Ray Dalio’s 5 Step Process
Set goals
- How well do you know what you want most out of life?
- What are your most important goals?
- Are you good at setting your goals?
- How confident are you that your assessment of you ability to set goals is right?
- If you are confident of your self-assessment, why should you be confident (e.g. because you have a demonstrated track-record, because many believable people have told you, etc)?
Identify and don’t tolerate problems
- How good are you at perceiving problems?
- How confident are you that your assessment of your ability to perceive problems is right?
- How much do you tolerate problems?
- How confident are you that your assessment of how much you tolerate problems is right
- If you are confident of your self-assessment, why should you be confident (e.g. because you have a demonstrated track-record, because many believable people have told you, etc)?
Diagnose the problems to root causes
- In diagnosing problems, how willing are you to “touch the nerve” (i.e., discuss your and others possible mistakes and weaknesses with them)?
- Are you willing to get at root causes, like what people are like?
- Are you good at seeing the patterns and synthesizing them into diagnoses of root causes?
- How confident are you that your assessment of your ability to diagnose is accurate? If you are confident of your self-assessment, why should you be confident (e.g. because you have a demonstrated track-record, because many believable people have told you, etc)?
Design a plan for eliminating those problems
- How good is your ability to visualize?
- How confident are you that your assessment of your ability to visualize is accurate?
- If you are confident of your self-assessment, why should you be confident (e.g. do have an excellent track record of visualizing and making what you visualized happen, have other believable parties told you that you are good at this)?
Do what is set out in the plan
- How good are you at pushing through?
- How confident are you that your assessment of your ability to push through is accurate?
- If you are confident of your self-assessment, why should you be confident (e.g. because you have a demonstrated track-record, because many believable people have told you, etc)?
Weaknesses
To repeat, the best advice I can give you is to ask yourself what you want, then ask ‘what is true,’ and then ask yourself ‘what should be done about it.’ If you honestly ask and answer these questions you will move much faster towards what you want to get out of life than if you don’t! Most importantly, ask yourself what is your biggest weakness that stands in the way of what you want.
- What do you think is the biggest weakness you have that stands in the way of what you want – the one that you repeatedly run into?
