Page 153 - Ray Dalio - Principles

The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly. If you’re
constantly learning and improving, your evolutionary process
will look like the one that’s ascending. Do it poorly and it will
look like what you see on the left, or worse.

I believe that:

1.5 Evolving is life’s greatest

accomplishment and its greatest

reward.

It is instinctually that way, which is why most of us feel the
pull of it—in other words, we instinctively want to get better
at things and have created and evolved technology to help us.
History has shown that all species will either go extinct or
evolve into other species, though with our limited time

window that is hard for us to see. But we do know that what
we call mankind was simply the result of DNA evolving into a
new form about two hundred thousand years ago, and we
know that mankind will certainly either go extinct or evolve
into a higher state. I personally believe there is a good chance
man will begin to evolve at an accelerating pace with the help
of man-made technologies that can analyze vast amounts of

data and “think” faster and better than we can. I wonder how
many centuries it will take for us to evolve into a higher-level
species that will be much closer to omniscience than we are
now—if we don’t destroy ourselves first.

One of the great marvels of nature is how the whole system,
which is full of individual organisms acting in their own self-
interest and without understanding or guiding what’s going on,

can create a beautifully operating and evolving whole. While
I’m not an expert at this, it seems that it’s because evolution
has produced a) incentives and interactions that lead to
individuals pursuing their own interests and resulting in the
advancement of the whole, b) the natural selection process,

and c) rapid experimentation and adaptation.