Ray Dalio, famous investor turned non-fiction writer and historian of investment (Dalio’s descriptions of the decades through which he traded will be invaluable source of insight into the market of that half century in as little as fifty years when there will no longer be any living witnesses. He’s decided to share his system for discovering good principles and documenting them:
I want to help you discover good principles that suit you and write them down. While that might sound like a lot or like you have a lot to do to develop great principles, that’s not true at all. All you need to do is start journaling and see what comes from it.
To do so he has created an expensive journaling template. There’s production issues (come dirty) and structural issues. The template has a partner app.
Apparently the app is not available and doesn’t work outside the United States (complaints from both Canada and Ireland). The main font size is apparently very small and low contrast grey, making the very expensive journaling template almost unuseable. Here’s what I commented to Dalio:
I’ve read your other books, Ray. They were well-observed and thought provoking.
You are better than trying a money grab with a template journal which must be bought, rather than just creating some free templates and some online instructions on how to do this. If you want to really get these principles out there, you could create templates for Markdown-based word processors, Microsoft Word, Open Office.
It’s astonishing that in a world where communication can be open and there’s so many non-proprietary frameworks for sharing data, we rush faster and faster to proprietary apps (which will grow old and obsolete very fast) and DRM.
I know Dalio’s heart (at the end of his life) is in the right place. Since he retired as an investor, he’s spent a lot of time and money to share his experience and to better the world. Strange that such a clever man would make such mistakes while trying to share out his experiences with journaling.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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