Happy Monday!
I hope you had an amazing weekend.
Let me give a brief about Ray Dalio before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons from him for you to read this week.
Ray Dalio (@raydalio) is the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates (managing over 160 billion dollars) and is the author of the new book Principles: Life and Work. He is also a leading figure in the world of philanthropy, is an avid supporter of transcendental meditation, and has appeared on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. His recent TED Talk on the topic of an idea meritocracy has already been viewed over a million times.
(Image credit: Farnam Street)
1 STORY FOR YOU
McDonalds Chicken Mcnugget
Dalio started managing companies’ financial exposure by buying and selling financial instruments on their behalf. Two of his biggest clients were McDonald’s and Lane Processing, which was one of the biggest chicken producers in the country.
McDonald's approached Dalio to tell him about a new product called the Chicken McNugget. They were reluctant to begin producing them due to the unstable price of chicken. It would make it difficult to sell the nuggets at a standardised price.
Chicken sellers didn’t want to sell at a fixed price, as they were worried their costs would go up and they wouldn’t make a big enough margin.
Dalio thought about the cause-effect and realised that the chicken could be seen as a ‘machine’ consisting of a chick and its feed. This meant the most volatile cost the chicken producer had to consider was the price of feed.
Dalio showed Lane Processing how to use corn and soy futures to lock in their costs. This way, they would be able to offer fixed prices and reduce the risk for McDonald’s.
Thanks to this logical thought process, McDonald’s was able to release the McNugget.
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“Life is like a game where you seek to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving your goals. You get better at this game through practice. The game consists of a series of choices that have consequences. You can’t stop the problems and choices from coming at you, so it’s better to learn how to deal with them."
“Thoughtful disagreement is not a battle; its goal is not to convince the other party that he or she is wrong and you are right, but to find out what is true and what to do about it.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Money and happiness are not correlated
It goes to this notion of meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Intelligence and happiness probably have no correlation with each other. In studies, it’s repeatedly been shown and money is very little correlated with happiness. The highest correlation with happiness is the community. Am I part of a community? Do I feel connections with other people? That’s been literally genetically programmed into us – it’s estimated between a million and two million years ago before we were even mankind.
That sense of meaningful relationships I think is very important. If you have meaningful work, like you’re on a mission, and you have meaningful relationships, I think it’s almost impossible not to be happy. There will be unhappy moments in your life that you encounter thing or that thing, but the unhappy people seem to be missing those things.
Pain + Reflection = Progress.
If you can develop a reflexive action to psychic pain that causes you to reflect on it rather than avoid it, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving. If you push through this process of personal evolution, you will naturally ascend to higher and higher levels. Go towards the pain rather than avoid it. The quality of your life will depend on the choices you make at those painful moments.
Have clear goals
- Prioritize: you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want
- Don’t confuse goals with desires. A goal is something you need to achieve. Desires tend to be things you want that stand in the way of your goals.
- Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable.
- Don’t mistake the trappings of success with success itself.
- Knowing how to deal with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to move forward
That’s it from me, until next Monday!