Ray Dalio started Bridgewater in his apartment and built it into the world's largest hedge fund. Here are 5 major lessons he's learned over the past 44 years.

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Bridgewater Associates founder and co-CIO Ray Dalio.

• Ray Dalio is the founder and co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, with about $150 billion in assets under management.
• Dalio discussed key moments from his career in an episode of the Business Insider podcast "This Is Success."
• Fundamental to his lessons are transparency and a willingness to codify lessons learned from making mistakes.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For the past couple years, Ray Dalio's life has been in transition.

He still spends most of his time as the co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, the hedge fund he founded and built into the largest in the world, but he's also focused on passing on what he's learned.

Dalio stepped back from office management in 2017 and published his first book, "Principles: Life and Work," later that year. He'll be publishing his core investment principles in the next year or so, but his unique life philosophy is core to everything he's done at Bridgewater.

In a recent episode of Business Insider's podcast "This Is Success," Dalio took us through key career moments since founding Bridgewater in 1975, and what universal lesson he pulled from each. You can find that episode and those lessons below.