Page 136 - Ray Dalio - Principles

I believe that everything that happens comes about because of
cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time. At
the big bang, all the laws and forces of the universe were
created and propelled forward, interacting with each other over

time like a complex series of machines that work together: the
structure of galaxies, the makeup of Earth’s geography and
ecosystems, our economies and markets, and each one of us.
Individually, we are machines made up of different machines
—our circulatory systems, our nervous systems, and so on—
that produce our thoughts, our dreams, our emotions, and
every other aspect of our distinct personalities. All these

machines are evolving together to produce the reality we
encounter every day.

• Look to the patterns of those things

that affect you in order to understand

the cause-effect relationships that

drive them and to learn principles for

dealing with them effectively.

By doing this, you will begin to understand how the machinery
underlying any “another one of those” works and develop a
mental map for dealing with it. As your understanding of these

relationships grows, the essentials stand out from the blizzard
of things coming at you; you will notice which “one of those”
you are facing and instinctually apply the right principles to
help you through it. Reality, in turn, will send you loud signals
about how well your principles are working by rewarding or
punishing you, so you will learn to fine-tune them accordingly.

Having good principles for dealing with the realities we

encounter is the most important driver of how well we handle
them. I’m not saying that all people have the same encounters.
It is certainly the case that different people in different parts of
the world face different challenges. Still, most of our
encounters with reality fall under one category or another and
the number of those categories is not enormous. If you were to
write down what type of encounter you have every time you