Pre-order Personal Development For Smart People
July 10th, 2008
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Steve Pavlina has just written his first book: Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth
The scheduled release date is October 15, 2008, and if you order it now, they’ll ship it to you when it’s ready. The retail price is $24.95, and it’s currently selling for $16.47 on Amazon. If the price changes between now and the release date, Amazon will give you the lowest price.
If you hadn’t heard of Steve Pavlina before, you heard about him in my post yesterday, Overnight Success. Steve got to where he is by having lots of fantastic original ideas about personal development. So when he says he’s come out with something he’s really proud of, that gets my attention.
In Steve’s previous attempt to write a book, he did a ton of research and wrote 30,000 words before realizing that it just wasn’t deep enough. He scrapped the book idea, and put it on hold for more than three years before he knew what he was really supposed to write about.
What he wanted to do was come up with a holistic approach to personal development. He wanted to reduce all the concepts of personal growth to a set of core principles that covers everything without being redundant.
For example, computers represent colors with the RGB (red, green, blue) model. You start with the primary colors of red, green, and blue, and by mixing them in various combinations, you can create any of the 16 million other colors. Technically, red, green, and blue didn’t have to be chosen as the primary colors, but you do need three primaries. With only two primary colors, there would be some colors you couldn’t derive. And with four primary colors, one of them would be redundant, since you could derive any color without it. So you can say the entire color spectrum can be reduced to the three primary colors of red, green, and blue.
What Steve does in his book is apply this concept to personal development. There are all kinds of ways in which people can grow, but if you were to distill everything down to a core set of principles, what would you have? Steve defines the three primary principles as truth, love, and power. He defines four secondary principles of oneness, authority, courage, and intelligence. The secondary principles can be derived from the primary principles as follows:
- Oneness = Truth + Love
- Authority = Truth + Power
- Courage = Love + Power
- Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power
This diagram shows the relationship of the seven core principles:
So apparently, all we need is truth, love, power, and the derived principles to reach the highest level of consciousness. Using the seven core principles, you can solve any problem in your life. Steve says he combines theory and practice, uses left-brained and right-brained presentation, and makes it all very deep while also being easy to understand (though I’m sure you still have to be smart). Here’s what’s inside:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Fundamental Principles
Chapter 1: Truth
Chapter 2: Love
Chapter 3: Power
Chapter 4: Oneness
Chapter 5: Authority
Chapter 6: Courage
Chapter 7: Intelligence
Part II: Practical Application
Chapter 8: Habits
Chapter 9: Career
Chapter 10: Money
Chapter 11: Health
Chapter 12: Relationships
Chapter 13: Spirituality
Afterword
About the Author
Resources
I’ve really been looking forward to this book for a while, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to wait three more months before it’s released. If you want to understand personal development as only Steve Pavlina can explain it, be sure to pre-order Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Hi Hunter,
Isn’t that amazing how fast his book is selling, and it’s not even in print yet?
Kudos to Steve.
Barbara Swaffords last blog post..FEFF - It’s Good For The Ego
July 11th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Hunter - that is awesome - his first book and it’s selling that well. What wonderful news.
I was really surprised Steve waited until now to right a book, but now you’ve explained why.
Cath Lawsons last blog post..Immigrating to Canada or Australia - Pros and Cons
July 11th, 2008 at 9:40 am
His blog posts are really insightful, I bet this is a great book. I read in one of his posts that sometimes he’ll write a long article and upon re-reading will realize that it’s not good enough for a million people to read (apparently that’s how many visitors he gets a month) so he’ll just throw out the article and start a new one. Now that’s a strong work ethic!
Marelisas last blog post..Create a Long List of Ways for You to Feel Good
July 11th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I already ordered it. I am SO EXCITED to read this.
July 11th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
@ Barbara, even Steve himself was surprised!
@ Cath, it seems to me that he could have written a book sooner. I bet the 30,000 words he threw away were better than a lot of books out there, but he wanted it to be better than just “good.”
@ Marelisa, the last I heard is that he gets 2 million visitors a month! And yeah, I read that he would sometimes throw out articles that weren’t as good as he wanted, and while I guess that’s good for us, I felt bad that he went to all that trouble.
@ Hayden, me too!
September 11th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
[...] over a month away from its release. If you haven’t heard of this book yet, you can read my Personal Development for Smart People pre-review. The quick summary is that it’s about the seven core principles of personal development [...]
September 17th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Great coverage here. I’ll watch for your post-reading review.
Pavlina’s posts are hit-or-miss for me (I tend to love the common sense kind of personal development but less so the “out there” stuff, and he’s kind of a mix from what I’ve read), so I don’t follow him regularly, but I’m vastly impressed with what he’s achieved, so am tempted to get the book just to support him.
Lindsays last blog post..Can You Still Make Money Blogging if You’re Not an Expert at Anything?
September 17th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
@ Linday, yeah, he definitely mixes in some “out there” stuff. Recently he was writing about his friend, who died a few weeks ago and is now helping him win at Blackjack. I like those things, but YMMV.
October 14th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
[...] and intelligence. I’ve previously written about this book (before I read it) in my posts Pre-order Personal Development For Smart People and Personal Development For Smart People: Free Sample Chapter, so I’ll try not to repeat [...]