I’ve recently started reading Principals by Ray Dalio and wanted to capture my thoughts. Ray’s writing doesn’t tell readers what their principals should be, but explicitly asks them to reflect on their life and write down their own. That’s what this post is for.

On Work

Shopping for a job shouldn’t be a rushed process. I’ve learned from this recent interview process that I need to:

1. spend ample time looking for products/projects I will learn from
2. assessing whether I would enjoy a working relationship with the team
3. look at the vibe of the company. does it have the right culture? would I fit in?

If I have any hesitations about these things listed above, the job isn’t right for me. Notice that I’m not mentioning salary or company clout. Earning a high wage and working at a mega tech company holds exactly 0 value to me. Another lesson I learned is don’t wait until your current job is unbearable to quit. The first time you think about leaving, be decisive and leave. My time and happiness are my most valuable assets. If I stay at a company too long, my performance will suffer, my happiness will suffer, and the people around me will transitively suffer. When I’m not happy, my unhappiness infects my coworkers and friends. It’s in everyones’ best interest for me to leave. In the eyes of the Essentialist, if the job isn’t essential to my career, move on.

Working smarter and harder have been the keys to my success so far. I believe that they will continue to be keys to my success; however, in the past, I’ve received feedback from peers and managers that I work too hard. I need to manage my perception around my coworkers and make my job look easy, even if I’m struggling. Ed has called this the duck syndrome; above water, a duck looks as if it’s casually wading, but underneath the water, they are moving their feet quickly.

Radical Candor hasn’t hurt me so far, so I’m going to keep trying it. Being transparent with my coworkers and managers has helped me in a roundabout way; it’s helped my coworkers give me the best advice they can give. By being open about my feelings and intentions, I’ve been able to foster stronger relationships with them and grow as an IC. My biggest fear before was that being open would leave me susceptible to poor performance reviews or a back stabbings, but now that I know that career-breaks aren’t career breakers, I’m more confident that I can be radically candid with the people I work with.

On Investing

I’m going to invest in the world I want to see. This means that if I want the world to reduce oil consumption, I’m going to invest in energy companies or mobility companies that use alternative fuels. If I want B2B Saas to be a common engineering idiom so that I don’t have to build everything when I get a new job, then I’m going to invest in B2B Saas companies.

I only invest in sectors I understand. If I’m in anything I don’t understand, I’m gambling. One of my first investments was ABBV, a pharma company I knew absolutely nothing about. When the ticker moved up or down, I had no idea why, and when I read news on why, I still couldn’t say why. This means that I’ll practically be invested in technology, without any diversification. This is obviously risky, and I’m sure most financial advisors would say so, but being risky is much better than being uninformed.

The book so far

I’m reading the section about Ray’s career and realizing that his life is a not-so-subtle flex of wealth. He talks about how his kids grew up in China a bit so the could experience more of the world after consulting with a child psychologist, talks his own success and the amount of money they made from their decisions at Bridgewater, and talks about the relationships he’s built over his life. It paints a clear, vivid picture of how little I understand the wealth gap. It’s enormous. It seems that he measures his success in dollars made from a decision, not from the impact of the decision. In Ray’s early career, he traded commodities. In an anecdote to show how well he understood the food industry, he talks about the amount of chicken that a farm could produce by looking at their chicken feed consumption (obviously ignoring the living conditions of the chicken, but that’s beside the point). At the end of it, he talks about some advice he gave to McDonalds and how they were able to successfully launch their new McNugget without worrying about chicken prices rising and sqeezing their profits.

I’m not a fan of fast food or the impact it has on lower income families, so this hit a little different. Ray calls this a success because he was able to make an absurd of money, but by doing so, directed a lot of poor Americans towards diabetes and obesity. I hold very little value to money, but I think that Ray doesn’t look at money as a means to purchase a lifestyle anymore. I think that once people get that rich, money is a measure of success, not what you can buy. If rich people had enough money to support theif lifestyles, I think that once people get to a certain level of wealth, that “gold stars” could hold just as much value. Then the financially rich people would measure their success in gold stars, instead of money.