When I didn’t want to do something, I would fight it, but when I was excited about something, nothing could hold me back.

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.”

That fall, I started at a local college, C. W. Post. I got in on probation because of my C average in high school. But unlike high school, I loved college because I could learn about things that interested me, not because I had to, so I got great grades. I also loved living away from home and having independence.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it.

Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively.

Over the decades since, I’ve repeatedly seen policymakers deliver such assurances immediately before currency devaluations, so I learned not to believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won’t let a currency devaluation happen.

The more strongly they make those assurances, the more desperate the situation probably is, so the more likely it is that a devaluation will take place.

To try to understand what was happening, I spent the rest of that summer studying past currency devaluations. I learned that everything that was going on—the currency breaking its link to gold and devaluing, the stock market soaring in response—had happened before, and that logical cause-effect relationships made those developments inevitable. 

My failure to anticipate this, I realized, was due to my being surprised by something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before.

The message that reality was conveying to me was “You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”

Enrolling at Harvard Business School that fall, I was excited about meeting the extraordinarily intelligent people from all over the planet who would be my classmates. And high as my expectations were, the experience was even better. I lived with people from all over the world and we partied together in an exciting, eclectic environment. There was no teacher in front of a blackboard telling us what to remember and no tests to see whether we remembered it. Instead we were given actual case studies to read and analyze. Then we gathered in groups to thrash out what we would do if we were in the shoes of the people in those situations. This was my kind of school !

I was beginning to see things happening over and over again, which led me to see that most everything is “another one of those”: Most everything has happened repeatedly before for logical cause-effect reasons.

Of course, being able to both properly identify which ones of those are happening and to understand the cause-effect relationships behind them remained difficult. Though most everything seemed inevitable and logical in retrospect, nothing was nearly as clear in real time.

This wasn’t academic learning: People with practice in the business showed me how the agricultural processes worked, and I organized what they told me into models I used to map the interactions of those parts through time.

Don’t get me wrong. My approach was far from perfect. I vividly remember one “can’t lose” bet that personally cost me about $100,000. That was most of my net worth at the time. More painful still, it hurt my clients too. 

The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered home is that you can never be sure of anything: There are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it’s always best to assume you’re missing something.

This lesson changed my approach to decision making in ways that will reverberate throughout this book—and to which I attribute much of my success. But I would make many other mistakes before I fully changed my behavior.

Ray Dalio. Principles: Life and Work (Kindle 位置 478-483). Simon & Schuster. Kindle 版本.