Dalio and the 5 Different You's
Despite being the 58th wealthiest person alive and one of TIME's most influential people, I chose Ray Dalio as my August person of the month because of a different reason: I wanted to learn more about boundaries.
Dalio's book Principles helped me see myself as a machine and enabled me to recognize many of my own values. Dalio believes that "leading values" drive you forward and determine your goals while "trailing values" may still be meaningful, but are unlikely to impact important decisions.
My own twist on this is seeing values as subscriptions. If you can subscribe, you can also unsubscribe.
I decided to create a board with multiple values. I began to update the board with more data around why a certain value is in my top x values or why it isn't. I found that doing so also makes decision making easier — when I have to make a choice between two possibilities and the values are contradicting each other, I choose the option that aligns with my highest ranking value.
I'm a believer that if you "find yourself" and convince yourself that you know the "true you", you're inherently stunting your growth. I hope I never find myself. While yes you can know your own values at any given point in time, knowing that the tomorrow you will be a different person than today is far more important.
On that same note, one of my favorite Dalio's beliefs is that if there isn't something you look back on from a year ago and say "wow I can't believe I did that", you simply aren't learning enough.
The previous "you" should be an embarrassment. This switch in mind set has enabled me to let go of most of my mistakes and see pain as a trigger for growth.
Dalio: "The winner of the argument is the one who loses, because they learned something"
Metaphors are essential in forming how and why we think a certain way. The issue with today's arguments is that we were raised to subscribe to the metaphor that "argument is war". You win an argument, defend a position, and hold your ground.
By flipping that installed belief (unsubscribing) you're changing the metaphors used in everyday discussion.
Now, instead of war, if you think of argument as a way to prove yourself wrong, you've just opened the door to learning. Wouldn't that be a bummer to prove yourself right and spend 30 minutes, just reinforcing the same knowledge you had previously? Perhaps the other person got away with more knowledge, but I prefer conversations where we both walk away with a new perspective.
The Machine of You
The final Dalio mindset I want to touch upon is how every outcome is representative of the machine, the machine of you.
One way I've made this my own is to think of myself as different "Davids". I'm the CEO David, the COO, the CSR (Social responsibility), the CMO and the CPO (Product Officer).
For 4 months, I'd rank each of these Davids on a scale of 1–10 and have a weighted average (30% was from the CEO David, 20% was from the product David, etc).
Always down to chat about the systems I set up as well as why Ray Dalio is setting the groundwork for other people to share their principles.
Bonus
"Dalio sees two reasons for most actions: One is to move towards a goal and two is to build and train your machine. The second is more important"
Be aware of second and third order consequences. Going out one night and staying up till 2:00am means less sleep means less productive day, means poor habit formation.
"Avoid being a frog in boiling water: If a frog is dropped into a pot of hot water it'll jump out. But if you slowly turn up the temperature, it'll be unable to recognize it's in danger. Watch your system closely as it's easy to drift towards system failures over time."