Page 124 - Ray Dalio - Principles

I feel deeply connected to nature, especially the oceans.
The oceans are our world’s greatest asset, covering 72 percent
of its surface and comprising 99 percent of its livable space. It

thrills me to support scientists who are exploring the oceans
and media showing them in the incredible environments they
visit. I’m on a mission to make clear that ocean exploration is
even more important and exciting than space exploration so
that our oceans get more support and will be more sensibly
managed. To add to my excitement, my son Mark is a wildlife
filmmaker who shares my passion, so we get to pursue it

together.

Matt’s passion is to bring inexpensive, effective computing
to the developing world as a way of expanding and improving
education and health care. Paul’s passion is mental health and
his wife’s is fighting climate change. Devon is more focused
on his career than on philanthropy now, but his wife cares
deeply about animal welfare. Our family continues to support

special-needs children in China, as well as an institute that
teaches best practices to Chinese philanthropists. We also
support the teaching of meditation to children in stressful
environments and to veterans with PTSD, cutting-edge heart
research, microfinance and other social enterprises, and much
more.

We view our donations as investments and want to make

sure that we have high philanthropic returns on our money. So
another big question we wrestle with is how to measure those
returns. It’s much easier to measure efficiency in a business by
seeing how much its revenue exceeds its cost. Because of this,
we developed an attraction to sustainable social enterprises.

Still, I saw that so many philanthropic investments could pay
off economically as well as socially, and it tormented me that
our society passes them up.

We also wrestled with how big our organization should be
and what governance controls we should have in order to
ensure the quality of our philanthropic decision making. I
approached these decisions the same way I explain in Work

Principles—by creating formalized principles and policies for
our decision making. For example, because we are bombarded
with more requests for grants than we can intelligently look at,