Billionaire Ray Dalio has built the largest hedge fund in the world. Bridgewater Associates has $160 billion in assets under management. And according to Dalio, there is a five-step formula to guarantee success.
Here are the five steps, with descriptions by Dalio, as told to Recode executive editor Kara Swisher on her podcast, Recode Decode.
1. Set goals. "You have to have your audacious goals."
2. Notice your mistakes. "As you go to those, you are going to encounter your failures, your mistakes. You have to identify those and not tolerate them."
3. Understand why you are making those mistakes. "You have to get the diagnosis to the root cause of them, which could be that you have a weakness or somebody has a weakness."
4. Fix your mistakes. "You have to design what you are going to do about it to get around it."
5. Persevere. "You have to push through to results"
"And if you keep doing that over and over again, you will inevitably succeed," says Dalio, 68. "You do it over and over again because you have determination — you will inevitably succeed."
Dalio discovered this formula for success in his professional life because he had to. He opened his hedge fund in 1975 and in the early 80s, he was convinced the economy was heading toward a recession and made moves with his company accordingly. Instead, the economy was just getting started on an 18-year-bull run, he says in his new book, "Principles: Life and Work."