Twitter/X: @SoufianeAtlhdj
(written at 27 Nov 2024 and published at 12 Feb 2025)
I recently picked up Ray Dalio’s Principles (first edition), and for the first time in ages, I felt like I wasn’t just reading another run-of-the-mill ‘self-help’ book. This one isn’t full of fluff. The introduction is incredibly convincing about the importance of having principles to succeed in life. He nailed the opening. Here’s a quote:
“Every game has principles that successful players master to achieve winning results. So does life. Principles are ways of successfully dealing with the laws of nature or the laws of life. Those who understand more of them and understand them well know how to interact with the world more effectively than those who know fewer of them or know them less well.”
I find this so true, don’t you?
Before diving into his principles and his reasoning behind them, I thought I’d ponder it myself: Is it really important to have principles in life? Well, I guess it’s a gray area. If someone has principles—rules or conditions to operate by—they might feel constrained. The range of actions they can take is limited to the scenarios they considered when setting those principles. This could mean missing out on luck or serendipitous opportunities that might be even better. You can’t act in a linear way and expect exponential outcomes. So, having “strict” principles might not always be a good practice… or maybe it can be.
Strict principles can actually lead to a great life. If these principles are universal laws or statistically proven to work, then consistently following them could lead to great outcomes, or at least decent ones. And if you fail, you know exactly what to examine: your principles!
Think of principles as update rules in a mathematical sense. The behavior “may” converge to an end, like a mathematical series. If you keep repeating a recursive series, you might converge. But you need to prove that you’ll converge with these rules, i.e., the explicit series formula. So, we have two possible outcomes: either you converge or you diverge. Diverging means having non-deterministic behavior in the long term, or an “unstable” life, which we don’t want. In the case of converging, there are two possibilities: a good outcome or a bad one in the long run (the limit). The limit depends only on the initial conditions of the series and its explicit formula. In life, we have two types of initial conditions: 1) those imposed on us (family, city, genetics…), and 2) those we imposed on ourselves, i.e., things we’ve done in the past that we can’t change now because they’re part of who we are.
In both cases, we can’t change initial conditions; they’re the problem’s constraints. So, we’re left with the explicit formula—the principles. If they’re bad, they lead to bad outcomes. If they’re good, we win.
In some cases (I’m not sure how rare this is, but I don’t think I’m in that situation), the initial conditions are so powerful and impactful that they lead to divergence or “bad” convergence—a miserable life from the start. This is certainly the case for people in some extremely poor countries in Africa. Someone from there might succeed, but only if they find a good explicit formula or someone helps them shape it. They need exponential growth to rise. Hard, but not impossible!
Hence, I’ve just argued that “good” consistent principles lead to “≥” good outcomes. I need principles to follow.
In life, principles can take the form of: 1) Behaviors, and 2) Thoughts that lead to behaviors. So, it all boils down to thoughts, especially actionable ones.
But, intuitively, I think these principles shouldn’t be “strict” if-else statements. They should be statistical rules… machine learning kind of rules: Principles that are “on average” winning, based on past actions—not only mine but also those of successful and unsuccessful people—and their outcomes. We can build a “machine learning” kind of mind model that guides us in life… and the model keeps learning in real-time. Whenever you take an action, you get feedback, add it to the dataset, and adjust the model.
The dataset should include various situations, how different people reacted, and their different outcomes.
Amazing. I’ve just demonstrated not only the importance of principles but also their structure.
I’ll read how Dalio thought of it…
(3 months later… didn’t make progress in reading Dalio’s “Principles of Life”… :\ )