"Time is like a river that will take you forward into encounters with reality that will require you to make decisions. You can’t stop the movement down this river, and you can’t avoid the encounters. You can only approach these encounters in the best way possible."

v.08

September 30,2023 - Pre-read Comments.

Ray Dalio is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager, who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund.  

Ray Dalio meets the requirements of a person who has had to wrestle with reality and has a long term proven track record of success.  He is also someone that appears to have good intention.  It is with this filter that I am excited to read his "Principles" memo which was released to the public and you can download below.  If you do not have time to read it, below you will find my version of some of the curated key insights to help you improve your world view and quality of life.  

Thank you Ray for sharing your insights and way of thinking with us!

Note: We will still approach what Ray says with scrupulous critical thinking.  This goes for everything and every piece of content we consume.  Just because someone is successful or accomplished does not mean they have a completely accurate world view.  Nevertheless excited to jump in to this one! 

October 1st, 2023 - Post-read Comments.

Wow.  I did not expect to relate so much to this writing.  It is filled with GOLD.  

This is a perfect example of having an idea executing on it and reaping the rewards.  I picked Ray because he fit my framework and I could not be happier. 

Particularly the first 36 pages - I can honestly say that there are things in this memo that will change my life.  The older you get and the more you have real world experience the more you will appreciate it - so I suggest reading and re-reading it multiple times in your life and most definitely journaling YOUR key takeaways for the benefit of expanding YOUR key understanding of the world.  Phenomenal.  10/10

Below italicized are direct quotes from Ray Dalio's:  Principles.

• I worked for what I wanted, not for what others wanted me to do.
• I came up with the best independent opinions I could muster to get what I wanted
• I stress-tested my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong:  I never cared much about others’ conclusions—only for the reasoning that led to these conclusions. That reasoning had to make sense to me. Through this process, I improved my chances of being right, and I learned a lot from a lot of great people.  (Love this!!!)
•  I remained wary about being overconfident, and I figured out how to effectively deal with my not knowing.
•  I wrestled with my realities, reflected on the consequences of my decisions, and learned and improved from this process.

By doing these things, I learned how important and how liberating it is to think for myself.

This is the whole approach that I believe will work best for you—...in order to accomplish great things.

I want you to work for yourself, to come up with independent opinions, to stress-test them, to be wary about being overconfident, and to reflect on the consequences of your decisions and constantly improve.

Ray Dalio's Fundamental Principles

• I have become someone who believes that we need to deeply understand, accept, and work with reality in order to get what we want out of life. Whether it is knowing how people really think and behave when dealing with them, or how things really work on a material level—so that if we do X then Y will happen—understanding reality gives us the power to get what we want out of life, or at least to dramatically improve our odds of success. In other words, I have become a “hyperrealist.” 
• I believe there are an infinite number of laws of the universe and that all progress or dreams achieved come from operating in a way that’s consistent with them. These laws and the principles of how to operate in harmony with them have always existed. We were given these laws by nature.
• Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.
• Truth —more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality— is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.
•  I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.
• I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature’s laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.
• This perspective gives me a non-traditional sense of good and bad: “good,” to me, means operating consistently with the natural laws, while “bad” means operating inconsistently with these laws. In other words, for something to be “good” it must be grounded in reality. And if something is in conflict with reality—for example, if morality is in conflict with reality—it is “bad,” i.e., it will not produce good outcomes.
• I believe that evolution, which is the natural movement toward better adaptation, is the greatest single force in the universe, and that it is good.
• Enjoying your job, a craft, or your favorite sport comes from the innate satisfaction of getting better.  Though most people typically think that they are striving to get things (e.g., toys, better houses, money, status, etc.) that will make them happy, that is not usually the case. Instead, when we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied.  The things we are striving for are just the bait to get us to chase after them in order to make us evolve, and it is the evolution and not the reward itself that matters to us and those around us.
• The sequence of 1) seeking new things (goals); 2) working and learning in the process of pursuing these goals; 3) obtaining these goals; and 4) then doing this over and over again is the personal evolutionary process that fulfills most of us and moves society forward.
• I believe that pursuing self-interest in harmony with the laws of the universe and contributing to evolution is universally rewarded, and what I call “good.” 
• Look at all species in action: they are constantly pursuing their own interests and helping evolution in a symbiotic way, with most of them not even knowing that their self-serving behaviors are contributing to evolution. 
• In fact, it appears to me that everything other than evolution eventually disintegrates and that we all are, and everything else is, vehicles for evolution. 
• Self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic: more than anything else, it is pursuit of self-interest that motivates people to push themselves to do the difficult things that benefit them and that contribute to society. In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted—NOT how much they desired to make money. Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted and largely unrelated to their desire to make money. There are many people who have made a lot of money who never made making a lot of money their primary goal. Instead, they simply engaged in the work that they were doing, produced what society wanted, and got rich doing it.22 And there are many people who really wanted to make a lot of money but never produced what the society wanted and they didn’t make a lot of money. In other words, there is an excellent correlation between giving society what it wants and making money, and almost no correlation between the desire to make money and how much money one makes.
• What differentiates man from other species is man’s greater ability to learn. Because we can learn, we can evolve more and faster than other species. 

Key Insight on the Nature of Man

• Man has the ability to look at himself and direct his own change, individuals have the capacity to evolve.
• Highly creative, goal-oriented people who are good at imagining the big picture often can easily get tripped up on the details of daily life, while highly pragmatic, task-oriented people who are great with the details might not be creative. That is because the ways their minds work make it difficult for them to see both ways of thinking. In nature everything was made for a purpose, and so too were these different ways of thinking. They just have different purposes.
• Unlike any other species, man is capable of reflecting on himself and the things around him to learn and adapt in order to improve.   He has this capability because, in the evolution of species man’s brain developed a part that no other species has—the prefrontal cortex. 
• People who can objectively reflect on themselves and others —most importantly on their weaknesses are—can figure out how to get around these weaknesses, can evolve fastest and come closer to realizing their potentials than those who can’t.
• People need meaningful work and meaningful relationships in order to be fulfilled.27 I have observed this to be true for virtually everyone, and I know that it’s true for me.
• Regardless of others’ principles, you will need to decide for yourself what you want and go after it in the best way for you.
• There are literally two different parts of each person’s brain that influence these reactions: the pre-frontal cortex and the amygdala. They work as though they were two different brains that fight for control of decision-making. The pre-frontal cortex is the logical part of the brain that evaluates choices logically and the amygdala is the “animal instinct” part of the brain that triggers emotional reactions like the instinct to fight or flee. When faced with an obstacle or threat, an emotional reaction (e.g. pain) can be triggered that can lead to a fight or flight reaction that “hijacks” decision making away from the pre-frontal cortex, where the rational choices are being made. This can result in our making decisions that produce consequences that we do not want. This typically causes really big problems.
•  I have never met a great person who did not earn and learn their greatness. 

On Decision Making

• People who are interested in making the best possible decisions rarely are confident that they have the best possible answers. So they seek to learn more (often by exploring the thinking of other believable people, especially those who disagree with them) and they are eager to identify their weaknesses so that they don’t let these weaknesses stand in the way of them achieving their goals.

Idea: Action Item

So, what are your biggest weaknesses? Think honestly about them because if you can identify them, you are on the first step toward accelerating your movement forward. So think about them, write them down, and look at them frequently

As I mentioned, as we head toward our goals we encounter an enormous number of choices that come at us, and each decision we make has consequences. So, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make. We literally make millions of decisions that add up to the consequences that are our lives.

 It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way. Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way. At the same time, nature made the process of getting stronger require us to push our limits. Gaining strength is the adaptation process of the body and the mind to encountering one’s limits, which is painful. In other words, both pain and strength typically result from encountering one’s barriers. When we encounter pain, we are at an important juncture in our decisionmaking process.  

People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future. 

Bad:  Allow Pain to stand in the way of their progress,

Good:  Understand how to manage pain to produce progress.

Most learning comes from making mistakes, reflecting on the causes of the mistakes, and learning what to do differently in the future. Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel the pain if you approach it correctly, because it will signal that you need to find solutions and to progress. Since the only way you are going to find solutions to painful problems is by thinking deeply about them—i.e., reflecting  30—if you can develop a knee-jerk reaction to pain that is to reflect rather than to fight or flee, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving 

On Decisions

Decision Tree

• First
  • Good: Allow pain to stand in the way of their progress.
  • Bad: Understand how to use pain to produce progress.
• Second
  • Good: "Face Harsh Realities"
  • Bad: Avoid facing "Harsh Realities
•  Third
  • Good: Worry about appearing "Good"
  • Bad: Worry about achieving Goal
•  Fourth
  • Good: Make their decisions on the basis of 2nd and third order consequences
  • Bad: Make their decisions on the basis of first order consequences
  • People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second- and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.36  36 Sometimes it can be difficult to anticipate the 2nd or 3rd order consequences of a decision, such as one that involves using complex technology like X-Rays or DDT, where either things are not what they seem to be or there are too many unknown variables to make a sound decision. For more on the probabilities of personal decision-making, please refer to the “To Make Decisions Effectively” section at the end of Part 3. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision-making. For example, the first-order consequences of exercise (pain and time-sink) are commonly considered undesirable, while the second-order consequences (better health and more attractive appearance) are desirable. Similarly, food that tastes good is often bad for you and vice versa, etc. If your goal is to get physically fit and you don’t ignore the first-order consequences of exercise and good-tasting but unhealthy food and connect your decisions with their second- and third-order consequences, you will not reach your goal. Quite often the first-order consequences are the temptations that cost us what we really want, and sometimes they are barriers that stand in our way of getting what we want. It’s almost as though the natural selection process sorts us by throwing us trick choices that have both types of consequences and penalizing the dummies who make their decisions just on the basis of the first-order consequences alone. By contrast, people who choose what they really want, and avoid the temptations and get over the pains that drive them away from what they really want, are much more likely to have successful lives. 
• Fifth
  • Good: Hold themselves accountable
  • Bad: Don't hold themselves accountable
  • Successful people understand that bad things come at everyone and that it is their responsibility to make their lives what they want them to be by successfully dealing with whatever challenges they face. 

 A superior decision-maker will produce superior outcomes. That does not mean there won’t be certain bad- (or good-) luck events that are life changing: a friend of mine dove into a swimming pool and became a quadriplegic. But he approached his situation well and became as happy as anybody else, because there are many paths to happiness. What happens to a lot of people is that they don’t take personal responsibility for their outcomes, and as a result fail to make the best possible decisions. 

In summary, I believe that you can probably get what you want out of life if you can suspend your ego and take a no-excuses approach to achieving your goals with open-mindedness, determination, and courage, especially if you rely on the help of people who are strong in areas that you are weak.

If I had to pick just one quality that those who make the right choices have, it is character. Character is the ability to get one’s self to do the difficult things that produce the desired results. In other words, I believe that for the most part, achieving success—whatever that is for you—is mostly a matter of personal choice and that, initially, making the right choices can be difficult. However, because of the law of nature that pushing your boundaries will make you stronger, which will lead to improved results that will motivate you, the more you operate in your “stretch zone,” the more you adapt and the less character it takes to operate at the higher level of performance. So, if you don’t let up on yourself, i.e., if you operate with the same level of “pain,” you will naturally evolve at an accelerating pace. Because I believe this, I believe that whether or not I achieve my goals is a test of what I am made of. It is a game that I play, but this game is for real. In the next part I explain how I go about playing it. 

If I had to pick just one quality that those who make the right choices have, it is character. Character is the ability to get one’s self to do the difficult things that produce the desired results. 

• People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second- and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.36  36 Sometimes it can be difficult to anticipate the 2nd or 3rd order consequences of a decision, such as one that involves using complex technology like X-Rays or DDT, where either things are not what they seem to be or there are too many unknown variables to make a sound decision. For more on the probabilities of personal decision-making, please refer to the “To Make Decisions Effectively” section at the end of Part 3. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision-making. For example, the first-order consequences of exercise (pain and time-sink) are commonly considered undesirable, while the second-order consequences (better health and more attractive appearance) are desirable. Similarly, food that tastes good is often bad for you and vice versa, etc. If your goal is to get physically fit and you don’t ignore the first-order consequences of exercise and good-tasting but unhealthy food and connect your decisions with their second- and third-order consequences, you will not reach your goal. Quite often the first-order consequences are the temptations that cost us what we really want, and sometimes they are barriers that stand in our way of getting what we want. It’s almost as though the natural selection process sorts us by throwing us trick choices that have both types of consequences and penalizing the dummies who make their decisions just on the basis of the first-order consequences alone. By contrast, people who choose what they really want, and avoid the temptations and get over the pains that drive them away from what they really want, are much more likely to have successful lives. 

On Choice

Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more. Some people fail at this point, afraid to reject a good alternative for fear that the loss will deprive them of some essential ingredient to their personal happiness. As a result, they pursue too many goals at the same time, achieving few or none of them. 

On Luck

Luck—both good and bad—is a reality. But it is not a reason for an excuse. In life, we have a large number of choices, and luck can play a dominant role in the outcomes of our choices. But if you have a large enough sample size—if you have large number of decisions (if you are playing a lot of poker hands, for example)—over time, luck will cancel out and skill will have a dominant role in determining outcomes. 

On Life

• Life consists of an enormous number of choices that come at us and that each decision we make has consequences, so the quality of our lives depends on the quality of the decisions we make. 
•  We aren’t born with the ability to make good decisions; we learn it. 
•  I believe that the way we make our dreams into reality is by constantly engaging with reality in pursuit of our dreams and by using these encounters to learn more about reality itself and how to interact with it
• I believe that personal evolution is both the greatest accomplishment and the greatest reward. 

On Success and Achievement

• So what is success? I believe that it is nothing more than getting what you want—and that it is up to you to decide what that is for you. I don’t care whether it’s being a master of the universe, a couch potato, or anything else—I really don’t. What is essential is that you are clear about what you want and that you figure out how to get it. 
•  Think of it as though there are two yous—you as the designer and overseer of the plan to achieve your goals (let’s call that one you(1)) and you as one of the participants in pursuing that mission (which we will call you(2)). You(2) are a resource that you(1) have to get what you(1) want, but by no means your only resource. To be successful you(1) have to be objective about you(2). 
• The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively. If they could just get around this, they could live up to their potentials. 
•  My 5-Step Process to Getting What You40 Want Out of Life There are five things that you have to do to get what you want out of life. First, you have to choose your goals, which will determine your direction. Then you have to design a plan to achieve your goals. On the way to your goals, you will encounter problems. As I mentioned, these problems typically cause pain. The most common source of pain is in exploring your mistakes and weaknesses. You will either react badly to the pain or react like a master problem solver. That is your choice. To figure out how to get around these problems you must be calm and analytical to accurately diagnose your problems. Only after you have an accurate diagnosis of them can you design a plan that will get you around your problems. Then you have to do the tasks specified in the plan. Through this process of encountering problems and figuring out how to get around them, you will become progressively more capable and achieve your goals more easily. Then you will set bigger, more challenging goals, in the same way that someone who works with weights naturally increases the poundage. This is the process of personal evolution, which I call my 5-Step Process.
•  Have clear goals. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals. Accurately diagnose  40 The you I am referring to here is the strategic you – the one who is deciding on what you want and how best to get it, previously referred to as you (1). these problems. Part 2: My Most Fundamental Life Principles 25 © 2011 Ray Dalio Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.  Implement these plans—i.e., do 1) You must approach these as distinct steps rather than blur them together. For example, when setting goals, just set goals (don’t think how you will achieve them or the other steps); when diagnosing problems, just diagnose problems (don’t think about how you will solve them or the other steps). Blurring the steps leads to suboptimal outcomes because it creates confusion and short-changes the individual steps. Doing each step thoroughly will provide information that will help you do the other steps well, since the process is iterative. these tasks. 
•  You must approach these as distinct steps rather than blur them together. For example, when setting goals, just set goals (don’t think how you will achieve them or the other steps); when diagnosing problems, just diagnose problems (don’t think about how you will solve them or the other steps). Blurring the steps leads to suboptimal outcomes because it creates confusion and short-changes the individual steps. Doing each step thoroughly will provide information that will help you do the other steps well, since the process is iterative. these tasks. You need to do all of these steps well in order to be successful. Before discussing these individual steps in more detail, I want to make a few general points about the process. 2) Each of these five steps requires different talents and disciplines. Most probably, you have lots of some of these and inadequate amounts of others. If you are missing any of the required talents and disciplines, that is not an insurmountable problem because you can acquire them, supplement them, or compensate for not having them, if you recognize your weaknesses and design around them. So you must be honestly self-reflective. 3) It is essential to approach this process in a very clear-headed, rational way rather than emotionally. Figure out what techniques work best for you; e.g., if emotions are getting the better of you, take time out until you can reflect unemotionally, seek the guidance of calm, thoughtful others, etc. 
•  to achieve your goals you have to prioritize, and that includes rejecting good alternatives
•  Another common reason people fail at this stage is that they lose sight of their goals, getting caught up in day-to-day tasks.
•  Avoid setting goals based on what you think you can achieve.
•  you need to set goals without yet assessing whether or not you can achieve them.
•  , there is almost no reason not to succeed if you take the attitude of 1) total flexibility—good answers can come from anyone or anywhere (and in fact, as I have mentioned, there are far more good answers “out there” than there are in you) and 2) total accountability: regardless of where the good answers come from, it’s your job to find them. 
•  Most problems are potential improvements screaming at you. 
•  Whenever a problem surfaces, you have in front of you an opportunity to improve. The more painful the problem, the louder it is screaming.44 • They can be “harsh realities” that are unpleasant to look at, so people often subconsciously put them “out of sight” so they will be “out of mind.” In order to be successful, you have to 1) perceive problems and 2) not tolerate them.   it is essential to bring problems to the surface. 

 They can be “harsh realities” that are unpleasant to look at, so people often subconsciously put them “out of sight” so they will be “out of mind.” In order to be successful, you have to 1) perceive problems and 2) not tolerate them. If you don’t identify your problems, you won’t solve them, so you won’t move forward toward achieving your goals. As a result, it is essential to bring problems to the surface. Most people don’t like to do this. But most successful people know that they have to do this. The most common reasons people don’t successfully identify their problems are generally rooted either in a lack of will or in a lack of talent or skill: • Thinking about problems that are difficult to solve can produce anxiety that stands in the way of progress. • People often worry more about appearing to not have problems than about achieving their desired results, and therefore avoid recognizing that their own mistakes and/or weaknesses are causing the problems. This aversion to seeing one’s own mistakes and weaknesses typically occurs because they’re viewed as deficiencies you’re stuck with rather than as essential parts of the personal evolution process. • Sometimes people are simply not perceptive enough to see the problems. • Some people are unable to distinguish big problems from small ones. Since nothing is perfect, it is possible to identify an infinite number of problems everywhere. If you are unable to distinguish the big problems from the little ones, you can’t “successfully” (i.e., in a practical way) identify problems.  

 Remember, you don’t have to be good at any of the five steps (in this case, identifying problems) to be successful if you get help from others. So push through the pain of facing your problems, knowing you will end up in a much better place. 

 Remember that identifying problems is like finding gems embedded in puzzles; if you solve the puzzles you will get the gems that will make your life much better.

The more creative I am, the less hard I have to work 

Generally speaking, goal-setting is best done by those who are good at big-picture conceptual thinking, synthesizing, visualizing, and prioritizing. 

 To help you do these things well—and stay centered and effective rather than stressed and thrown off by your emotions—try this technique for reducing the pressure: treat your life like a game or a martial art. Your mission is to figure out how to get around your challenges to get to your goals. In the process of playing the game or practicing this martial art, you will become more skilled. As you get better, you will progress to ever-higher levels of the game that will require—and teach you—greater skills. I will explain what these skills are in the next section. However, the big and really great news is that you don’t need to have all of these skills to succeed! You just have to 1) know they are needed; 2) know you don’t have some of them; and 3) figure out how to get them (i.e., either learn them or work with others who have them). 

 Once you accept that playing the game will be uncomfortable, and you do it for a while, it will become much easier (like it does when getting fit). When you excel at it, you will find your ability to get what you want thrilling. 

 The first order consequences of escaping life’s challenges may seem pleasurable in the moment, but the second and third-order consequences of this approach are your life and, over time, will be painful. With practice, you will eventually play this game like a ninja, with skill and a calm centeredness in the face of adversity that will let you handle most of your numerous challenges well.  

On Goals

• You can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want. 

On Growth

• Typically defensive, emotional reactions—i.e., ego barriers—stand in the way of this progress. These reactions take place in the part of the brain called the amygdala. As a result of them, most people don’t like reflecting on their weaknesses even though recognizing them is an essential step toward preventing them from causing them problems. Most people especially dislike others exploring their weaknesses because it makes them feel attacked, which produces fight or flight reactions; however, having others help one find one’s weaknesses is essential because it’s very difficult to identify one’s own. Most people don’t like helping others explore their weaknesses, even though they are willing to talk about them behind their backs. For these reasons most people don’t do a good job of understanding themselves and adapting in order to get what they want most out of life. In my opinion, that is the biggest single problem of mankind because it, more than anything else, impedes people’s abilities to address all other problems and it is probably the greatest source of pain for most people.
•  Which path they choose, more than anything else, determines how good their outcomes are. Aristotle defined tragedy as a bad outcome for a person because of a fatal flaw that he can’t get around. So it is tragic when people let ego barriers lead them to experience bad outcomes. 

On Reality

• For example, if you are dumb or ugly, you are unlikely to acknowledge it, even though doing so would help you better deal with that reality. Recognizing such “harsh realities” is both very painful and very productive.
• As I mentioned in the first chapter, you don’t have to know everything to get what you want. You just have to be honest with yourself about what you don’t know and know who to ask for help. 

Key Insight on Setbacks

• This process of productive adaptation—i.e., the process of seeking, obtaining, and pursuing new goals— does not just pertain to how individuals and society move forward. It is equally relevant when dealing with setbacks, which are inevitable. That is why many people who have had setbacks that seemed devastating at the time ended up as happy as (or even happier than) they were before, once they successfully adapted to them. 

On Happiness

• It is extremely important  to one’s happiness and success to know oneself—most importantly to understand one’s own values and abilities—and then to find the right fits. We all have things that we value that we want and we all have strengths and weaknesses that affect our paths for getting them. The most important quality that differentiates successful people from unsuccessful people is our capacity to learn and adapt to these things.
• Also, for most people happiness is much more determined by how things turn out relative to their expectations rather than the absolute level of their conditions. 

Mindset Insights

• (Harvard) the place was even better than I expected because the case study method allowed open-ended figuring things out and debating with others to get at the best answers, rather than memorizing facts. 

Investing Insights

• Sometimes when I know that I don’t know which way the coin is going to flip, I try to position myself so that it won’t have an impact on me either way. In other words, I don’t make an inadvertent bet. I try to limit my bets to the limited number of things I am confident in.

Life Insights

• I was fired essentially for insubordination.
• I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.
• I learned that finding out what is true, regardless of what that is, including all the stuff most people think is bad—like mistakes and personal weaknesses—is good because I can then deal with these things so that they don’t stand in my way.
• I learned that there is nothing to fear from truth. While some truths can be scary—for example, finding out that you have a deadly disease—knowing them allows us to deal with them better. Being truthful, and letting others be completely truthful, allows me and others to fully explore our thoughts and exposes us to the feedback that is essential for our learning.
• I learned that being truthful was an extension of my freedom to be me. I believe that people who are one way on the inside and believe that they need to be another way outside to please others become conflicted and often lose touch with what they really think and feel. It’s difficult for them to be happy and almost impossible for them to be at their best. I know that’s true for me. ( I do not mean that you should say everything you think, just that what you do say matches your thoughts. )
• I learned that I want the people I deal with to say what they really believe and to listen to what others say in reply, in order to find out what is true. I learned that one of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads—often theories that are critical of others—that they won’t test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people’s backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation. I learned to hate this because I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity (saying the same things as one believes) and to despise the lack of it.
• I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future. I learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective. I learned that wrestling with my problems, mistakes, and weaknesses was the training that strengthened me. Also, I learned that it was the pain of this wrestling that made me and those around me appreciate our successes 

On School

• I believe that our society's “mistakephobia” is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning. As a result, school typically doesn’t prepare young people for real life—unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that’s why so many students who succeed in school fail in life. 

On "Who We Are" and "What Great Is"

• I met a number of great people and learned that none of them were born great—they all made lots of mistakes and had lots weaknesses—and that great people become great by looking at their mistakes and weaknesses and figuring out how to get around them. So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not. I learned that they are the great ones—the ones I wanted to have around me.  In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement and movement toward what I wanted. 

On Common Mental Pitfalls

• While most others seem to believe that learning what we are taught is the path to success, I believe that figuring out for yourself what you want and how to get it is a better path.
• While most others seem to believe that having answers is better than having questions, I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learning.
• While most others seem to believe that pain is bad, I believe that pain is required to become stronger.
• While most others seem to believe that mistakes are bad things, I believe mistakes are good things because I believe that most learning comes via making mistakes and reflecting on them.
• While most others seem to believe that finding out about one’s weaknesses is a bad thing, I believe that it is a good thing because it is the first step toward finding out what to do about them and not letting them stand in your way.

On Money

• I’m lucky because people make such a big deal of it and, if I didn’t experience both, I wouldn’t be able to know how important it really is for me. I can’t comment on what having a lot of money means to others, but I do know that for me, having a lot more money isn’t a lot better than having enough to cover the basics. That’s because, for me, the best things in life—meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures— are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money. For me, money has always been very important to.  What I wanted was to have an interesting, diverse life filled with lots of learning—and especially meaningful work and meaningful relationships. 

People who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects that the second- and subsequent-order consequences will have on their goals rarely reach their goals.36  36 Sometimes it can be difficult to anticipate the 2nd or 3rd order consequences of a decision, such as one that involves using complex technology like X-Rays or DDT, where either things are not what they seem to be or there are too many unknown variables to make a sound decision. For more on the probabilities of personal decision-making, please refer to the “To Make Decisions Effectively” section at the end of Part 3. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision-making. For example, the first-order consequences of exercise (pain and time-sink) are commonly considered undesirable, while the second-order consequences (better health and more attractive appearance) are desirable. Similarly, food that tastes good is often bad for you and vice versa, etc. If your goal is to get physically fit and you don’t ignore the first-order consequences of exercise and good-tasting but unhealthy food and connect your decisions with their second- and third-order consequences, you will not reach your goal. 

------------------------------------

Reflections\Inspirations from Reading

I think that if I saw the world as you do I would agree with you 100%.

The same thing that lets me spend a very long time with problems or repeat drum or musical patterns in my head to iterate on them to perfection is the same reason I ruminate on worrying thoughts.  They are flip sides of a coin.

What am I Confident In?

• AI, VR

What are my problems?

- Not getting quality sleep and rest at night is impacting my ability to face life and my job and my relationship etc.  I am napping in the day then staying up in the night.  

- My insecurities are making me feel very inadequate about myself - not representing myself to myself for what and who I am fairly and what I am capable of.

- I procrastinate - because I procrastinate I leave problems till the last possible time to do them.  This lingers in the back of my mind and the problems pile up.  Because I know I should do the thing - it bothers me and in the back of my head I ruminate over and over about it which stresses me out which does not let me heal which affects my health.  Then a cascade of problems hits me and I deal with them under extreme pressure and stress - this makes me not want to feel like that again and again I leave of doing things until they are a MUST DO.  This creates a  repetitive cycle.  This applies specifically to sales and giving presentations  something I can apply 30 minutes a day to to solve the problem in less then a month.  I have the content to review and know what to do to practice.

I am currently aware and tolerating the above problems.  If I take a few hours a week to address and fix these I will feel amazing about myself and my life and its trajectory.