Notes on Ray Dalio's Principles: Life and Work

I recently finished reading Ray Dalio's book Principles: Life and Work. I took notes along the way, which you can find below. My Kindle highlights can be found here.

• Dalio's principles are what I would call heuristics—stress-tested shortcuts for problems matching a pattern.
• Much of what Dalio describes bears striking similarity to Amazon's Leadership Principles.
• Dalio mentions encountering the "fork-in-the-road" of how to handle two seemingly essential but mutually exclusive options: 1) being radically truthful with each other including probing to bring our problems and weaknesses to the surface so we could deal with them forthrightly and 2) having happy and satisfied employees. Dalio states that when faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible.
• I had high hopes for this book based on (a) the interview with Dalio on The Tim Ferriss Show, and (b) the strong introduction in the book. The book introduction (along with title) primes the reader to feel like they're about to delve into a timeless work on universal truths. The rest of the book, although thought provoking, did not feel as axiomatic. Early in the book however, Dalio is very up front that this book consists of his principles, not all of which will be universally applicable.
• Dalio comes across as a little "fire happy". For example: [most people] understand that the chances their job will not work out are higher than normal, but they embrace the risk because the upside of succeeding is huge relative to the downside of having it not work out. Dalio doesn't seem to directly address the risk this might present to Bridgewater's recruitment pipeline, having a company with a reputation for higher than average firings. E.g. would talented people who would have to relocate (potentially internationally) to work at Bridgewater be less inclined to apply, knowing they would face a higher than average risk of being fired? Are the upsides sufficiently great to cancel this risk out? Does the reputation for higher than average firings increase the company's desirability to some job candidates, based on it increasing the company's perceived excellence?
• Interesting data point: Bridgewater gets luke-warm ratings on Glassdoor: 3.4/5 stars, 61% recommend to a friend, 77% approve of CEO. Caveat: not clear exactly how much Glassdoor reviews impact a company's perceived reputation to potential employee's, or how accurately they reflect the typical experience across all current employees.
• Dalio presents the notion of an idea meritocracy, built on individuals' believability. Dalio clearly distinguishes this from a democracy. In a democracy, everybody gets an equal vote, irrespective of competence. In an idea meritocracy, everybody's individual vote is weighted by their believability.
• Dalio suggests that you should think of yourself as two machines. One is the you that actions things. The other is the you that tweaks the operation of the actioning machine to achieve a desired outcome. Regarding the latter, I would term this "dispassionate introspection".
• Dalio discusses probing multiple levels deep, until a root cause is identified. Interestingly, Dalio believes that individual people should be called out explicitly during this process, e.g. people should avoid using the royal "we". This is in contrast to a number of technology companies which aim for blameless post-mortems.
• Dalio is fond of pyschometrics. IIRC, pyschometrics as a field is fraught with dubious results. Would have to revisit.
• One of Dalio's work principles is literally "once a decision is made, everyone should get behind it even though individuals may stil disagree.". cf. Amazon's Disagree and Commit.
• "Double do" rather than "double check". Seems applicable for high stakes actions.
• Dalio claims that great people have great character and great capabilities. Dalio goes on to claim those with one but not the other are dangerous. Reminds me of Warren Buffett's quote that you want people who have integrity, intelligence and energy—if they don't have integrity though, then you want them to be dumb and lazy.
• Dalio states that radical transparency reduces office politics/bad behavior, as that's more likely to take place behind closed doors.