Book Review: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development For Smart People

Everyone knows, you should be yourself, let your true core self shine through. And everyone also knows, that sometimes you have to "fake it 'til you make it". Wait a second, these ideas directly contradict eachother! Many people sincerely preach one, and many people just as sincerely preach the other. You want to develop yourself, and there's a lot of literature out there aimed to help you develop yourself, but so much of it is contradictory. Some books aren't even self-consistent, contradicting themselves from one chapter to another. Steve Pavlina, a writer who has had a big influence on me, noticed this dilemma and sought to find a clearer, straighter path.


CRITERIA FOR PRODUCTIVE PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

In his book "Personal Development For Smart People", Steve starts out by putting forth criteria that a self-development strategy should have, if it's legitimate and not just a cheap way to sell books. These criteria aren't rocket science, in fact they seem so obvious it makes you go, "I should've thought of that!" But what Steve's done is he's pushed the field of self-development to a new level by going meta. Most self-development books will focus on some specific details, like finances, self esteem, willpower, social skills, or some combination of these. What Steve does is he shifts the focus away from specific details and looks for the deeper underlying patterns underlying it all.

Here are some of the criteria Steve identified, criteria which a personal development philosophy should enjoy in order to be really worth following:

• Universality - The high-level guiding principles of a philosophy should apply equally well to all areas of life. I learned how important this was when I started working to improve my social skills. Some guys think they can change their whole personalities when they go to a club or coffee shop, like their deep inner selves are just an accessory in their outfit. And then when they return to their job, it's back to their old chode selves. Obviously that's completely incongruent. It's not universal.
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• Internal consistence - A philosophy for self-development absolutely must be internally consistent. When the bullets are flying and real life trials are rearing their ugly faces, the last thing anyone needs is two chapters giving conflicting info on what to do.
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• Completeness - If a follower of a certain philosophy takes a correct action, that action should be explainable in a natural way from the fundamental tenets of the philosophy. For example, suppose a philosophy teaches that the entire path to happiness comes from reciting a certain mantra every morning. Then, based on that law, I should be able to go rob banks and wage crimes on humanity, and still be happy, as long as I recite the mantra every morning. "Oh no!" cry the gurus of the philosophy, "You can't do that!" Then the philosophy isn't complete, is it!

By outlining these kinds of criteria in his introduction, Pavlina essentially sets up hurdles for himself to clear. In this way, he's really forcing himself to perform in the rest of the book, because once the reader reads his criteria, the reader is going to be scrutinizing the following text to see whether Pavlina practices what he preaches. This is very characteristic of Steve Pavlina- he is not a man to take the easy route of declaring himself a guru and asking readers to follow blindly. In fact that would violate his very philosophy, which is very much based on consciousness and alertness and questioning things.


THE THREE AND THE SEVEN

Having established criteria, and thus implicitly setting a certain minimum expectation, Steve follows through by laying down three core virtues, and deriving four more by combining them in different ways, to get a total of seven virtues which he claims form the cornerstone of self-development.

Steve claims to have derived his system of seven virtues by looking for general patterns in the vast, disconnected literature of self-development- including major world religions and philosophical movements and belief systems of all shapes and colors.

Here are the seven virtues which Steve describes in Personal Development For Smart People:

1. Truth Truth means acknowledging what IS. It means having an accurate, clear map of reality. Truth is light amidst the darkness of the world. If we are not honest with ourselves, all our other actions cannot help but be confused and unbalanced, coming as they are from a misguided view of the world, like a blind man driving a car.
2. Love Love is what separates our actions from the actions of robots. Not just love for other humans, but love for what we do, love for the beauty of the world around us, love for our own selves, love for the blessings in our lives.
3. Power Power refers to our ability to interact with the world around us and actually influence it. We are not mere observers, we actually dwell in this world and take part in its dramas and adventures, and all the truth and love in the world wouldn't do anything to change our lives if we didn't take action on them. The most powerful action is action which is lucid, conscious and deliberate.
4. Oneness = Truth + Love Combining Truth and Love, we get the virtue of oneness. The best way to describe this is through the analogy of cells in a body. In a body, good cells act in the best interest of other cells and of the body as a whole. A "selfish" cell is a parasite at best, a disease at worst. Oneness goes a long way to bring meaning and passion to life in a world of selfish, self-interested pursuits and values.
5. Authority = Truth + Power Combining Truth and Power, we get the virtue of authority. To understand this, think of the tragic cartoon character Dilbert, a brainy engineer with a stupid boss. Dilbert has all the truth and none of the power, and so he accomplishes nothing. Dilbert's boss has all the power and none of the truth, and so he just wastes everyone's time. Neither has real authority. If either gained the positive virtue of the other, the result would be authority.
6. Courage = Love + Power Combining Love and Power, we get perhaps my favorite virtue, the virtue of courage. If power was deliberate, conscious, lucid action, courage is power in the face of danger (real or imagined). Courage is what lets a man approach a beautiful woman and start a conversation. Courage is what lets a salaryman quit his day job and start his own business. To be honest, I can't really understand the logic behind this particular combination (love plus power), although it certainly makes sense in the "man approaching pretty woman" example.
7. Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power The ultimate virtue, according to Steve, is "intelligence", the combination of Truth, Love, and Power. I think really this is just a convenient name for a virtue that doesn't really have a name of its own; certainly Steve's "intelligence" is not the same as Webster's Dictionary's "intelligence". But then again, intelligence is kind of difficult to define, and Steve's is, if less orthodox, perhaps more practical and useful than the standard definition. If you look at human beings as artifacts of evolution, then intelligence really is our ultimate feature, what puts us at the top of the food chain, so this definition works well in an evolutionary sense.

Probably the biggest benefit of this structured system is that it adds order to self-development, a field which is usually far-flung and chaotic, and often incomplete. Whether or not Steve Pavlina's structure is "objectively true" in some verifiable scientific sense, isn't really important. It's just a convenient and elegant thread for uniting the disconnected pieces of self-development.

Moreover, because of how most the combinations make a lot of logical sense, it creates a very practical hierarchy: if you want to improve your Authority, for example, Steve gives specific exercises in his Authority chapter, but beyond that, you can also work on your Truth or your Power, and building either of those will naturally hit your Authority as well.


APPLICATIONS OF THE SEVEN VIRTUES

In the second half of Personal Development For Smart People, Steve Pavlina applies the seven virtues to discuss six aspects of life. Here are the six areas which Steve applies the seven virtues to:

1. Habits
2. Career
3. Money
4. Health
5. Relationships
6. Spirituality

If you just want a "vanilla self-help book" where a guru tells you what you should do with little explanation, you could take P.D.F.S.P. and skip the first part entirely and just read the "Applications". I don't really recommend that, though.

The most interesting application chapter, appropriately, is the climactic final chapter, "Spirituality". "Spirituality" (which, btw, can be read perfectly well through an NLP viewpoint with no actual voodoo or magic involved at all) could be more accurately named "Belief Systems". In this chapter, Steve talks about belief systems-- religions, atheism, political ideologies, philosophies, etc.-- and brilliantly compares them to "lenses" which let us perceive reality.

The idea Steve conveys in "Spirituality" is that different "lenses" (belief systems) provide different viewpoints of reality. Through one lens, we may see certain things clearly, while others are obscured. To live life peering exclusively through one lens would be akin to purposefully depriving ourselves of full sensory input. Think, for example, when someone takes a political ideology too seriously and seems to become "blind" to reality.

The most interesting thing about the "Spirituality" chapter-- and this is something you won't even read in the book itself-- is that you can apply it "recursively" to Steve's own writings. So, in Steve Pavlina's own language, Steve Pavlina's own writings are just another "lens" to view reality. Though, in the opinion of Glowing Face Man, Steve provides a very powerful and enlightening lens.

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



Here are some other articles I've written. I poured a lot of Truth, Love, and Power into writing these articles.
Consciously Choosing Health
Metabolism As An Example Of Accepting What Is
30 Day Article-A-Day Challenge Completed!
How To Be A Better Teacher