RAY DALIO

My 5-Step Process to Getting What You Want Out of Life

There are five things that you have to do to get what you want out of life. First, you have to choose your goals , which will determine your direction. Then you have to design a plan to achieve your goals. On the way to your goals, you will encounter problems . As I mentioned, these problems typically cause pain. The most common source of pain is in exploring your mistakes and weaknesses. You will either react badly to the pain or react like a master problem solver. That is your choice. To figure out how to get around these problems you must be calm and analytical to accurately diagnose your problems. Only after you have an accurate diagnosis of them can you design a plan that will get you around your problems. Then you have to do the tasks specified in the plan. Through this process of encountering problems and figuring out how to get around them, you will become progressively more capable and achieve your goals more easily. Then you will set bigger, more challenging goals, in the same way that someone who works with weights naturally increases the poundage. This is the process of personal evolution, which I call my 5-Step Process.

In other words, “The Process” consists of five distinct steps:

Have clear goals.

Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals.

Accurately diagnose these problems.

Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.

Implement these plans—i.e., do these tasks.

By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t give a damn what you “like.” So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things—which often are difficult but produce good results—so that you’ll then deserve to get what you want.