Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

You'd be stupid not to read this: one of the richest men on the planet tells you in great detail the principles by which he built his success. And Ray Dalio didn't get rich with a randomly viral chat app - his hedge fund made more money than any other fund in history. Unlike others with good trading track record, it did so using a systematic rule base, not just one guy's trading instincts. The principal elegance of this book is that the author spent twenty years building a rule base that helps him trade the markets, and then twenty years building a rule base that helps him manage people. (While his investment rule base kept making money.) That should give you all kinds of reasons to read this book: whether you're an investor looking to understand how the author did it, or a computer scientist interested in what happens if you tried to apply your coding skills to organizing people, or just curious to see a grand social experiment in understanding and molding human nature up close, you shouldn't pass up the chance to view the world through the author's eyes. I would give one piece of advice from my personal point of view (I spent a few years working at Bridgewater ten years ago): suspend your disbelief. Any smart person's cynicism reflex will get triggered at some point in the book. (Perhaps when you hit the part that talks about the "equation" Pain + Reflection = Progress.) Bridgewater's training materials used to start with a page that stated, "don't just believe anything you read", and yet here is an entire book that tells you not just how to organize work, but also your life. Several of the principles will strike you as trivial. Or not particularly in line with the latest scientific mainstream (not that I'm particularly believable in this - but, for example, the "right brain/left brain" stuff that's discussed in some of the principles to my Google-based knowledge has largely been debunked as an oversimplified model). So, if any of that happens to you while you're reading, just remember that you're reading it wrong. Because this is not meant to be a (pop) science book or a meta-study of existing frameworks for philosophical approaches to life and work. It's a highly and almost completely autonomously evolved framework that is at once extremely practical ("don't interrupt each other for at least two minutes") to extremely philosophical ("nature optimizes for the good of the whole, not for your own personal good"), born and forged in the hellfire of founding a business and surviving through the most brutal of crises over 40 years, and smashed up against a lot of situations that involved some of the smartest people you can think of. (Simple example of that practical evolution: as I recall, in the Principles version from 10 years ago there used to be a work principle called "don't talk about people who are not in the room"; that seems to have been replaced with "Never say anything about someone that you wouldn't say to them directly", which is a much more practical version.) It's impossible to argue that this doesn't have incredible, highly compressed value. Even though you might not want to end up subscribing to the entire school of thought (lots of reasons why you might not want to), there is nothing else quite like where it came from, so read it and struggle with it. As a bonus, content on "level vs. change" and thoughts on AI actually even drop hints on Bridgewater's investment process. Finally, the entire first part of the book is Ray Dalio's life story, and it's the perfect backdrop for the principles, because it's awesome.