Self-Made Billionaire Ray Dalio: The 3 Things You Need To Be Successful
Written by
Brooke Barley
Edited by
Cory Dudak
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Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund firm. He made Forbes’ World’s Billionaires List in 2024 at No. 124 with a net worth of $15.4 billion. Although Dalio is a main player in the business world today, he comes from humble beginnings. As a teenager, Dalio was a golf caddie at a country club on Long Island, New York in the 1960s. By 1975, he started Bridgewater.
How did Dalio go from caddie to business mogul? He defines a successful life as being made up of three things: dreams, reality and determination. Here’s a look at how Dalio has employed those three entities to create his substantial wealth.
Dreams
Dalio started investing in the stock market at just 12 years old. While he was a golf caddie, he picked up money tips from the wealthy investors he was running into on the links. It’s clear Dalio had aspirations to work in finance from an early age, and knew he was going to make something of himself even if he wasn’t immediately successful.
Dalio wrote of his early life in his book, “Principles: Life and Work,” saying “I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.'”
Dalio soon began “stepping” toward opportunity and worked at the New York Stock Exchange after graduating from Harvard Business School.
Reality
Though Dalio let himself dream big, he also stressed the importance of feasibility. On his LinkedIn, he posted “People who achieve success and drive progress deeply understand the cause-effect relationships that govern reality and have principles for using them to get what they want. The converse is also true: Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create problems, not progress.”
Though it’s important to set sights high, Dalio has reminded people to be practical with the goals they set for themselves.
Determination
Of course, no dream can be achieved without unending effort. Dalio stressed in “Principles: Life and Work” that people cannot let setbacks defeat them. “Because most people are more emotional than logical, they tend to overreact to short-term results; they give up and sell low when times are bad and buy too high when times are good,” he said. “I find this is just as true for relationships as it is for investments — wise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel, jumping into things when they’re hot and abandoning them when they’re not.”
Like he alluded to, it’s good advice for business, and for life. Progress is not made without failure, so determination is essential.
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