Personal Development for Smart People
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 unive
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A Tremendous Accomplishment,
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…
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|New definition of insight?,
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.
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|A breath of clear fresh air…,
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…
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