Personal Development for Smart People

The following is a review I wrote last fall on a previous blog, but since I referred to this book again only last weekend I was reminded of how jam packed with great information it is. Steve Pavlina has been studying personal development for a long time, and if that doesn’t interest you (I wasn’t sure it interested me), he makes a full time living from his website. Naturally I’m all ears to any advice he may give on that score!

I was honored to receive an advance copy of Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth for review. It took me a couple of weeks to read it, because I was just reading a little bit each evening, filling the pages with little PostIt flags, because every page is crammed with great information and I wanted to process and remember it all! This book is not fluff or platitudes. Steve is an extremely intelligent man who started programming computers at age 10 and is a very analytical thinker, and he examines personal development as a field that must obey universal laws just like physics does! After two and a half years of research, he found three core principles, truth, love, and power, and four secondary principles which are combinations of the first three (think of three primary colors then the colors which are made by mixing two or more of them). The secondary principles are oneness (truth + love), authority (truth + power), courage (love + power), and intelligence (truth + love + power). The book devotes one chapter to each of these principles, explaining it fully with many examples, then there are six excellent chapters on how you can apply the principles to your life: “Habits,” “Career,” “Money,” “Health,” “Relationships,” and “Sprirituality.”

I obviously can’t condense or summarize this book, and will not attempt to do that. You really must read this book at least once. I will tell you about a few of the things I marked with my PostIts:

In one part of the Truth chapter, Steve urges us to admit to ourselves things we have been trying to bury and deny. Did we take a wrong career path, or did we marry the wrong person? Since we may feel there is no choice left for us, we may not want to admit those things to ourselves. Steve assures us it is better to admit those things to ourselves, even if we don’t intend to do anything about them. “Whenever you’re faced with a part of reality you don’t like, and you feel powerless to change it, the first step is to accept the truth of your situation. Say to yourself: ‘This situation is wrong for me, yet I lack the strength to change it right now.’” He examines the reasons we might continue to live in situations we know are wrong for us, and he offers suggestions we can try in order to figure out what the right choices are for us. Somewhere in there we know the answers all along, but we manage to obscure them with denial and distractions.

In part of the Love chapter, Steve states, “Every day you’re compelled to make connection decisions…..If you want to grow consciously, you must decide which connections you’ll strengthen and which you’ll allow to weaken. Such choices ultimately determine the shape of your life.” He talks about connections in this world and how to consciously connect and communicate more deeply.

In part of the Power chapter, Steve talks to us about our ability to consciously create the world around us. He states, “If you want different results, you must go out and create them yourself……You must actively make your life happen instead of passively letting it play out.” He talks about setting goals and when to know if a goal is not right for you. A goal should start improving your present reality, not just be a reward you hope will be at the end of a miserable time of suffering and sacrifice. He also gives many suggestions on how to make sure you start achieving something toward your goal once you know what it is. He shares with us how he launched StevePavlina.com in October 2004, with the goal of having it be the best personal development website on the internet. He knew he felt tremendously motivated whenever he thought of the goal, even though for the first four months the site didn’t have much traffic and the fifth month only earned him $53. Wouldn’t most of us “realized” that is was long past time to give up on that “empty dream?” Instead, he kept going, and over the next three years, the site grew to include hundreds of free articles, and traffic grew to two million visitors per month! The site began to earn tens of thousands of dollars per month. His goal was achieved when StevePavlina.com became acknowledged by many to be the most popular, practical, and down-to-earth personal development website.

In the Oneness chapter, Steve talks to us about many things, among them empathy, honesty, and contribution. He actually had had a very successful computer games business before launching StevePavlina.com and was helping game developers, but he saw he could make an even bigger contribution to the world by going full time on personal development.

In the Authority chapter, we learn that each of us is the one true authority in our own life. We make the decisions and we take the actions. He talks to us about effectiveness and persistence, pointing out that when you fail, the failure wasn’t a “waste.” Instead, you have learned some valuable things that will allow you to choose more wisely and do better as you go along. In this chapter he urges us to focus on what really matters to us and realize what things are a total waste of our time. He shows us how to “triage” projects and tasks so that we spend our time on the important things that need our time in order to succeed. We are also urged to run some experiments so that we can learn how to make ourselves more effective. Why sit and wonder how things would go if we got up earlier each day? Why not try it and see?

In the Courage chapter, Steve starts to give us the secrets to getting off that incorrect path we may know we’re on but feel helpless to remedy. He tells us ways to prepare ourselves to get on the correct path, whether that means educating ourselves a bit, progressively training ourselves to overcome fears, or just making commitments in advance to do things we’d like to be able to do but are afraid of.

The Intelligence chapter talks about being authentic and actively seeking growth, and Steve gives us a lot of concrete small questions we can ask ourselves as a self-assessment of where we are on the seven principles, plus seven sets (one set for each principle) of “Growth Blitzing” exercises we can do to increase our alignment with every principle.

The six final chapters are each crammed with great information about applying the principles to your own life. Since I have run on so long here, I will not try to tell you about the things I marked. I will say that to me the Career chapter alone would be worth the price of the book. For you, it may be the Relationships chapter. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth can replace dozens of books you might have bought about one small area of personal development (like a book on marriage or how to eat in a healthy manner).

The last sentence, which really sums it up, after you’ve read it, is this: “Live consciously.”