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

Steve Pavlina (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2009

Despite promises of “fast and easy” results from slick marketers, real personal growth is neither fast nor easy. The truth is that hard work, courage, and self-discipline are required to achieve meaningful results—results that are not attained by those who cling to the fantasy of achievement without effort.

        Personal Development for Smart People reveals the unvarnished truth about what it takes to consciously grow as a human being. As you read, you’ll learn the seven universal principles behind all successful growth efforts (truth, love, power, oneness, authority, courage, and intelligence); as well as practical, insightful methods for improving your health, relationships, career, finances, and more.

You’ll see how to become the conscious creator of your life instead of feeling hopelessly adrift, enjoy a fulfilling career that honors your unique self-expression, attract empowering relationships with loving, compatible partners, wake up early feeling motivated, energized, and enthusiastic, achieve inspiring goals with disciplined daily habits and much more!

       With its refreshingly honest yet highly motivating style, this fascinating book will help you courageously explore, creatively express, and consciously embrace your extraordinary human journey.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steve Pavlina is widely recognized as the most successful personal-development blogger on the Internet, attracting more than two million monthly readers who value his unique insights. Instead of posing as a self-help guru with all the answers, Steve encourages people to fearlessly conduct their own personal growth experiments in order to learn through direct experience. He has written more than 700 free articles, often challenging his readers to question what they’ve been taught and to consider alternative perspectives. Blue-eyed, colorblind, and left-handed, Steve is the voice of recessive genes that seek creative expression instead of social conformity.

Product Details

• Paperback: 266 pages
• Publisher: Hay House (October 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401922767
• ISBN-13: 978-1401922764
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.9 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #26 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Developmental Psychology

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

286 of 317 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and useful, but a little too strange for me! October 4, 2008

By D. Wong

Format:Hardcover

Steve Pavlina has a very popular personal development website, [...] and this is his new book.

In a nutshell

This book takes a new approach to personal development. I've read numerous books on goal-setting, relationships, career, finances, etc. and 99% of them focus on the practical things you can do in order to achieve success in whatever area you'd like to. "Personal Development for Smart People" is unique in that it tries to establish a set of core principles that form a foundation of all personal development, rather than just focusing on what you should try to DO. Steve Pavlina believes that it is acting out of the 7 core principles of Truth, Love, Power, Oneness, Authority, Courage, and Intelligence that guarantees success. Just like how there are universal laws of physics, he believes that he has discovered the universal laws of personal growth.The first half of the book explains the 7 core principles, and the second half of the book discusses how to apply them.

How different is "Personal Development for Smart People" from other personal development books?

It is extremely differernt- sometimes too different for my comfort. Of course, Steve Pavlina is very different from your typical self-help book author. He starts off the book by describing how he was arrested for felony grand theft as a 19 year-old, and subsequently got kicked out of college. He enrolled in another college and graduated in THREE semesters, while double-majoring in computer science and mathematics. Now, he is a vegetarian, and eats only raw food. He is also married to psychic medium/intuitive counselor.

So... you would expect Steve's book to be a little out-of-the-ordinary, yea?

Indeed it is.... For example, in illustrating the "connection" principle under his core principle of Love, he asks you to imagine an everday object like a pen. He asks you to feel the connection between you and the object, to imagine that the object is part of you. He asks you to send your love energy toward the object and say "I love you," and "You're beautiful."

I don't know about you, but I didn't do that exercise, and I don't ever plan to! It's far too strange for me!

"Personal Development for Smart People" has many other strange exercises, like "Time-Travel Meditation"... I think that the name would tell you that it's another rather unusual exercise?

How practical is this book?

Despite the many weird things that Steve writes in his book, there are many insightful things that he mentions, too. In the second half of his book, he discusses how you could apply the 7 core principles in the areas of Habits, Career, Money, Health, Relationships, and Spirituality. He has many interesting views on everyday issues. For instance, he says that the 2 components of career are its Medium and its Message. Its Medium is what it is, eg. you're a doctor, a salesman, a teacher, etc. while its Message is what beliefs/values you communicate through your Medium, eg. compassion, love, curiosity, enthusiasm. He says that often, we focus too much on the Medium, when it is the Message that really brings you fulfillment in career. He says that in order to build an authentic career, you must ask yourself 4 questions: 1) What must I do? 2) What can I do? 3) What do I want to do? 4) What should I do? When you find that the answer to the 4 questions is the same, you're on the right path.

He mentions a lot of other practical things you can do to improve your relationships, finances, health, etc. - and his advice is all based on his 7 core principles.

All in all, I would say that "Personal Development for Smart People" is much more belief-centered than action-centered- unlike most other personal development books.

Bottomline

My personal belief is that being should precede doing. I've heard it said before: "Being precedes doing, that's why we're called human beings, not human doings." Steve Pavlina clearly believes this too, which is why he focuses on principles rather than actions.

However, there are just some weird things (spritual and philosophical in a strange sort of way?) that Steve writes in this book that just give me goosebumps. I think this will be the case for the average reader... but there are definitely a lot of interesting perspectives and useful information presented in "Personal Development for Smart People". But I could never fully subscribe to his beliefs/core principles, even though everyone could benefit from a lot of the practical applications he suggests. Read more ›

66 of 71 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A bit disappointing, but still good October 30, 2008

By Michael S. Turitzin

Format:Hardcover

When I first encountered Steve Pavlina's website "Personal Development for Smart People" a couple years ago, I was immediately impressed with the quality of its content. Steve's articles--which have titles like "The Courage to Live Consciously," "Cultivating Burning Desire," and "Whatever You Fear, You Must Face"--are well-written, insightful, and often motivating. Yes, they can be sappy and melodramatic, but they are far better than the junk usually found in personal development books. Steve's website is a great resource, and its success is well-deserved.

That said, I was a little disappointed by Steve's recent book, which is titled after his site. Steve is ambitious in his book's scope: he wants to define the "core principles" of personal growth, the principles on which all successful growth efforts are based. There exist self-help books on a broad range of topics--personal finance, career choice, relationships, and so on--and Steve wants his book to subsume all of them. His thesis is that all effective personal growth techniques are based on a few core principles. If you apply these principles to your life, he thinks, the more-specific techniques presented in other books will come naturally.

Steve's presentation is clear and well-thought-out. I like his core principles, which are named Truth, Love, and Power. Truth is seeing and accepting things as they are, Love is engaging fully and openly with the world, and Power is consciously effecting change. I also like Steve's scientific approach: he requires that his principles be universal, complete, irreducible, congruent, and practical. And I think Steve is probably right that his principles underlie most, if not all, effective personal growth efforts.

So why did I find PDFSP a little disappointing?... Maybe I just had high expectations. And, admittedly, I've read enough of Steve's articles that it's hard for me to judge his book on its own merits. But I do think it could have been quite a bit better.

First there's its organization. PDFSP feels overly-structured and overly-segmented. I suspect this organization came from Steve's desire to be systematic--and perhaps to make writing it straightforward--but the result is often tedious, predictable, and repetitive. The first seven chapters are devoted to the three core principles and four secondary principles that are supposed to derive from them. A chapter is devoted to each principle, and each chapter is further sectioned off into independent discussions of "terms" that Steve associates with that principle. For example, in the Truth chapter, there are sections on "perception," "prediction," "accuracy," "acceptance," and "self-awareness." This kind of structure is tedious. I would have preferred a more-lively take on the principles.

Worse still is the structure of the later "application" chapters, which apply the principles to the usual self-help topics: money, career choice, relationships, and so on. Each of these chapters is sectioned off into a separate discussion of how its topic relates to each of the primary and secondary principles. So, in the money chapter, we get sections on "Money and Truth," "Money and Love," "Money and Power," and so on. Each of the six application chapters is like this, and they account for almost half of the book. It's not surprising that this repetition of structure leads to repetition of ideas. For example, when discussing Oneness, one of his secondary principles, Steve repeats his view that we are all "individual cells of the same body" over and over again.

Steve's simple, exuberant, and almost-naive writing style may be off-putting to more-skeptical readers. This style, combined with the general abstractness of PDFSP, makes it a bit hard to relate to him as a person. Though Steve does describe a few painful experiences from his past, his explanations feel detached and overly analytical. I only mention this because, in a personal development book especially, it's nice to feel a personal connection to the author.

All right, enough of the negative. There's a lot of great advice in PDFSP. I like Steve's suggestion to rate the parts of your life--career, relationships, etc.--numerically from 1 to 10. If you give something a "decent" score like "7," chances are you're more dissatisfied with it than you think. To make his point, Steve says that a "7' score is really a "1."

I like (love?) Steve's view on love. Steve sees love as a form of connection and as a way of engaging with the world. For example, he suggests that, instead of seeing yourself as inherently separate from the people around you, you assume you're already connected to them. Rather than assuming that connections take a long time to create, he suggests you assume they already exist ("Instead of having to break the ice with someone, assume that there is no ice."). Such an attitude will yield in-kind responses from others and fast friendships, Steve claims. I believe him.

Steve has good advice on making lifestyle changes. For example, he suggests running "30-day trials" to evaluate new habits. The idea is to try something new without actually committing to it. If a change is good, it shouldn't be difficult to keep going with it after the 30 days are up. Steve himself has done interesting trials of things like polyphasic sleep and a raw food diet and has posted the results on his website.

In general PDFSP contains a lot of great advice, whether it be on facing fears or on time management. And I love Steve's attempt to break personal development down into a few core principles--he's largely successful, in my opinion. However, I can't offer an unqualified endorsement of his book. Its overly-formal structure is boring and repetitious, and its simplistic exuberance can take some getting used to. If the good stuff I've mentioned sounds interesting to you and the bad stuff doesn't sound too bad, it's worth a look. Read more ›

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The "How To" for Learning to Live a Meaningful LIfe October 10, 2008

By Sheila Viers

Format:Hardcover

Let me start off by saying that I am a avid believer in living each day for fulfillment. I have undergone an awakening over the past year, realizing that living with purpose and awareness is so much more rewarding than going with the flow, living each day just to get by. I love reading books that offer a different perspective and deeper insight into living more meaningfully. So you can imagine that I was thrilled to be fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of the book, "Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth". I have just finished reading the book and I want to share my review with you.

Steve Pavlina

If you are unfamiliar with Steve Pavlina, I encourage you to check out his personal development website at www.StevePavlina.com. One could literally spend hours reading through more than 700 free articles of incredibly thought provoking information on that site. In the span of a few years, Steve has risen to the top echelon of personal development aficionados, attracting more than two million monthly readers to his site. When I first stumbled upon Steve and his website, I was amazed at the depth of his knowledge in personal growth. Steve's tag line is to "live life consciously" and in each article of his that I read, I grow more confidant that he truly follows this mantra every single day.

Overview

Steve begins the book by taking us back to the pivotal moment in his life when he realized that he was interested in personal development. It was 1991, and he was sitting in a jail cell after being arrested for felony grand theft. It soon becomes clear that he has had his fair share of life experiences to build from.... We learn that over the course of his life he has had many ups and downs, from bankruptcy to owning his own video game software development business (reaching levels of success far surpassing what many people can imagine), to the birth of StevePavlina.com. Each of these experiences brought him closer to answering the ultimate personal development question:

What does it mean for us to consciously grow as human beings, and how do we intelligently guide that process?

Steve believes that the answer to this question lies within three core principles: truth, love, and power. He goes on to explain that four secondary principles are then derived from these first three.

Oneness - Truth + Love
Authority - Truth + Power
Courage - Love + Power
Intelligence - Truth + Love + Power

The book is organized into two parts. Part One goes into great detail on the theory behind these universal principles, explaining how to align yourself with each. These principles can and should be applied to every aspect of life. Part Two explores how to apply the seven principles to specific areas of life, such as habits, career, finances, health, relationships, and spirituality. Some examples would be injecting truth into relationships, aligning your career with love, and bringing power to your spiritual practice - things that many of us struggle to do.

Steve admits that applying what we learn in this book won't be easy and it wasn't even easy for him, but he says that real conscious growth is seldom undemanding, but it's always worthwhile.

He goes on to explain that if you are dealing with a major problem in your life right now, that dilemma can be redefined as a problem of alignment with one or more of the three primary principles of truth, love, and power. If you change your perspective so that you can see it in that sense, you will be equipped with all the tools to right that situation.

Also, you may find that you are stronger in one or two of the primary principles, and weaker in the other(s). The details laid out in this book will help you to gain a balance of all three. As you continue to increase that balance, life just starts to fall into place. Things happen that seem as if "destiny" brought them into your life (tying into the law of attraction). If you get off track, you will notice that maybe things aren't so peachy anymore, and that is your cue to realign yourself with these principles again.

My Thoughts

I started out reading the introduction of this book wondering if I was in over my head. Steve is sometimes a very analytical writer, and he goes into "technical mode" right off the bat. I got a little nervous at first, thinking I might not be able to connect at this abstract level. I soon realized I was wrong, and by the time I finished the book, I had completely killed a brand new highlighter pen. Steve mixes soul searching type topics with personal stories, real-world examples, and exercises to illustrate the key points and deepen your understanding while keeping an overall easy-reading feel. No need to feel intimidated, we are talking about life here, not biophysics.

Keep in mind, this book is not for the narrow-minded. In order to fully achieve the personal growth that this book offers, you have to approach it with an open mind. Steve has an almost brilliant way of defining each of the seven principles, but a lot of what he says directly calls into question much of what we currently believe as a society.

My overall take away from the book is a feeling of true self acceptance. Personal Development for Smart People is a tool that allows us to remove the shell and gain a greater awareness and understanding of the vast amount of social conditioning that surrounds us. Our friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances contribute heavily to our understanding of reality. We are told that this is the way it has to be because that is what is accepted by our culture, society, religion, etc and we believe it.

Not to say that social conditioning is always a bad thing, but it is something that many of us rarely question. By aligning ourself with the principles Steve speaks of, it gives a level of clarity and peace that is not easily achieved when we allow ourselves to go through life, ignoring the voice inside that tells us to question something doesn't feel right, but is accepted by society as a whole.

Following is a list of a few more of my favorite "aha" moments and highlights from the book.

- The first step on your path of personal growth must be to recognize that your life as it stands right now isn't how you want it to be.

- Perception is a key component of personal growth because we react to what we perceive to be true.

- When you fail to release incompatibilities from your life, you settle for mere tolerance and prevent compatible new connections from forming.

- The purpose of every relationship is to teach you how to love yourself from the inside out.

- Some belief systems teach us that powerlessness is a desirable trait, but nothing is further from the truth.

- There is no power in the past or the future, only in the present moment. We should set goals not to control the future, but to empower ourselves and improve our present reality.

- Exercise your courage to go after the prize of true fulfillment, which is so much greater than the illusion of security.

- Your greatest regrets in life won't be the mistakes you've made; they'll be the opportunities you let slip through your fingers by failing to act.

- Being authentic doesn't mean being perfect.

- Risk taking isn't gambling.

- Never close your eyes to the truth. If you want to grow beyond your current limitations, you must first learn to stop resisting where you are.

- Your relationships have a tremendous influence on your self-development. Surround yourself with people who naturally empower you.

- In a world that isn't fully committed to health, the most natural and beneficial practices are often considered extreme. Average is a slow suicide. Summon the maturity to make intelligent choices for yourself, regardless of what throngs of sick people encourage you to do.

- Don't wait for a crisis to strike before taking action to improve your health.
- Fear of rejection is one of the major blocks to aligning one's self with love.

My Favorite Message

- Power is a direction, not a position. The best thing you can do to empower others is to empower yourself.

The message from the book that truly hits home the most for me is that living life purposefully means to live an inspired life, consciously using our potential to its fullest. As we do this, we become more intelligent, because we are truly aligning ourselves with the core principles of truth, love, and power. The closer in alignment that we are to those principles - the more we improve ourselves, and in turn, inspire others to do the same. Then, as those people follow in our footsteps, finding their own path, they inspire others, and the ripples go on and on down the chain. By living a fulfilled life, we are in essence contributing to the greater good. As we improve ourselves, we improve everyone. This point made so much sense to me, because I have found how amazing it feels to follow your passion, and by the same token, I am almost magnetized to people who I encounter that are doing the same.

Altering Your Perspective

There is a big difference between working with the flow versus letting go and simply allowing life to happen to you. Why do we just settle? We have power, we just choose not to use it. When we are operating with the flow, things feel good, like there is a powerful energy working through us. We know from the inside out that we are on the right path. I think this is where a lot of people could benefit from reading this book, just as much as I have, because we tend to think that we don't have a choice. In reality we have all kinds of choices, we just tend to narrow our focus too much and we don't see all that life has to offer if if we would let it.

Tough Stuff

The chapters on relationships and spirituality were the toughest for me to comprehend due to my own past beliefs. I like that Steve comes right out and says that you may disagree with things that he says and that is fine. His main goal is to get you to challenge your assumptions and make your own conscious choices.

Religion is a touchy topic, but yes...he goes there, and I am going to go there too. I was raised Catholic, went to 12 years of Catholic school, and as you would expect, certain beliefs have been ingrained in me. Over my life, I have questioned some things regarding my own spirituality, because that is just my personality - I tend to want to know the how's and the why's, and I had trouble coming to grips with the idea of one religion being "right", suggesting then that all others are "wrong".

As I read through the book, I was pretty excited to see that Steve addressed this very question. I realized that when I take a step back and think about spirituality without social constraints, I see that the more open I am to learning about different cultures and different religions, the more I am able to consider life and reality from multiple perspectives and gain a greater understanding of other people and the world.

It's Never Too Late

I know what it's like to work in a job that is unfulfilling. I know what i is like to think, "Man, I want more than this," only to follow that up with thoughts of feeling like I don't know how to fix it or feeling powerless to the situation or contributing factors. Steve puts it so simply when he says, "The longer you follow that path, the more skill you build at something you don't enjoy." You may continue to gain seniority and experience in that line of work, but ultimately if it doesn't fulfill you, you are just digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole.

Sometimes it takes courage to withstand some short term sacrifices to get you to a long-term place of true meaning and joy. And then when you find the career that truly drives and empowers you, life becomes a journey, and we are no longer living day by day, striving for the destination of 5 o'clock, or the weekend, or retirement. Life is meant to be lived, not endured.

In Conclusion

We are not powerless because we have children to be responsible for, or because we currently do not have the income of our dreams, or because we are 50 years old. Its never too late to start changing your life for the better. And if you are inspired at all by what I have said above, I know without a doubt that this book could have a great impact on your life. I say "could" and not "will", because ultimately, it is up to you to take all the knowledge that Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth has to offer, and apply it.

Sheila Viers
http://www.livewell360.com Read more ›