Billionaire Ray Dalio attributes his success to meditation — and shares his ‘best advice’ for others

Billionaire Ray Dalio says we’re living in a time of rapid change, as geopolitical tensions rise, economic systems shift and technology develops faster than ever before.

As people grapple with what he called the “changing world order,” Dalio says it’s important to focus on what really matters.

“I think the question is, above all else … how we’re going to be with each other,” said the Bridgewater Associates’ founder. “Because, breakthrough technologies — they can be used for wars, they’re going to create great displacement of people.”

How humans deal with one another will be “particularly important” in the next five to 10 years, Dalio added.

“The best advice that I could give anybody, I think, it would be to meditate, and that’s because it gives you a calmness and equanimity. It gives you a sense of spirituality, which means … [a] connectedness to the universe, connectedness to people,” he said.

“Whatever success I’ve had in life, has been more due to my meditating than anything else.”

Dalio identified five major forces that are shifting the world order: government debt, populism, conflict, climate and technology.

Regarding debt, Dalio said, “There’s a big cycle of increasing debt relative to incomes … that is going to lead to a big change in the monetary order that we’re now facing,” he said.

Dalio has previously warned about America’s mounting debt — now standing at more than $36.2 trillion. He says this problem is of “paramount importance,” and the U.S. deficit needs to go from a projected 7.2% of gross domestic product to about 3% of GDP.

Dalio also addressed a rise in populism in the West.

“There’s the left and the right … it gets to the point where there are irreconcilable differences over money and values,” Dalio told CNBC’s Sara Eisen Wednesday at CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore.

The third force is a changing geopolitical order, he said, which answers questions like: “What are the rules of the world? Of how countries interact? And who determines that?”

“It’s determined by the winners of the last war. They set out the rules … but there’s a change in the world order as rising powers challenge existing declining powers. And so we are seeing that change in the world order, from one that was unilaterally, really largely controlled by the United States, to something that’s very different,” he said.

The fourth force is climate and acts of nature, which throughout history, has had a bigger impact and killed more people than wars, said Dalio. Finally, the fifth force is new technology, or as Dalio describes “man’s inventiveness,” which we are seeing today with the rise of AI and other emerging technologies.

“We are now in that transition to new orders of all of those,” he said.

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