Page 233 - Ray Dalio - Principles

marginal cost of waiting to decide. People who prioritize well
understand the following:

a. All of your “must-dos” must be above the bar before you do your “like-to-
dos.” Separate your “must-dos” from your “like-to-dos” and

don’t mistakenly slip any “like-to-dos” onto the first list.

b. Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which
is better than not having time to deal with the impor-tant things. I often
hear people say, “Wouldn’t it be good to do this or that?” It’s
likely they are being distracted from far more important things
that need to be done well.

c. Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible. It’s

the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in
terms of its likelihood and prioritized. People who can
accurately sort probabilities from possibilities are generally
strong at “practical thinking”; they’re the opposite of the
“philosopher” types who tend to get lost in clouds of
possibilities.

SHORTCUTS FOR BECOMING A

GREAT DECISION MAKER

Great decision makers don’t remember all of these steps in a

rote way and carry them out mechanically, yet they do follow
them. That’s because through time and experience they’ve
learned to do most of them reflexively, just as a baseball
player catches a fly ball without thinking about how he’s going
to do it. If they had to call each of the principles up from their

memory and then run them through their slow conscious
minds, they couldn’t possibly handle all the things that are
coming at them well. But there are a couple of things that they
do carry out consciously and you should do them too.

5.8 Simplify!

Get rid of irrelevant details so that the essential things and the
relationships between them stand out. As the saying goes,