The 2 Biggest Barriers You NEED to Break to Unlock Good Judgment

Nugget by Ray Dalio

Jun 27, 2025

👋 Hey friend

Today I bring you a great insight I picked from the book Principles, written by Ray Dalio.

Ray talks about the two biggest barriers that keep people from making good decisions and living up to their potential: EGO and BLIND SPOTS.

And he offers great advice for how to break both of these disastrous barriers — in order to unlock optimal decision-making and make real progress.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Ray Dalio:
The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.
1. Understand your ego barrier.
When I refer to your “ego barrier,” I’m referring to your subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses.
Your deepest-seated needs and fears—such as the need to be loved and the fear of losing love, the need to survive and the fear of not surviving, the need to be important and the fear of not mattering—reside in primitive parts of your brain such as the amygdala, which are structures in your temporal lobe that process emotions.
Because these areas of your brain are not accessible to your conscious awareness, it is virtually impossible for you to understand what they want and how they control you. They oversimplify things and react instinctively. They crave praise and respond to criticism as an attack, even when the higher-level parts of the brain understand that constructive criticism is good for you. They make you defensive, especially when it comes to the subject of how good you are.
…
To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.

"We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.

…

Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call an antischolar —— someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device —— a skeptical empiricist."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Book: The Black Swan)

2. Understand your blind spot barrier.
In addition to your ego barrier, you (and everyone else) also have blind spots—areas where your way of thinking prevents you from seeing things accurately.
Just as we all have different ranges for hearing pitch and seeing colors, we have different ranges for seeing and understanding things. We each see things in our own way. For example, some people naturally see big pictures and miss small details while others naturally see details and miss big pictures; some people are linear thinkers while others think laterally, and so on.
Naturally, people can’t appreciate what they can’t see. A person who can’t identify patterns and synthesize doesn’t know what it’s like to see patterns and synthesize any more than a color-blind person knows what it’s like to see color. These differences in how our brains work are much less apparent than the differences in how our bodies work. Color-blind people eventually find out that they are color-blind, whereas most people never see or understand the ways in which their ways of thinking make them blind. To make it even harder, we don’t like to see ourselves or others as having blind spots, even though we all have them. When you point out someone’s psychological weakness, it’s generally about as well received as if you pointed out a physical weakness.
If you’re like most people, you have no clue how other people see things and aren’t good at seeking to understand what they are thinking, because you’re too preoccupied with telling them what you yourself think is correct. In other words, you are closed-minded; you presume too much. This closed-mindedness is terribly costly; it causes you to miss out on all sorts of wonderful possibilities and dangerous threats that other people might be showing you—and it blocks criticism that could be constructive and even lifesaving.

“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

- Alan Kay


“If you’re so certain of your opinion, why don’t you want to hear the other opinions?”

- Alex Karp

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