What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today, I am sharing a timeless principle from the Godfather of principles

himself. Also, make sure to listen to the end of this episode because I am giving away

free shit. Let's hop into it.

Ray Dalio is a name that you need to know. Yes, he is the founder of Bridgewater Associates,

the largest hedge fund in the world, with $150 billion in assets under management.

But he is someone you need to know irrespective of if you're interested in investing,

macroeconomics, or financial markets. I personally think of Dalio as a historian,

an anthropologist, an sociologist, as much as I think of him as an investor and an entrepreneur.

The man simply has a fascinating brain and he looks at the world in terms of systems and principles.

At least that's what he attributes his success to. If you were to ask Dalio, he really views

himself as being this ordinary guy who had an ordinary childhood grew up in a middle-class

family in Long Island, I believe. But he developed a set of principles through self-awareness

and radical transparency over the course of now a nearly 50-year career, and those principles

provided him the playbook for excelling in business and in life. And what I really find

cool about his principles is the way that he conceptualizes them. Ray Dalio views life as just

one big constant game that is filled with puzzles. Each problem that we face in life is just another

puzzle. And by solving each puzzle that we face in this big game called Life, we earn a gem.

And that gem is a principle or a rule to avoid the same sort of problems or puzzles in the

future. And I personally love his way of just conceptualizing work and learning because it forces

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