Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth

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 th

Pavliniac (n): Person who is an avid reader of Steve Pavlina's blog (www.stevepavlina.com/blog) and participant in his forums (www.stevepavlina.com/forums). Okay, I freely admit it... I'm a Pavliniac, and like many others, I've been eagerly anticipating the release of Steve's book, Personal Development For Smart People, since he announced that he was writing one. Luckily for those of us who are impatient souls, a glitch somewhere along the line resulted in the book being released earlier than the intended date of 15 October. Dare I call this a collective manifestation caused by all Steve's many fans?! The reason why I've been a long-term reader of Steve's blog is that I enjoy the blend of logic and intuition in his writing and thought processes. Often, personal development blogs sit at one of the extremes, and while I'm more than happy to read such blogs, I find that my blog reading list as a whole has to find a balance between the two. Steve's blog, however, is one of the few that combine the best of both sides of the brain, and his newly released book follows suit. This book presents the results of Steve's search for the universal principles underlying personal development - Love, Truth and Power. These core principles are further expanded to Oneness (Truth + Love), Authority (Truth + Power), and Courage (Love + Power). Finally, Intelligence is defined as the combination of all three core principles. This framework synthesises information in what is often a broad and fragmented field, and provides both philosophical and practical applications to a diverse range of life areas, such as career, relationships and health. Although Steve has given examples from his own life throughout the book as well as provided exercises through which readers can utilise the principles in their own development, this is not a prescriptive book. Rather, the book aims to increase readers' awareness of the principles in their lives, so that where these are present they can be further developed, and where these appear to be absent they can be allowed to grow. It is, as the book's tagline says, the conscious pursuit of personal growth. In the introduction, Steve states that the principles should be simple and elegant. They are. In fact, at first glance, it may appear that some of the book's content is in fact too simple. Yet, this is not a simplicity born of triteness and self-help cliché that is unfortunately all too common in the personal development arena. Instead, this is the kind of simplicity that emerges from dedicated and conscious exploration and experimentation in the area of personal growth. It is a simplicity that allows us to recognise the overarching structures of life that exist at a deeper level. It is what Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to as the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Can things really be this simple? Yes. But, remember that simplicity doesn't necessarily equal easy. As Steve points out, personal development can be very chall

This is a great book if you like self development. Some sections will apply to most people but some people will not need to go indepth on all secitions. Part 1 deals with 7 fundamental principles - Truth, Love, Power, Oneness, Authority, Courage and Intelligence. I had a negative reaction to a paragraph he wrote in the section on Truth about habits. The gist of his message was - to become more intelligent, do things differently. "Excessive routine is the enemy of intelligence". Of course I am a big believer in having success habits. Later in the book he devotes a full chapter to success habits though so he does understand the power of habits. I liked and agree with what he said about media conditioning. We can become over influenced by traditional media. And much of media has a conflict. They want to "sell" you that something is not good for you - EG alcohol will make you feel popular or sexy. He even suggests a media fast for 30 days. I liked what he said about momentum. The key is to get started and get moving. I will write an article on this in the coming days. I am adding articles to my resources section with fair frequency now. I just added one on Be a Life Long Learner (I am sure Pavlina would agree with that one) and another on Leadership vs. Management. Part 2 talks about practical application - Habits, Career, Money, Health, Relationships and Spirituality. I found a lot of practical tips in the first section (like start with the worst thing first thing and master the first hour of the day) so really looked forward to more practical application. From the Habits chapter: "Habits are your Mind's approach to time management. It would be extremely inefficient for you to decide how to spend every minute of every day. Your conscious mind has better things to do than solve the same problems over and over, so it delegates known problems to your subconscious" The book is well written and easy to read. And it is inspirational. The book is full of ideas. It is one of those books that you can take only 2 or 3 ideas and incorporate them into your life to make a big change. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in self development.

As a regular reader of author Steve Pavlina's thoughtful postings on his very popular blog, I have been looking forward to his first book and seeing how he would distill his many postings into a cohesive book. Well, the wait is over. Steve's first book is exceptional! If like me, you have grown tired of sophomoric pabulum of so many of today's self-help books, you will likely enjoy this thoughtful book. Instead of writing what many would like to hear ("six east steps to..."), the author has conceived a philosophy of peak performance. The result reads more like a philosophy book than a typical self-help book. The organization of the philosophy is very thoughtful, the writing very articulate, and the tone just perfect. I especially liked that the author doesn't see himself as a guru, but instead as someone eager to share his learnings. Examples of abound, throughout the book, where the author has taken commonly discussed concepts and taken them to a more thoughtful level. As just one example, he uses a variation of the wheel of life that Zig Ziglar introduced me to many, many years ago. But, what I found powerful was the author's discussion (page 21) of how we often cheat ourselves with our scores when grading ourselves in the different elements of our lives. Throughout the book, the author adds his thoughtful ideas to the basics so as to enrich the power of the basics. The timing of this thought provoking book could not be better. I believe millions of people will be re-examining their core beliefs in view of the dramatic economic and societal changes we are seeing. Readers looking to really re-examine their beliefs will find few better, recent books for launching that inquiry. I am in awe of the fact that this is the author's first book (although his blog postings demonstrate that he is hardly a novice at writing). The quality of this book portends for great things from Pavlina in the years to come. I predict that he will become a very significant force in raising consciousness, assuming he continues to walk his wisdom. Here is hoping that fame and adulation will not knock him off course as it has done with so many others. The world needs Steve Pavlina, and more like him. Bravo.

This is one of the first Personal Development books that focuses on Personal Development as a whole and how to use it to improve your overall life. The book starts with very basic principles that are essential to your happiness and success and then builds upon them. Once you understand these principles you will understand what you really want and will have the power to go after it. I have personally used the several of ideas in this book to completely change my life and it is written in a way that anyone can do so. This book is a must have for anyone looking to improve or change their life.