Page 118 - Ray Dalio - Principles

extremely wise and extremely practical. A leading shaper of
the Chinese economy for decades who is also responsible for
eliminating corruption, he is known to be a no-nonsense man

who can be trusted to get stuff done.

Every time I go to China, we meet for sixty to ninety
minutes. We talk about what’s happening in the world, and
how that relates to thousands of years of history and the never-
changing nature of mankind. We discuss a wide range of other
topics as well, ranging from physics to artificial intelligence.
We are both keenly interested in how most everything happens

over and over again, the forces behind those patterns, and the
principles that work and don’t work in dealing with them.

I gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and
I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of
History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through
history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the

insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution
works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of
the Individual in History. All these books showed how the
same things happened over and over again throughout history.

Most of my conversations with Wang are at the principle
level; he sees the rhyme of history and puts the particulars we

speak of in that context. “Unattainable goals appeal to heroes,”
he once told me. “Capable people are those who sit there
worrying about the future. The unwise are those who worry
about nothing. If conflicts got resolved before they became
acute, there wouldn’t be any heroes.” His advice has helped
me in my planning for Bridgewater’s future. For example,
when I asked him about checks and balances of power, he
pointed to Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and

Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure
no one person is more powerful than the system. I took his
advice to heart as I set out to improve Bridgewater’s
governance model.

Every time I speak with Wang, I feel like I get closer to
cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the