write down what you believe

ray dalio built bridgewater, the most successful hedge fund in history, by doing one incredibly hard thing: he wrote down his principles.

most people go through life with a vague set of goals or a collection of tactical "hacks" to get through the week. but dalio realized that goals aren't enough when the world is on fire and you have billions on the line. he needed rules. he needed a set of fundamental truths that would tell him exactly what to do when things got messy. he wrote them down and then—this is the crazy part—he made them public. he chose radical openness. he chose to be wrong out loud so he could find the truth faster.

here is the reality: most people are terrified of writing down their principles because writing forces a level of honesty that most of us aren't ready for. it is easy to say you "value integrity" when everything is going great. it is a lot harder to stick to that when it costs you a deal or a promotion. if a rule is expensive and you refuse to follow it when it hurts, it isn’t a principle. it is just a preference. it’s something you like, not something you live by.

bitcoin works for this exact same reason. satoshi nakamoto didn't just have a "vision" for better money; he encoded his principles directly into the code. he chose scarcity (21 million), predictability (the block schedule), and a total resistance to central control. he didn't leave it to chance or a committee's "intuition." he wrote it down in the ultimate ledger. he made the rules immutable so that trust could be replaced by math.

now, we are seeing the same choice play out in ai and robotics. we are building machines that will soon have more influence over our lives than any politician. without a clear set of written principles, these technologies will just drift. they will become reflections of our worst impulses or the easiest paths. but with principles, they become predictable. and predictability is the only real foundation for trust.

intuition is just a fancy word for unwritten principles. the problem with unwritten principles is that they always bend toward your comfort. they change when you're tired, or when you're scared, or when you're being offered a shortcut. the only way to keep yourself—and your organizations—honest is to get the thoughts out of your head and onto the page.

write them down. follow them specifically when it costs you the most. encode them into something that has the power to outlive you. that is the difference between having a career and building a legacy. a career is what you do for a paycheck; a legacy is the set of rules you leave behind for the people who come after you.

so, what do you actually believe? if you haven't written it down, you don't actually know yet. stop guessing and start writing. the truth is waiting for you to define it.