Page 162 - Ray Dalio - Principles

1.9 Own your outcomes.

For the most part, life gives you so many decisions to make
and so many opportunities to recover from your mistakes that,
if you handle them well, you can have a terrific life. Of course,
sometimes there are major influences on the quality of our
lives that come from things beyond our control—the

circumstances we are born into, accidents and illnesses, and so
forth—but for the most part even the worst circumstances can
be made better with the right approach. For example, a friend
of mine dove into a swimming pool, hit his head, and became
a quadriplegic. But he approached his situation well and
became as happy as anybody else, because there are many
paths to happiness.

My point is simply this: Whatever circumstances life brings
you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if
you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead
of complaining about things being beyond your control.
Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control,”
and studies consistently show that people who have it
outperform those who don’t.

So don’t worry about whether you like your situation or
not. Life doesn’t give a damn about what you like. It’s up to
you to connect what you want with what you need to do to get
it and then find the courage to carry it through. In the next
chapter I will show you the 5-Step Process that helped me
learn about reality and evolve.

1.10 Look at the machine from the

higher level.

Our uniquely human ability to look down from a higher level
doesn’t apply just to understanding reality and the cause-effect
relationships underlying it; it also applies to looking down on
yourself and those around you. I call this ability to rise above
your own and others’ circumstances and objectively look

down on them “higher-level thinking.” Higher-level thinking