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158 of 176 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
Steve Pavlina has a very popular personal development website, www.stevepavlina.com, 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.
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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Oustanding Accessible Practical Integrative Framework, October 1, 2008
There are thousands of books published in the personal development field.
So why should you read this one? Because it's an...
Accessible. Practical. Integrative Framework.
Accessible: This book was not written from a Tibetan monastery or Princeton think-tank-- it was written by a transparent, plain spoken guy who is sharing what he has learned from both extensive reading and analysis and the lab of his own life. You won't need to haul out your dictionary or scratch your head and think, "Now what does he mean by that?"
Practical: This book gives more than just concepts- in each chapter there are practical exercises where you can put the concepts into direct doable action designed to kick-start growth and change in your life. I dare you to read this book and not find a dozen ideas that will REALLY WORK in your life immediately.
Integrative Framework: I've read other books that helped me with organization or work or approach to life or understanding myself. They were helpful, but they dealt with only one component of my life. One the other hand, Personal Development for Smart People gave me an overall framework that let me see a complete picture of my growth as a person, and allowed me to integrate those other good ideas and books into the framework. This allowed me to utilize all my resources more effectively and see where they fit into my life as a whole.
What's inside......
In the introduction, Steve sets out the question,
"What does it mean for us to grow as conscious human beings, and how do we intelligently guide that process?"
He answers that there are three universal principles: truth, love & power. The goal of the book is, "to teach you how to bring all areas of your life into alignment with these universal principles." He starts out with chapters on each principle, its components, common blocks to it, and ways to increase it in your life. Each chapter contains clearly written insights, engaging personal experiences, and practical exercises.
He next devotes chapters to principles he derives from the first three, which include oneness (truth+love), authority (truth+power), and courage (love+power). He caps it off with a chapter on intelligence, which he defines as the integration and mastery of all six principles.
After a discussion of the principles, he moves to application. There are chapters on how to apply each principle to the areas of habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirituality.
What did I like about this book?
-I love that it is an integrative framework that I can fix in my head and use to structure my insights and actions about personal growth.
-The three basic principles are solid and I was immediately able to apply them to my own life. They echo the three principles that the Apostle Paul once wrote, "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."
-The book has given me insight and motivation to make some real, substantial changes in my life. I currently am in week 2 of getting up at 5am every morning (even weekends), exercising a half hour a day, and not eating dessert or red meat. I've lost 7 pounds, crafted an effective life purpose statement and feel greater clarity and productivity.
What came up short?
-Steve's principle of "oneness" is not a universally accepted principle in the same category as truth, power, & love. For Steve, this belief serves him because he rejects the idea of a Judeo-Christian Creator God. For me, knowing that I am a loved child of an omnipotent Sovereign works better than thinking I am one with everything else in the world.
-Some of the application chapters were strong (money was especially helpful to me), but others such as relationships, health and spirituality again strayed more into aspects of Steve's personal worldview than universally accepted principles.
Overall, Personal Development for Smart People is a great read and a fantastic resource. There are some parts you will likely not agree with, but there's a lot of gold to be mined and effectively used in your life. I've read it twice in two weeks, and already given two copies to friends. Highly recommended
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A bit disappointing, but still good, October 30, 2008
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.
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