This is a book review of Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth by Steve Pavlina of Steve Pavlina.com.
How I got the book:
Self-purchased (I paid for this with my own money)
Background:
Steve Pavlina, a former computer gaming software entrepreneur, started blogging about personal growth in 2004. He has pursued personal growth and self-improvement voraciously since avoiding a jail sentence for theft at the age of 19. Since then, he has undertaken many personal growth experiments, read and studied a great deal of material, and has worked to share that information with other people. He turned his life around and has done some cool, worthwhile things since then. In short, through his blog, forums, articles, podcasts, and other content, Steve Pavlina tries to help people change the way they think, act, and even feel about things in order to help them grow.
Personal Development for Smart People is Steve’s first book and it is aligned with his other content, supplementing and reinforcing it in many ways. The subtitle of his book, The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, repeats his main theme of living consciously: thinking, planning, doing, evaluating and repeating this cycle in order to grow as a person.
The strengths:
Steve’s book is logically divided into two sections: background theory and practical applications for personal growth. He has devised a logical framework for his principles of personal development, starting with some core ideas and then combining them several ways to come up with seven principles. The seventh principle, intelligence, combines the three basic principles in a holistic way to show that intelligence, or smarts, depends on truth, power, and love. I like this idea of humanizing intelligence.
The book has a useful self-assessment test (with a twist!) to help you determine where you are at in your own personal development. It contains a number of self-improvement exercises, including a number of habits that you work on and also ways to develop these habits. He favors 30 day trials or programs to develop new habits, similar to how Leo Babauta and Scott H. Young describe methods to build habit builds.
Steve’s writing style is light and friendly, making his book an easy read. He leads you through the reasons to help improve yourself and also attempts to rebut some of the common arguments that attempt to counter his ideas. He does a good job at this, although some people will disagree with some of his logic. In particular, I think some people will reject some of his rationale behind his concepts of love and oneness, particularly if they aren’t spiritually inclined or sufficiently open-minded. The key to enjoying and using his work, in general, is to be prepared to set aside your ideas and beliefs where they don’t naturally align with Steve’s, then think them through and see if you can accept his arguments.
I like the fact that he doesn’t try to make things seem easy, although he does try to provide techniques and tips to help you out. He acknowledges that personal growth is hard and requires both motivation and self-discipline.
The anecdotes and quotations that he sprinkles through the book are good, too.
The areas for improvement:
There are three main problems with this book that bothered me:
No index to quickly find specific sections of the book: at 254 pages, it might not be necessary to have such an index, but it would be helpful to quickly find certain parts of the book.
No references: his book clearly echoes the work of hundreds of years of writing, philosophy, and thinking from a myriad number of sources. His concept of oneness, as an example, reflects a number of other religions and philosophies which talk about how all things and beings are interconnected, although his personal concept of spirituality seems to revolve around atheism (no, that’s not a contradiction). However, Steve doesn’t cite many external resources other than a few quotes. By contrast, Stephen Covey has made some attempts to highlight the specific resources that have influenced his ideas, particularly in First Things First. There’s no doubt that Steve did a lot of work to take those basic concepts and fine tune them to make his own methodology. I feel that citing more external sources would have provided more growth material for his readers.
Section 2, the practical applications of his book, was a little disappointing: his chapter topics make good frameworks for discussion (e.g. habits; career; money; relationships; health, etc.), but the bulk of the practical exercises are limited to the Habits chapter, as well as the Intelligence chapter of section one. They are all good exercises, but they’re all clumped together in those two chapters, which seems to dilute the overall value of section 2. Steve links all seven principles of personal development to each practical application chapter, but it appears to be done more to reinforce that intellectual framework than to give you concrete, practical exercises for each application. However, he does add a number of personal anecdotes throughout which help to stimulate some thoughts.
Other points of interest:
Steve provides links to parts of his website to provide some additional information for his reader.
Verdict (out of 10): 8 (worth buying and reading)
Pavlina provides enough interesting content, anecdotes, and exercises to make this an enjoyable but not heavy read. It’s worth reading if you’re looking for a good framework to organize your personal growth activities and it’s full of good ideas. It’s not a workbook. It probably works even better when you head over to his website and add in the blog, forums, etc., but it certainly stands on its own.
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I have been reading a lot of personal help books recently, in hopes that I will be able to gain the knowledge I need to conquer my personal goal of obtaining my dream job and getting out of debt. I would have to say that Sonia Miller's latest book, “The Attraction Distraction” has been my favorite thus far. By reading this book, I learned a simple four-step process which called “The Mystic's Formula, which helped shed light on all the ways I was sabotaging myself without knowing it. This was such a huge break-through for me and now I feel more ready than ever to move forward, and do everything I can to obtain this goal. I am extremely interested in reading Steve Pavlina's book also, as I am sure that there will be a lot of great information included, to help me better obtain my goal.
Good luck, Becky!
Thank you!
I just picked this up and started to read it this week. I have to say that I am pleasently surprised. I didn’t really know what to expect from this book and so far I’m liking it.
Ian
Ian@ Personal Development´s last blog ..Self Confidence
@Ian – good for you. I think there’s some valuable material in the book.