Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth [Paperback]

Personal Development For Smart People - Author Background
Steve Pavlina is one of the most successful bloggers on the internet, being the creator of the most popular personal development website on the internet today, StevePavlina.com. Millions of people visit his website every month, which provides enough free, high quality personal development content to fill several books.

Book Overview

Personal Development For Smart People presents a series of principles that Steve Pavlina hopes will help you to improve every area of your life including your health, career, finances, relationships, habits, and spirituality. The principles are:

* Truth
* Love
* Power
* Oneness (Truth + Love)
* Authority (Truth + Power)
* Courage (Love + Power)
* Intelligence (Truth + Love + Power)

Steve Pavlina claims that he has found a simple, elegant, and completely original set of principles that are universal, and that are applicable in any situation, for any person, at any time. He states that he goal of the book is to bring you into alignment with the 7 principles - thus becoming a more conscious human being and living your life in the most intelligent way possible.

In the first part of Personal Development For Smart People, Steve Pavlina describes each of the principles in turn, devoting one chapter to each principle. It is difficult to describe the principles briefly as they need several pages to be fully explained, but I will do my best to briefly describe each principle as follows:

Truth

Truth means being totally honest with yourself and with others about everything in your reality. It means constantly seeking new truths about reality and incorporating those truths into the way you see the world. Truth also means making honest predictions about what your future will hold given your current thoughts, beliefs and actions, and constantly improving your predictive abilities by making new predictions, taking action to achieve them, and updating your model of reality as you learn more about what works and what doesn't in achieving your goals. You are aligned with the principle of Truth when you are completely honest with yourself and others.

Love

Love means deciding what you will connect with, and what you will avoid. You can connect with a person, a place, a desired end result, or a thing by simply thinking about it, or going up to it and interacting with it where appropriate. Whenever you decide to connect with something, you simultaneously decide not to connect with everything else. For example, you can decide to connect with your television, or you can go and spend some time with your partner. You are aligned with the principle of Love when you feel good about the connections you are choosing, even if other people do not agree with your choices.

Power

Power is the ability to consciously create the world around you, and to bring what you want into existence. When your power is strong, you will find it easy to achieve your goals and get what you want in life, but when your power is weak, you may find it difficult to meet your needs.

Oneness (Truth + Love)

When truth and love intersect, you have Oneness. Oneness is the idea that we are all connected and are all a part of the same whole. Oneness means that we are all cells in a larger body. Coming from this framework, we must do our best to ensure the health of ourselves, of other cells in the body, and of the body as a whole. This naturally gives rise to a global consciousness, and brings great responsibility to each and every one of us to do our best to help the world to be healthy and to achieve peace and harmony.

Authority (Truth + Power)

When Truth and Power are combined, this gives rise to Authority. Truth without power doesn't accomplish much, while power without truth creates wasted action. Authority is taking command of your life, and using what you know about yourself and the world to decide what to create in your reality, and to take the action to create it.

Courage (Love + Power)

You need courage to connect with the things that you really want. It takes courage to ask someone out on a date. You need courage to pursue a dream that you really want but don't know if you can have. Love helps you decide what or who you want to connect with in the first place, and Power helps you to overcome the fear of connecting with it. As Steve Pavlina says in the book, Courage involves asking, What is the path with the heart?

Intelligence (Truth + Love + Power)

Intelligence is alignment with Truth, Love and Power. When you are acting in alignment with all of the principles, you are acting on the best knowledge available to you, you are connecting with what you really want and what makes you feel good, and you are actively creating what you want and bringing it into reality. When you are in alignment with Intelligence you are acting completely congruently, which means that how you are expressing yourself on the outside completely matches who you truly are on the inside.

In the second part of Personal Development for Smart People, Steve Pavlina gives extensive practical advice for how to integrate the principles into your own life and to apply them to improve your Habits, Career, Finances, Health, Relationship and Spirituality.

My Opinion of the Book

Being a long time reader of Steve Pavlina's website, I was eagerly awaiting the release of Personal Development for Smart People. I was expecting a lot from the book, as I have found his website to be a source of some of the most consistently insightful and helpful articles that I have come across.

Before it was released and from the descriptions on his blog, I knew that this book was not just going to be a compilation and bringing together of all of his writings from his website (which would have been welcome in itself) but was going to be something completely new. But it was only when I began to read the book that I began to realise the depth and originality of what Steve Pavlina has been working on for the past 2 years.

Personal Development for Smart People is an amazing achievement from Steve Pavlina. It is a breath of fresh air and a whole new look at the field of personal development and how to live your best life possible.

The principles that I have briefly described above are each given several pages in the book, and each one is described fully so as to give a complete understanding to the reader. The depth and breadth of his principle-based approach is astounding, as he brings the descriptions of Truth, Love and Power much deeper and wider than their traditional definitions and usage.

But Personal Development For Smart People really comes into its own in the second part, where Steve Pavlina explains how to use the principles to improve every area of your life, including your Habits, Career, Finances, Health, Relationships and Spirituality.

In this section it is possible to realise the depth of Pavlina's understanding of personal growth and of the challenges that can be faced in each area of life. His experience of being exposed to feedback from hundreds of thousands of people over several years regarding their personal development problems and solutions is evident, as the advice he provides is tremendously practical and useful. He gives many real examples to give as much clarity as possible on how to integrate the principles into your life and solve your own real-life challenges.

How the Book Impacted My Own Life

Since I have read it, Personal Development For Smart People has definitely had an impact on my life. In particular I found the chapters on Oneness, Career, Money and Health to be the most helpful in accelerating my personal growth.

Career

I found the chapter on career to be absolutely fascinating. It states that your career is simply your outlet for creative self-expression, and that it has two components, your medium and your message. Your message is what you express, and your medium is how you express it. We normally express what work we do in terms of our medium - we can say we are a writer, speaker, blogger, teacher, programmer, and so on. But our message is just as important, and actually consists of our life purpose - what we are here to share and to do.

I found this chapter to be tremendously powerful and it really helped me to clarify what is the correct path for me.

Money

I thought that the chapter on money shows an incredible clarity of thought from Steve Pavlina. I never understood money as well as I do now that I have read this chapter. One of the aspects of money that Pavlina explains is that when you have a certain amount of money, this gives you the right to extract that amount of value from society, and earning money simply involves creating social value for society. The more value you provide, the more money you can earn - it's as simple as that. This is explained in much more detail in the book.

This chapter also helped me to clarify what my path is in life and what direction I want to take. It helped me to see even more clearly that if we really want to have financial abundance, that we must stop seeing other people as potential dollar signs, and must really focus on helping others.

Health

As health (and particularly the optimum diet for humans) holds a particular interest for me, I was very interested to read this chapter. What really stood out for me was that although Pavlina is not afraid to include his opinion on the correct diet, he does not push us to eat a certain way. Read more ›

Steve has managed to condense a great deal of material into 154 pages. Pages that will serve you for many years for it is certain that with each re-reading you will gain new insights and aha's into areas within your life that are in need of further clarification, care and attention.

These are likely aspects which you may have been unconsciously avoiding or that you now recognise need re-visiting for fresh insight. So to this end its fair to expect the reading of the book to feel uncomfortable at times as you are challenged to explore the truth of its key themes and subsequently recognise where you are in denial or failing to apply them wholeheartedly in your life. You may feel little pangs of panic from your lower self as it senses change knocking once more at your door, because, as you've likely already discovered, it does not matter how much personal work you've done ~ there's always another level to explore. This reaction is of course a very useful sign.

Steve states that he _"... set out to find the common pattern behind all successful growth efforts, to identify a complete set of core principles that would be universally applicable."_ and that furthermore _"First, these principles must be universal. They must be applicable by anyone, anywhere, in any situation. They must work equally well for all areas of life: health, relationships, career, spiritual growth, and so on. They must be timeless, meaning that they can still be expected to work 1,000 years from now, and they would have worked 1,000 years ago. They must be culturally independent: they need to work for all those living on Earth, as well as for people aboard a space station in orbit. They must work both individually and collectively, so they're effective for any group of any size."_

The result of that enquiry is the following themes:

* Truth: Accept reality and rid your life of falsehood and denial.
* Love: Improve your ability to connect with yourself and others.
* Power: Build your motivation and discipline to create the life you desire.
* Oneness: Stop fighting against resistance, and make the world your ally.
* Authority: Take command of your life, and learn to make clear decisions.
* Courage: Summon the inner strength to take action in spite of fear.
* Intelligence: Live authentically, and express your genuine creativity.

These themes are further clarified and explored in part one of the book and then looked at from a highly practical standpoint in particular relationship to the following key areas of your life.

* Habits: Create a daily routine that gives you a sense of flow
* Career: Build a career you're truly passionate about
* Money: Achieve financial abundance without compromising your integrity
* Health: Adopt health habits that empower your physical body
* Relationships: Enjoy loving relationships that help you grow
* Spirituality: Raise your awareness and live more consciously

He offers a wide variety of questions, challenges and practices in relation to these that when answered, tried and explored, have the potential to yield tremendous benefits in your life in terms of becoming more you, more real, and ever more deeply satisfied and fulfilled.

However at no point does he suggest that any of this is likely to be particularly easy, quite the reverse in fact, but he always maintains that the rewards are worth the effort and that with the right inspiration and personal alignment its not so hard to summon the resolve to meet any challenge honestly and courageously.

Steve Pavlina is obviously a very clever man, highly skilled in the use of his mind and applying it logically to any and every situation including mathematics, computer programming, chess, gaming or whatever and he is clearly highly intuitive to boot. To my perception his great strength lies in delivering, intelligent, linear, thought out, rationalised and intensely practical approaches and solutions to the difficulties we all face in creating deeply fulfilling, happy, meaningful lives for ourselves. This he does without any extraneous nonsense or embellishment,

It is a wonderful gift but can feel a little "dry" and that is about the only criticism that I'd level at his book. I felt at times like I was reading an _owners workshop manual for life_, it is perhaps more practical than inspiring.

I felt there was a huge amount of information about what to do but somewhat less there to actually inspire and motivate you to get on and do it beyond the inherent truth and wisdom calling you to action from the pages. Of course, this should be enough but I suspect that to a populace so currently gripped in victim and blame culture that there may be many who shy away from such positive action.

For those who are ready though its a massive gift and they will likely pick up this book and sigh inwardly..._"oh... at last, at last, thank you...". I'll certainly be ordering my hardcopy when I finish writing this.

Another wonderful aspect of his approach is not that he is saying _"be like me and you'll get great results"_ but rather that he is simply saying use these principals and apply them to You in Your way and You will get the results that You uniquely desire. Its highly empowering.

I highly recommend it.

Honestly, I took a chance with this book, it wasn't heavily reviewed within the UK and relative to other books available, certainly not as popular and in retrospect I'm glad that I did buy it.

This read really hit home for me since my life mirrors Steve's scarily closely, so much so that life experiences and the lessons certainly weren't taken with a pinch of salt.

Refreshingly, the book isn't touting a quick fix solution to get fame and fortune. Steve reminds us that we each have our own deep and meaningful ambitions which are easily obtainable as long as they are aligned with the principles he lays down. It also doesn't lie to the reader, to get the things in life you truly desire, its certainly not going to be easy but definitely not impossible.

Once read, the book acts as a great reference guide to live ones life... take it or leave it.