Write Down Your Ideas!

Think your revelations aren’t worth reading? You’re wrong, says billionaire investor Ray Dalio. He says that you—and everyone else!—can learn a lot when you save and share your principles.

- By Jason Feifer

Some entrepreneurs live by a kind of oral tradition. They think out loud and share ideas with colleagues but rarely write them down—for themselves, or for others. “That’s sort of stupid,” says Ray Dalio. As the founder of Bridgewater Associates, where he built a multibillion-dollar asset management company, Dalio very famously kept his notes: They formed the basis of his 2017 New York Times number one best-seller, Principles: Life & Work. But he firmly believes that anyone, at any level, should be recording and sharing their ideas like he did. “Think about all the different successful people, and their recipes for success, and their recipes for encountering problems. I wish I knew about those things, because they’re learning lessons,” he says.

Today, Dalio is also the founder of Principles, a people-management software company, and author of the new book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. And he always tells leaders: Success starts with a written record.

As I see it, an entrepreneur always has three audiences: They can write for themselves, for the people they work with, or for anyone who wants to learn from them. You’ve done all three, so let’s take them in order. Why did you start writing things down for yourself?