The truth is that Dalio cut his teeth at a time where the finance industry grew faster as a portion of the national economy than in any other period in history. Glossed over in his biography are the events that led to his termination on Wall Street (and eventual founding of Bridgewater): he was fired from a trading house because he brought a stripper to a party and punched his boss in the face. He writes, in Part One, that “everyone was talking about the stock market” while he was growing up, and described how he started buying stocks as a 12 year old. When Dalio started his hedge fund, Bridgewater, in his two-bedroom Manhattan apartment in the 70s, his experiences were coloured by the age of ascendant finance. If I were to summarise Ray Dalio’s Principles in a single sentence, it is that it is an odd but valuable book that is the product of an odd but valuable organisation, made possible only by their success in a uniquely fast-paced industry. This, too, came from Covey's 7 Habits - though I had no idea at the time. Years later, my boss taught me to do task management according to the four quadrant model of prioritisation: draw two axes on a piece of paper, one for importance, one for urgency, and then lay tasks out in one of the four quadrants created by the two axes. When I was growing up, my dad always told me to do “first things first”, which I now realise is an echo of Covey's third habit (that is, to prioritise and do what is most important first). Some of Covey's ideas have spread into mainstream thinking on motivation, time management, and life skills. Instead, he wrote 7 Habits to focus on ‘character traits’, which he regarded as the result of timeless and universal principles. In retrospectives, Covey said that he reacted to the trend of self-help books of his generation to focus on superficial ‘personality traits’ - surface level attributes that people could adopt easily. It was a huge hit some commentators credited it with single-handedly creating the ‘business self help’ genre.ħ Habits was a product of its time. In 1989, Steven Covey published his most famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This is part 8, the final part of the Principles Sequence, a series on the Ray Dalio book.
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