
Drop Your Ego
âIt is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning,â said Ray Dalio.
For example, rather than reading a few investing books or hiring a financial planner, people with big egos think they are capable of picking winning stocks themselves.
More often than not, they end up losing a lot of their money.
The most successful people, however, arenât afraid to admit they donât know something. They arenât afraid to ask for help.
And thatâs precisely why they advance in their life and career.
âSmart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers.â â Ray Dalio
Drop your ego. Itâs holding you back from reaching the next level.
Think Independently
âAbove all else, I want you to think for yourself, to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true and 3) what to do about it,â said Ray Dalio.
Whether weâre talking about investing, career advice, or anything elseâŚ
⌠Donât blindly follow the news.
⌠Donât blindly follow the herd.
⌠Donât blindly follow what your friends/colleagues say.
Learn to think for yourself.
This is especially true for financial markets, where everyone has an opinion/prediction on where the economy is going and which stocks are going to do well.
But as Ray Dalio said, âTo make money in the markets, you have to think independently and be humble.â
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Two Different Wealth Mindsets
Ray Dalio said, âIf you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.â
For example, building a business requires an âaggressiveâ mindset. Youâll need to take risks, push yourself, and convince others of your products and services.
Negotiating a raise or applying for a job at a higher-paying company also requires an âaggressiveâ mindset. Youâll need to have the courage to ask for what you believe youâre worth.
But keeping your money requires a different approach â a more defensive one.
To protect your wealth, youâre usually better off investing in proven assets such as index funds, bonds, and real estate instead of high-risk start-ups, small-cap stocks, or cryptocurrencies.
Where making money requires going on the offense and seeking risk, keeping your money requires going on the defense and mitigating risk.
CONTRIBUTED BY Jari Roomer
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