Page 408 - Ray Dalio - Principles

11 Perceive and Don’t

Tolerate Problems

On your way to your goals, you will inevitably encounter
problems. To be successful you must perceive and not tolerate

them. Problems are like coal thrown into a locomotive engine
because burning them up—inventing and implementing
solutions for them—propels us forward. Every problem you
find is an opportunity to improve your machine. Identifying
and not tolerating problems is one of the most important and
disliked things people can do.

For a lot of people identifying problems is difficult to do.

Most people would rather celebrate all the things that are
going well while sweeping problems under the rug. Those
people have their priorities exactly backward, and there is little
that can be more harmful to an organization. Don’t undermine
your progress in pursuit of a pat on the back; celebrate finding
out what is not going well so you can make it go better.
Thinking about problems that are difficult to solve may make

you anxious, but not thinking about them (and therefore not
dealing with them) should make you even more anxious.

Having this kind of anxiety about what can go wrong is
extremely useful. It is what drives one to develop systems and
metrics for monitoring the outcomes your machine is
producing and motivates those who manage well to constantly
taste-test the outputs of the system and to look for problems in

its nooks and crannies. Having that constant worry and doing
the double-checking is important to maintaining quality
control. Making sure that little problems don’t exist is
important because, if they’re allowed to continue, they will
grow into big problems. To convey the point, I will tell you