Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina review (Blog)

[jacob]

Discuss here the following article from mind-energy.net blog.

The book I’m reviewing today, Personal Development for Smart People, by Steve Pavlina was one of my most anticipated books lately, since Steve announced it. And I was fortunate to be sent a review copy.

I’ve already written about Steve Pavlina here and there on this site, mostly as related to his and his wife’s experiences with developing psychic abilities, mostly mediumship. I’ve also interviewed Steve’s wife, Erin Pavlina in June 2007. She is a psychic medium. But this book is not about psychic abilities at all.

Steve is one of the most known personal development bloggers today. I’ve known his site for several years now and have found him to be one of the most original and prolific bloggers on the subject. He had many unique ideas and views on many topics and his writing style is very much to my taste.

Steve has published several hundred articles on his site on various topics and it was interesting to see what he could innovate in his book. Steve promised that the book won’t be a rehash of site’s content and I’m glad to say that he delivered.

The book is just about 150 pages but it is so packed with original ideas and concepts that other writers would have smeared it at least on a handful of books. Luckily for the readers, Steve’s ability to present his ideas succinctly, without much repetition packed the book dense with information.

So what is this book about? The book presents a way of how to look at conscious personal development. The book is built from the ground, in a bottoms up approach, which gives it a somewhat philosophical kind of depth. Indeed, Steve has tried, for the purpose of writing the book, to analyze, in his mind, many of the existing successful growth practices. He analyzed them by trying to identify the most basic principles that unite all of them.

His goal was to find a set of basic principles that would be universal, meaning that they should be for everyone and for all areas of personal development and life. They should be timeless – work in the future and should have been working thousands of years ago as well. They should be collectively complete, meaning that all laws of personal growth should be based on them. And the primary principles should be irreducible. Of course, they also shouldn’t conflict with each other.

Steve then introduces the seven principles. Three core principles: Truth, Love and Power. And four secondary principles, oneness, authority, courage and intelligence. These secondary principles are based on the first 3 in different combinations.

So, part I of the book explores these principles. There’s a chapter for each of them. This is the more “dry”, philosophical part of the book, where the reader builds the foundation.

The second part of the book shows how to apply each of these principles in various areas of one’s growth process. There are chapters for habits, career, money, health, relationship and spirituality. Every area is explorer through the lens of the principles.

Some of these chapter include practical advice as to how one should analyze his situation in the given area. Usually this is done by truthfully answering some very difficult questions. Sometimes feelings and emotion are the guide. But everywhere Steve tries to be only the guide, asking the questions and showing the way one should take to analyze his situation and find the correct answer for himself, which might be different for everyone.

Whoever follows Steve’s blog knows that he changed his diet, from regular to vegetarian, then to vegan. In the last year he switched to eating only raw food. One of the positive effects that Steve mentioned from these changes and that his mental clarity improved with each of this changes. His thinking abilities improved since concentration was easier and mental fog dissipated. This book clearly shows that Steve’s mind capable of going into real depths of thought, giving the process of personal development an almost scientific approach.

The book is titled “Personal Development for Smart People”. And it delivers.



Click here to view the article.

[caoxueer1r]

My 15-year-old is disinclined to work for her GCSEs, saying her time is better spent preening herself

in preparation for assignations with her delightful, diligent, privately educated, moneyed boyfriend.

She insists the money spent on nail-painting, hair-colouring and the like is an investment and will be

more than repaid when he marries her. Is she deluding herself?

　　A curious mother

　　Dear Curious Mother, archlord gold,

　　Surprising as this may seem in the 21st century, your daughter's strategy is not unusual. Evidence

on speed-dating gathered by the economists Michèle Belot and Marco Francesconi shows that women are

attracted by rich men, while men focus more on a woman's physical appearance. Lena Edlund, another

economist, has found that in the areas of her native Sweden where the wealthiest men live, women of

prime marriageable age are over-represented。

　　However, your daughter is only 15; for Edlund, “prime marriageable age” is 25-44. Your daughter

is either going to have to get her hooks into this chap unusually early, or she is going to have to

keep him on the boil for another decade – a lot of nail-painting。
archlord power leveling,
　　Not only is she concentrating her investments into a single asset by abandoning her education, but

she may even be making her main goal harder to achieve. Belot and Francesconi discovered that a strong

social trend towards “assortative mating” means that although educated, high-achieving men are not

interested in marrying a rich woman, they do like educated high-achieving women, rather than shallow

girls with shiny nails。

　　Your daughter should learn to work hard and look good at the same time. Not only will it advance

her immediate goals, it will also – sadly – stand her in good stead for the rest of her life。
archlord gold,
Unless we spend money to spot and prevent asteroids now, one might crash into Earth and destroy life

as we know it, say some scientists.
　　Asteroids are bigger versions of the meteoroids that race across the night sky. Most orbit the

sun far from Earth and don’t threaten us. But there are also thousands of asteroids whose orbits put

them on a collision course with Earth.
　　Buy $50 million worth of new telescopes right now. Then spend $10 million a year for the next 25

year5s to locate most of the space rocks. By the time we spot a fatal one, the scientists say, we’ll

have a way to change its course.
　　Some scientists favor pushing asteroids off course with nuclear weapons. But the cost wouldn’t be

cheap.archlord power leveling,
　　Is it worth it? Two things experts consider when judging any risk re: 1) How likely the event is;

and 2) How bad the consequences if the event occurs. Experts think an asteroid big enough to destroy

lots of life might strike Earth once every 500,000 years. Sounds pretty rare—but if one did fall, it

would be the end of the world. “If we don’t take care of these big asteroids, they’ll take care of

us,” says one scientist. “It’s that simple.”aoc gold,
　　The cure, though, might be worse than the disease. Do we really want fleets of nuclear weapons

sitting around on Earth? “The world has less to fear from doomsday rocks than from a great nuclear

fleet set against them,” said a New York Times article.

A curious mother