Two books sat on my desk as I waited for a call from philanthropist and entrepreneur Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. He had written both books. Although they cover similar principles of Dalio’s successful life, the two books don’t look anything like each other.

Dalio’s #1 New York Times bestseller, Principles, has a distinctive, sparse black cover. It’s 600 pages. Dalio’s new book, Principles for Success, is a picture book, full of colorful illustrations. It’s only 156 pages. 

When my wife caught sight of the new book on my desk, she leafed through it and said, “This would be good for our daughters.” That’s exactly why Dalio wrote it in a simpler, easy to digest format. He intended it to be accessible to a wider audience.

Ray Dalio is an impactful communicator because he doesn’t expect all readers to consume his content in the same way. He meets the audience where they are.

“Principles For Success is a simplified, distilled, entertaining book for readers of all ages,” Dalio told me. 

“Some people don’t want to spend the time to read a 600-page book. So, I did a 30-minute video called Principles for Success. Lots of parents who watched it with their kids asked me to do it as a book. So, I made it for folks who want the quick read— and for kids.”

Dalio has a rare communication skill—he creates content in digestible formats to reach the widest possible audience. And he does so in language they can understand. 

For example, most of the pages of Dalio’s original bestseller, Principles, have about 300 words. The first page of Dalio’s new, illustrated book has 26 words. The words are written in short sentences that are remarkably easy to read. Dalio begins:

You are on an adventurous journey called life. Because there’s a lot ahead that you haven’t yet encountered, you can’t possibly know what will be like. 

On most pages, the text is simple enough to be read by a 7th-grade student, according to Hemingway readability software. 

Dalio’s principles are essentially recipes for success, important things to know as you go on the journey of life. Principles such as: “Think for yourself while being radically open-minded.”

In Dalio’s book, he writes that being successful is just a matter of following a 5-Step Process.

Step 1. Know your goals and run after them.

Step 2. Encounter the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals.

Step 3. Diagnose the problems to get at their root causes.

Step 4. Design plans to get around the problem standing in the way of your progress.

Step 5. Do it. Execute those designs.

“A successful life consists of doing these five steps over and over again,” he writes. 

In addition to simple steps, an illustrated picture book allows Dalio to tell the stories that lead him on a quest for knowledge. Dalio writes,

My big failure came in 1982 when I bet everything on a depression that never came. The markets were very turbulent and I believed the U.S.economy was headed into a crisis. I very publicly took a big risk…and was dead wrong.

The U.S. economy went on to enjoy its greatest growth period in history. At his lowest point, Dalio writes that he had to borrow $4,000 from his dad just to pay his bills. He had to let employees go. He was the only one left at his company. 

“Something like this will happen to you,” Dalio writes. “You will lose something that you think you can’t live without, or suffer a terrible illness, or injury, or your career will fall apart before your eyes…but it will pass.”

After reflecting on his failure, as well as the biases and blind spots that lead to the wrong call, Dalio created one of his most fundamental principles which he presents as a simple formula:

Pain + Reflection = Progress

Dalio acquired his principles over a lifetime, “mostly from making mistakes and reflecting on them.” If you learn something from each crash or failure you experience, you’ll get better and crash less. 

I told Dalio that I find him to be among the most interesting business communicators because he’s one of the few people— outside of screenwriters or novelists— who can talk about Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey.’

Campbell is the mythologist who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book that influenced George Lucas’s story of Star Wars. Campbell introduced the ‘hero’s journey,’ a universal theme of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world’s mythic traditions. 

Dalio says he recalled seeing Campbell on television, but hadn’t read the book until his son, Paul, introduced it to him in 2014. In Campbell’s telling of the hero’s journey, a ‘hero’ isn’t a perfect person who always gets it right. The typical hero starts off as as an ordinary person, gets called to adventure, battles trials and failures along the road, and is transformed by the experience. Most importantly, they ‘return the boon,’ which means the hero gains specialized knowledge through their journey and are excited to pass that knowledge on to others. 

Dalio says the book gave him powerful insights into the patterns of his own life’s journey.

“It’s a coincidence that we identified the same very common journey,” Dalio told me. “It spoke to me…The hero who has a call to adventure goes through trials… He makes mistakes and he crashes and, because of that, he has a metamorphosis. The metamorphosis is the discovery that he has weaknesses and vulnerabilities which give him humility without costing him his courage to take risks. He keeps the courage to go on, but operates in a different, more humble way that lets him work better with others while remaining a strong independent thinker.”

Dalio is ‘returning the boon’ through books for readers of all ages, as well as digital formats that reach a wider audience.

On Dalio’s YouTube channel, you can watch animated videos where he narrates each of his principles or witness a mentoring session between Dalio and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs. You can also download a free mobile app that offers activites, videos and exercises to put the principles into action. Dalio also writes original articles for more than one million followers on LinkedIn, tweets regularly, and posts quotes from his books on Instagram. 

Dalio is clearly committed to ‘returning the boon’ across as many platforms as possible. He wants everyone to know the formula for achieving their dreams and having a successful life. The formula, he stressed, is pretty easy to identify. 

“There was nothing special about me,” Dalio said at the end of our conversation. “Everyone is going to crash. But if you do it with an open-mindedness, if you can triangulate well, and learn a lot, and get better, it will raise the probability of getting it right—and that leads to success. That’s the formula.”