Principles: Life and Work

I'm not getting many critics on the reviews. Yes, you can disagree with many things he says, you can find them not really news. The point is that he's just sharing his point of view from his experience. It's not a magic potion but just an opinion of a very smart individual, it's up to you to absorb it in the best way possible.
I've personally found it very interesting, Mr. Dalio gives very interesting opinions and thoughts about organisational behaviour, macro-economics, and ethics, definitely worth reading!

Could have been way better, unfortunately most of the principles talked about in this book aren't really tremendous. Moreover, there was quite a lack of work into making this book adequately publishable as most of the text looked like an internal HR memo more than a real book. Some thoughts were interesting, but not really enough to justify the time it took to read.

I think this might be the best book I've read in all of 2017. Lots of practical thoughts on life and how those apply to work. So many good takeaways that I don't even know where to start in implementing. I think this could easily be a book that I go through several times, and focus on pieces of it at a time.

Also fantastic advice for running a business. And it was cool to see how all those things were based on how we should live our lives.

I've read only half of the book. It contains several useful ideas. But there is so much boring and common sense stuff, that it's hard to push through. The first part about author's life is meh. The second part about life principles is ok. I've decided to skip the last part about work principles, as it's mostly not applicable to my current life. Maybe I'm just not the target audience for the book, which is I guess higher management and owners of large companies.

I stopped reading this book about 20% in when he had bold statements like that the impact on society is measured by money (NGOs, marginalized groups whose credit was taken, underpaid healthcare workers, anyone?). Also the parts I read went on with highlighting multiple times his (monetary) success and how these principles helped him. The content I skimmed through sent similar to ones found in other self-optimization books (set an ambitious goal, work for it, fail, try harder, etc). The author also did not acknowledge his privilege of growing up as a white male in one of the richest societies world wide. His chances of getting really successful are way higher by birth than by people with less privilege and are thus not really applicable.

This book annoyed the hell out of me. Ray's personal story is really interesting, would've enjoyed more of that, but once he gets to his principles it starts feeling like a snake oil salesman who genuinely believes his elixir works.

It's interesting as a character study. Here's a guy who can't accept he's just another genius investor with the right level of tenacity and timing to make it big. He has to imagine he has invented some brilliant new philosophy to teach as well. The fact is, he's not saying anything wrong, its great and simple sounding fluff you can enjoy at that level and not dig into at all. Think of it as the Ayn Rand school of philosophy.

Couldn't make it through the Principles section before giving up.

Did not finish.

Why did I pick this book
This book was recommended by so many articles/people. Especially in the theme of Mental Models, personal development, etc.
It was a new addition to my local library, so I picked it up when it was available.

The book
The book is by famed investor Ray Dalio. In it he describes in short his personal history and the lessons he learned during his lifetime. Dalio has been very systematic in noting down these lessons and creating a set of principles which he uses to guide his everyday decisions.

It is divided in two sections; life principles and work principles. As the name implies, life lessons focuses on lessons which can be used in life in general, and work principles focuses more on principles you can apply at work.
The text is presented as a long argumentation of how certain principles came to be and what smaller sub-principles are contained within. This is really just a case of different header stylings with short bits of text in between.

What I thought
I was not able to finish this book.
The way the book is formatted it feels like just one long blurb of text and story-telling, with different header styles applied to random sentences throughout. Say you were reading through a long text -say the Bible- and you applied a Header 1 to every 100 sentences, Header 2 to every 80th sentence, etc.
With all these little sub-sub-sub-headers I lost track of the main points and these sub-sub-sub-headers are so general that they did not feel like eye-opening-must-remember-at-all-costs leasons to learn.

I stopped at the Work principles, because they also mostly apply to managers/directors and the higher-ups of a company (the ones making hiring decisions etc).

My recommendations
To get a start at self-development with really actionable steps I would recommend The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
To get a more fun-to-read, actionable, self improvement read my other recommendation would be An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.