From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Ray Dalio on following your passion

(gentle music) - What kind of advice do you give to someone who's 21, 22 and thinking about just starting their career? - The main things that come to mind would be always follow your passion. Realize that what you know is only an infinitesimally small fraction of what is important to know and realize that the path to your success will come from knowing how to deal with not knowing rather than based on what you know. So getting that humility. Enjoy the mistakes. I have a saying that pain plus reflection equals progress. If you start to view pain as a cue that something went wrong and that's a puzzle, once you calm yourself down, not when you're in the moment of pain, if you could as a discipline reflect on that pain, what caused that pain, what could I do differently, how would I handle it the next time so that you can kind of write that down and save that, that would be good. I would also say that everything happens over and over again. So if you start to look at everything as everything's another one of those, and you start to think about what one of those is it, and how's the best way to deal with those. So you start to develop your own principles. I mean principles are just that encountering the same thing over and over again, and saying, ahh here's the best way to do it. And becoming more thoughtful, I think that's important. I would say again, it's this meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Buy and large, you'll have a bunch of decisions you're going to make, and what happens to you, will buy and large be on basis on how good you make those decisions? So what you get will be pretty much what you deserve. Don't worry about the success, don't worry about how good you look, don't worry about how good you look, don't worry about the success. For God sake do not try to seek peoples approvals of being free. Don't let your fears stand in your way. So many have all these fears. Fears of how their perceived, or fears of failure. Failure is part of the journey. So you know to, go out there and experience, have the failures, learn from the failures because you are very open minded. You know, and pursue your passions. I think that life is three main ingredients. If you have a dream, whatever that dream is. And you are very realistic, you don't treat reality as something like, oh I wish it was different. But you say, ahh isn't it interesting how reality works and you embrace reality and you know how to deal with reality, and then you're determined, you will learn how to get to your dream. And I think that's the path of success.

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