Ray Dalio On The Biggest Failure of His Career

So you had this huge failure after being wildly successful very early on in your life. You had to borrow $4,000 from your parents, and he started to reflect on this, and he came up with this very interesting principle: pain plus reflection is equal to progress. Uh, so there is no such thing as failure; failure is an opportunity for evolution, as you've been saying, and that mindset helped you create Bridgewater, right?

Yeah, I think it's a journey for everybody, right? You start off and you encounter reality. If everything goes well, then I suppose you don't need to learn much, but that's not the way it goes. It's almost like boring, actually.

Yeah, it's almost like it's like a pendulum swinging only one way. Yeah, it would be boring, and it also isn't just the way it is.

Yeah, and so you encounter life. It's almost like a video game, you know, except with real pain and real pleasure. So you encounter it and then reflect on how does reality work and how should I interact with it?

I think one of the big problems about a lot of people is they form an expectation of how reality should be, and they get upset if it's not that way, which is so silly, ‘cause reality is reality. And so that process of struggling and falling and learning is just the way it is.