How to Maximize Your Own Evolution

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s 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’s Principles

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, and a 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 us to be playful and stop taking anything in life, especially career, too seriously. So anyway, in 2017, Ray Dalio took all of his principles that he had basically accumulated and written down throughout all of his years at Bridgewater, and he turned them into a book that I'm in the middle of right now. The book is called Principles. It's a highly original title, and I'm sure I'm going to be quoting Dalio and discussing his principles many more episodes on Founder’s Journal, but I decided to share one of my favorite principles thus far and explain how it has impacted me in my life and my career. 

Dalio’s formula for growth: Pain plus perfection equals progress

So here's the principle: Evolving is life's greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward. Said differently, if you want to maximize your happiness, you should try and maximize your evolution in life. Now it's a strange principle, right? Like strange wording, why is it so jargony? But it makes a lot of sense when you look at history and when you think about the moments of joy that you've had in your own life. Over the course of time, a given species has two paths: evolution or extinction. It's that simple. And humankind today is where it is because we as a species have evolved over the last 200,000 years. There is this just natural, deep biological pull for all of us to want to evolve, because that is one of our oldest, deepest incentives. On top of that, it is uniquely human to be aware and in control of your own evolution. Human beings are the only species that are capable of thinking logically and abstractly, which gives us the ability to reflect on our evolution and grow faster than any other species. Now, I hope that makes sense theoretically, but I want it to also make sense tangibly. Think about why so many people in their career experience unhappiness despite endless career success and having all of the material possessions that one could possibly ask for. Now, there are a number of reasons that one could feel this way and I'm not going to try to solve all of them with this one episode. But I believe that one of the greatest contributors is because money, fame, and all of the things don't replace learning or growth, they are just simply a product of it. And I've experienced this reality firsthand several times in my life. When you first get into business or entrepreneurship, you are constantly reminded to enjoy the journey and celebrate the little wins. But then many of us, and definitely me, do a crappy job of taking that advice because as a competitive careerist or a motivated entrepreneur, you become wired to keep your head down and look to that next goal since you don't want to get complacent. And that next goal will get you closer to the big one. It's super ironic when you think about it, because it's not the big goal at the end that will ultimately make you happy. It is the process of learning and struggling today that actually maximizes your joy. And now today, like literally right now, I am reminded of the power of this principle, just in a different context. Since selling a portion of Morning Brew and moving from CEO to executive chairman, I've had my fair share of anxiety and personal struggle. You know, I assume that all of these moves that I just described were going to make me happier: hitting the big business goal we had always dreamed of, achieving financial freedom, moving out of the weeds to have the freedom of time and my choice of what I'll do with it. Yet for a number of months, I found myself lost and confused. I wasn't sure who Alex Lieberman was anymore because I only knew him as CEO of Morning Brew, basically a hundred percent of his identity the last six years. And I was confused why I wasn't happier. It took me six months to find that answer and it lives in this principle that we're talking about. I have felt a personal absence of evolution. At first, I thought, I just felt like I wasn't learning anymore. So I spent a number of months, exclusively reading, watching, and consuming content, literally just trying to download as much information as possible. And my rationale was just to resteep in the learning curve, but I still felt empty after doing all of that. If only I had read this book earlier. One of the most important parts of learning is the act of struggling. I don't believe you feel joy or happiness from the knowledge that enters your brain once you've learned, but instead from the pain and struggle that is required to unlock that knowledge. And by bypassing that struggle and going straight to the information, I wasn't fighting for my growth. But then this begs the question: If one of the keys to maximizing happiness is by maximizing evolution, how can we make that happen for ourselves? And on this question, Dalio has a perfect formula to answer it: Pain plus reflection equals progress. In my mind, pain refers to basically picking the right work, to do the right things to spend your time on. You see, reading a book isn't painful. Watching a YouTube video isn't painful. It's probably why when I spend months just learning through consumption, I wasn't feeling a whole lot of happiness. But building a team from scratch or building a company from scratch or taking on a role that you're wildly underqualified to do, that is painful. And then the next part is reflection. Everyone's heard the old adage practice makes perfect and I think that adage is completely inaccurate. If you do the same type of work over and over and over and expect a different result, you will never make progress, no matter how painful the work is. What the added should read is perfect. Practice makes perfect. We must find painful work and then pan out and step back periodically and ask ourselves, what can I do tomorrow to be better at the work that I did today, or in the words of Dalio, what gems did I find while solving a problem or a puzzle today that I can use to avoid failing tomorrow? All of this, to say that you need to get great at seeking painful things, learning to embrace them, and then finding ways to pull principles out of them through trial and error.

And this idea of seeking pain, pain is actually an amazing signal for us. It's our body telling us that there's something that we have to be on guard for. It's, it's a survival mechanism, but that doesn't mean to fall away from it actually means to lean into it a lot of the time. And Dalio says it best: “Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life. You have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy, but comfortable delusion.” And so bringing it back to me, I believe for many months I was living a comfortable delusion. I've been sitting back relaxing, resting on my laurels, and just justifying my free time as time well-deserved. But in reality, this story has allowed my time to control me versus me to control my time, which is why I've made a promise to myself. In 2022, I'm going to build something new. I have no idea what it's going to be, but I know that it must be something that forces me to embrace pain and discomfort. It doesn't matter how big the idea is, or if it makes money, it just matters that it gives me the chance to accelerate my evolution. 

I want to hear from you

Now, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, I am giving away free shit. And here's how it's going to work. I told you how impactful Ray Dalio's book has been to me. Well, now I want to spread the knowledge, so I'm going to give away five copies of Principles, and to qualify for the giveaway, it literally will take you one minute max. The first thing you have to do is rate and review Founder's Journal the podcast on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify, whichever you prefer. And then second, email me at alex@morningbrew.com with a screenshot of your review so I know that you did it. I will be picking the five lucky winners who will each get a copy of the book at the end of this week. And for context, this episode was first published on February 7th. So it's going to be the end of the week of February 7th. As always, thank you so much for listening and best of luck in the giveaway.