Steve Pavlina is the next guest in my interview series Hunter’s Heroes: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Souls. “Ordinary” might not be the first label you’d think to attach to him (perhaps blogging god would be more likely), but I know that Steve feels that a guru image puts up a wall that makes it harder for him to help people with their personal growth.

Back when he announced his then-upcoming book Personal Development for Smart People, I had some questions about it. Using the principle of courage, I requested an interview. Using the principle of oneness, he accepted. But then his book was somehow released six weeks early, which kept him very busy with promoting it and giving interviews, not to mention fighting the Thundercats and drinking a gallon of juice every day. But true to his word, he made time to give the interview. Just keep in mind that I chose the questions before his book came out.

The timing of Steve’s response was pretty freaky. I sent him the questions nearly three months ago, and got put in the queue. I had no idea how long it would take for him to finish all his other interviews and get around to me. I had no reason to expect that it would happen today.

While I’m not at liberty to go into details at this time, earlier today I had my first communication with one of my spirit guides, and I was learning about how my primary clair is claircognizance. That means “clear knowing,” and refers to information being instantly “downloaded” to you from your higher self or a spirit guide. I was looking for some life guidance, and wondering if I could get this through claircognizance. Less than an hour later, Steve replied with his answers, and I literally downloaded the information as a Word document.

Now, if you haven’t been scared off yet, let’s see what Steve has to say about the principles of personal growth.

Hunter: Your book is based on seven fundamental principles: truth, love, power, oneness, authority, courage, and intelligence. We see a lot of people throwing around numbers and writing about their “X Elements of Success” or “Y Keys to Happiness.” In the blogging world, this is called a list post, and it’s being overdone as an easy formula for rehashing ideas. However, I know you didn’t just pick seven random principles, that you had a very specific reason for choosing these and no others. Can you explain what’s special about these seven principles?

Steve: You’re right that this is much more than a random list I pulled out of thin air. A considerable amount of work went into defining and articulating this principle-centered model of growth.

My goal in writing Personal Development for Smart People was to identify the core fundamental principles behind all successful personal growth efforts. Before I identified the principles, I defined several specific criteria these principles would have to satisfy in order to be included in the book.

First, all of the principles had to be universal, meaning that they can apply to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and they can work equally well for all areas of life (health, relationships, career, finances, etc). Second, they had to be collectively complete, so all the critical elements of growth are accounted for and none are missing. Third, the primary principles had to be irreducible, serving as atomic building blocks for secondary principles. Fourth, the principles had to be internally congruent, so they must work synergistically instead of contradicting each other. And fifth, the principles had to be practical, so people can apply them to generate real-world results.

Consider a potential principle such as commitment. This doesn’t satisfy our criteria for growth because commitment isn’t universal. You can certainly grow from a commitment to proper diet and exercise, a committed relationship, a commitment to spiritual growth, and so on. But there are situations where excessive commitment can just as easily derail you. Many people have experienced more growth after breaking commitments that no longer served them, such as quitting an unfulfilling career path, ending a loveless marriage, or dropping a disempowering belief. There are hundreds of ideals and values that look good at first glance, but they ultimately failed to provide the kind of situation-independent guidance I was seeking.

Truth, on the other hand, is a universal principle. By truth I mean the awareness and acceptance of what is. The more truth you can bring to your life – the more you can accept and deal with reality as it is – the faster you’ll grow. When too much falsehood and denial creep into your life, you’ll invariably stagnate. For example, if you pretend you enjoy your job when the truth is that it leaves you feeling empty, your denial will keep you stuck. Identifying and admitting the truth in any situation, even if you presently feel powerless to change, is a huge improvement. Truth always points us in the direction of positive growth. Falsehood and denial lead us away from growth.

When you read each of the seven principles, they should strike you as almost obvious. It’s hard to argue that truth is a bad quality, for instance. The strength of this model doesn’t come from the individual principles. It’s the identification of the whole collection and how the principles interact with each other. That’s something I’ve never seen done in any other personal development book.

Hunter: You came up with truth, love, and power as the three primary principles, being both orthogonal (non-overlapping) and complete (all other principles of personal growth can be derived from them). I think we can see that they’re orthogonal, but how do you know that they’re complete?

Steve: That knowledge can only come from experience. Once you consciously work with the principles for a certain length of time and apply them to dozens of different problems and situations, you learn to trust them. You begin to see how they always point to solutions in any personal challenges you may encounter.

This is one of the reasons it took me about 2-1/2 years to develop this model. I had to put the principles to work again and again, applying them a wide variation of situations, so I could test to see if they were indeed complete and could be trusted to hold up in the long run.

I went through many iterations of this model and always found holes in earlier versions, encountering problems where the model wasn’t applicable or couldn’t offer practical solutions. But I haven’t been able to find such holes in the current model. It’s general enough to apply to all situations but specific enough to be down-to-earth and practical.

Hunter: Is it possible that someone could come up with three different primary principles, or four or more primary principles, that are orthogonal and complete?

Steve: Subject to the constraints of my intellect, I would have to say no on the four-principle model. At least I haven’t come across anything of the sort. The three-principle model is rich enough to cover all the bases – including awareness, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results – but it’s simple enough that we can apply it to everyday situations and real-world problems.

A model based on four primary principles, if such a thing could be developed, would introduce unnecessary complexity. For starters, we would have to deal with 11 secondary principles for a total of 15 different universal principles. Such a model would be so complex and unwieldy that I doubt very many people could apply it in the real world. I can’t completely rule out the possibility that such a model may someday be developed, but I don’t think it would be very useful in practice.

[Hunter's comment: This reminds me of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The best known version is called Step I, with its 4 dichotomies and 16 types. People say that's too simplistic, that there must be more than 16 different personalities. Well, there's also a Step II, with 20 dichotomies and 1,048,576 types. It's more detailed, but it's also a heck of a lot more complicated. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the simplest one.]

As for alternative three-principle models, that’s certainly possible, but they’ll still cover the same space as truth, love, and power, and such models will likely add unnecessary complexity.

For example, I can define a model of personal growth based upon oneness, authority, and courage as primary principles, but that model covers the same space as truth, love, and power. Oneness is truth + love, authority is truth + power, and courage is love + power. So we don’t gain anything here except that we’re looking at the same space from a different perspective. It’s like substituting polar coordinates for Cartesian coordinates to plot a point on a 2D surface. Both models work, but for most situations Cartesian (x,y) coordinates are simpler and easier for people to grasp.

[Hunter's comment: I was going to say it's like having a different set of three primary colors, like magenta, cyan, and yellow instead of red, green, and blue. Polar vs. Cartesian coordinates is interesting. For plotting a single point, yes, the Cartesian method is just as capable and way easier to grasp. On the other hand, many cool polar functions like r(θ) = 2 sin 4θ just can't be expressed as functions in the Cartesian plane. (Can you tell that Steve and I were math majors?)]

The reason I settled on truth, love, and power for the core principles is that these are simple terms and are easy for most people to understand. These are concepts people already intuitively grasp. It takes more effort to understand and apply oneness, authority, and courage, so a model based on those (or any other principles) would likely add complexity without any major benefits.

Hunter: Let’s say that we have a particular problem we want to solve, like saving money to send our kids to college. I’m sure your book doesn’t go into all the details about Coverdell Education Savings Accounts and so forth. Is the idea that we need to understand how to correct misalignments we have with the core principles, and then it will be easy to work out a solution to a specific problem?

Steve: Essentially yes. But it’s not just about correcting misalignments. The goal is to bring parts of your life into ever greater alignment with truth, love, and power. But for optimal results, this must be done in a holistic, across-the-board manner.

For example, as you proposed, imagine that you want to save money for your kids’ college education, and you find it very difficult to do so. Maybe you look at the big picture (truth), and you realize you can’t afford to send your kids to a very good school. But your desire is to be able to provide them with such opportunities, and this means a lot to you (love). However, you feel you presently lack the ability to fulfill this desire (power).

Now the obvious output of this quick analysis is that you’re weak on the power element. You know what you want, but you lack the ability to get it. Why is that?

This is where we must broaden the application of truth, love, and power, and look at your life more holistically. Perhaps your lack of focus and discipline (power) is holding you back from advancing in your career, and this is depressing your income. If you could become more disciplined and focus, perhaps that would be enough. So what is keeping you from achieving this? Maybe the truth is that you feel uninspired by your work (lack of love). Or possibly you just don’t have the energy to advance because your health habits are poor (misaligned with truth).

When you apply the truth, love, and power model to your life as a whole, you’ll be able to discover the real problems that hold you back from growing and fulfilling your desires.

I’m in a situation where if I work hard for perhaps a week or two, I can create a new revenue stream that would fund a college education for both of my children. I couldn’t do anything like this 10 years ago, but such opportunities are readily available to me today. I have the knowledge, the skills, and the resources to generate abundant income in a short period of time – through totally honest means and without resorting to any rip-offs or scams. I was able to reach this point by recognizing that personal growth must be done holistically. I can’t just hammer away on career advancement and expect to get good results. I can’t compartmentalize my life like that. For example, a great deal of my success comes about because I eat a diet that makes me feel motivated, happy, and energetic, and I cultivate relationships with people I admire and respect. My career wouldn’t have turned out as well if I found myself eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) or remained stuck in unsupportive relationships.

Hunter: Does understanding these principles really give us everything we need to diagnose and solve any problem we might face in our career, health, relationships, finances, spirituality, or any other area of life? How effective has this model been in your life, compared to say, the intention-manifestation model that you’ve often written about (more commonly known as the law of attraction)?

Steve: The truth, love, and power model can bring tremendous clarity to situations where you’ve felt stuck for a long time. It is a high-level, general purpose diagnostic tool. It shows you where you’re out of alignment with one of the core principles, and this reveals the general nature of the solution.

You will still benefit from using other tools and techniques to solve specific low-level problems. But in many cases, 80% of the solution to a problem involves diagnosing the problem correctly. A major stumbling block in solving tricky life challenges is looking for the solution in the wrong place.

[Hunter's comment: That's very interesting. It's like when weight gain is caused by job stress, or a toothache is caused by heart disease. If you're treating the symptom directly, you're looking in the wrong place.

When I was reading Steve's responses, I froze right here, as if I somehow knew this applies to me. Claircognizance?]

This model has helped me overcome some major hurdles that had previously trapped me for years.

For example, one of my goals in life was to adopt a 100% raw vegan diet. I’ve been vegetarian since 1993 and vegan since 1997, but when I tried to go 100% raw, I could only do it for 30-45 days at most, and I always went back to cooked food afterwards. I loved how I felt on the raw foods diet – the mental clarity and the energy gains were tremendous – but for some reason I always reverted back to cooked foods, and I lost those wonderful gains. For many years I assumed I just needed to educate myself more (truth) and work harder on building my discipline (power). But no matter how hard I pushed, I always failed to make the change stick.

It was only after developing the truth, love, and power model that I was finally able to see what I was missing. I had all the truth and power I needed to succeed. But I was missing the love element. I had many vegan friends, but I had zero friends that were raw foodists. Consequently, whenever I tried to become a raw foodist, my social relationships always drew me back to cooked foods. My old eating habits were too well integrated into my social life. The principle of love told me that if I wanted to become a raw foodist, I need to build sufficient social support for that change.

So I applied the solution suggested by this model. I found other raw foodists online, and I began befriending them. I joined a raw food social networking site (www.GiveItToMeRaw.com) and began connecting with other raw foodists. Building that social support was critical, and it was exactly what I needed to become a raw foodist and make the change stick. In fact, it was much easier than I expected. Now I have lots of raw foodist friends, and it’s rare that a day goes by when I don’t connect with at least one of them via email, phone, or face to face. I’m also planning to attend three raw foodist meet-ups/potlucks in Las Vegas in December.

The Law of Attraction is basically a subset of the truth, love, and power model. It includes elements of all three, which is why it can be so effective for people, but it’s also missing some key aspects, which is why it often fails to work. The LoA is about tuning in to your desires and focusing your intentions. With respect to truth, the LoA model teaches you to perceive what you’re getting and notice what you’d like to change; however, it doesn’t do a good job of teaching people how to predict whether their desires are likely to manifest or whether they’re succumbing to self-delusion. With respect to love, the LoA teaches people to connect with what they want and disconnect from what they don’t want; however, it doesn’t adequately address the importance of building social support for the new intention. And with respect to power, the LoA stresses the importance of building desire and maintaining focus, but it fails to properly integrate effort and self-discipline, leaving people mistakenly believing they can be lazy and still manifest whatever they want, even as the unpaid bills begin to pile up.

The LoA is a step in the right direction, but it’s too inaccurate and flawed to work well in all situations. You can get some interesting results with the LoA to the degree that it helps you align with truth, love, and power, but the flaws in that model often leave people with little or nothing to show for their efforts. Holding clear intentions is still important and useful, but that’s only one piece of the larger puzzle.

[Hunter's comment: Now that's just about the best assessment of the LoA I've ever heard!]

Hunter: This seems like an enormous breakthrough in personal development. Why had no one done it before? Why did it take you two and a half years? Let me partially answer the question for you. I think the seven core principles are deceptively simple. You can look at them and think, “Oh sure, I could have come up with those.” And yet, when people tried to guess the principles in your forum before you revealed them, they came up with everything but those seven: desire, momentum, honesty, integrity, creativity, imagination, knowledge, acceptance, awareness, action, understanding, curiosity, responsibility, survival, reproduction, sustenance, shelter, unity, source, growth, identity, clarity, congruence, connection, freedom, duality, thought, expansion, meaning, context, focus, change, justice, fairness, contribution, etc. Not one person suggested truth, love, or power! I think that shows that coming up with the core principles was a lot harder than we might think.

Steve: It was incredibly difficult to identify the core principles and develop this model of human growth, much harder than it might appear at first glance. As you can see from the various values you’ve listed, there were vast possibilities to explore. You’ll find an even longer list of values at www.stevepavlina.com/articles/list-of-values.htm. This creates an enormous search space to consider. There were many frustrating blind alleys to explore. The worst part was that I didn’t even know a solution existed. I just intuitively sensed I would eventually figure it out.

I think the difficulty of the problem is one reason I’ve never seen anyone do something like this before. But it’s also possible that very few people asked these types of questions in a way that made them curious enough to search for answers.

The main question I asked was, “What does it really mean to grow as a human being?” Now you might answer that by saying something like, “It means you work on making your life better.” But what does better mean? That’s a question that really got under my skin. I wondered if the answer was entirely relative. Is this something we must all decide for ourselves? It is better to earn more money or less? What if you steal to get it? What if you lie just a little? Is growth really something that’s situation-dependent, or is it possible there are hidden commonalities to all successful growth efforts, regardless of the specific circumstances?

When I first began this search, I couldn’t come up with satisfactory answers to these questions. That really bugged me. After all, I was running one of the most popular personal development websites in the world. People were looking to me for advice in this area. This is a great responsibility because people sometimes visit my website when they’re feeling suicidal, when they want to quit their jobs to start a new career, or when they’re trying to decide whether or not to end their marriage.

I found it terribly ironic that I was running a successful personal growth website, and I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory definition of what it means to grow. It was something I intuitively understood, but I lacked a cohesive mental framework. How could I keep running a personal growth website if I couldn’t even define growth?

I feel much more centered after developing this model. Now I finally have clear answers to those questions, answers that satisfy my intuition as well as my intellect. Now I can tell people that growth is the progressive alignment with truth, love, and power. It’s such a simple, elegant definition, and it really covers all the bases.

Imagine taking 2-1/2 years to develop a model of growth based on just three words. I think that’s reason enough to explain why this pursuit would turn most people away. You have to be really fanatical about growth to want to undertake a challenge like this.

Hunter: And one final question to put your book in perspective. You’ve said a number of times that almost everything we have can’t survive our death, and therefore we should spend our lives developing our consciousness, the one part of us that can possibly survive. But why do we need to get a head start on the afterlife? Why not optimize our lives for the physical world, and then work on our consciousness after we die, if we still have it in the afterlife?

Steve: This isn’t an either-or challenge. It’s an and challenge. Let me ’splain.

We know we’re going to die someday, and we know that everything of a physical nature must remain behind when that happens, including our bodies, our possessions, our careers, and our friends and families. That’s a difficult thing to accept, but whether we accept it or not, it’s still part of our reality. We’ll all have to face this event someday.

If we center our lives on that which is physical, then in the long run, it doesn’t matter what we gain or lose because we’re going to lose it all when we die. Our careers will end. Our human relationships will end. Everything we build here will eventually become dust.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to devote ourselves to some kind of spiritual path that basically trashes our physical existence in the process. We can tune out from physical life altogether. Since we know it will eventually end, we may ask, “What’s the point of living here anyway? It’s all for naught.” This can lead us to check out from our human lives. Some people live like they’re just waiting for death. The inevitability of death prevents them from really living.

But instead of focusing on the differences between this life and the potential afterlife, let’s consider the major commonality instead. The only commonality we can really identify is consciousness. If we experience some kind of existence after death, then the only part of us that can survive is our consciousness, i.e. our awareness. If we lose our awareness after death, then we’ve lost the ability to even recognize and acknowledge the existence of an afterlife. But if we remain conscious and aware on some level, then some part of us endures.

Now there’s no guarantee that your consciousness will continue beyond death, but I think you’ll agree that it’s the only part of you that could survive your physical death. Everything else clearly remains behind.

So if consciousness is the only potential common element to this life and the afterlife, then we get the greatest possible long-term gains by developing our consciousness in this life. And what’s really fascinating is that by focusing on the development of your consciousness now, you’ll enjoy an incredible life while you’re here. You’ll lose your fear of death because you’ll know you’re doing the very best you can to prepare for it. And once you lose your fear of death, you’ll live much more fully in the here and now. For starters you’ll be less timid about taking risks such as quitting your job to start a new business. After all, if you accept that you’re going to die, how you can be afraid of minor stumbling blocks like going broke? Those things are just part of the expansion of your consciousness.

Consciousness develops through expansion, through exposure to new experiences. If you do the same things day after day, you aren’t doing a very good job of developing your consciousness. You’re just holding yourself in a stuck position.

When you work on developing your consciousness, when you focus on living a life of expansion and exposure to new experiences, you know you’re living the best life you can. You gain the feeling of being ready to die without regrets. This adds a special spiciness to your human life in the here and now.

When people get too caught up in physical life, they live way too timidly. They essentially become powerless cowards. They whine about petty problems, and minor challenges keep them stuck for years. They settle for uninspiring jobs, unfulfilling relationships, and unproductive habits. They become lazy and confused. With each passing year, they feel increasingly regretful and resentful. Life passes them by, and they know they’re missing something important, but they can’t identify what it is.

The expansion of consciousness clearly dictates that if you find yourself in such situations, you need to quit immediately because you’re just wasting your life. But people who don’t align themselves with this pursuit remain stuck in such situations for years. They act like the goal of life is to pay their bills on time or keep a roof over their heads. That isn’t why we’re here though. We’re here to have the greatest growth experience – the greatest adventure – any conscious being could ever wish for.

If you live your life as anything less than the greatest adventure ever, you’re totally missing the point of life. You’re focused too much on the physical static around you, and you’re overlooking the big picture. You’re here to develop yourself as a conscious being. That means discovering truth, experiencing love, and embracing your power. When you live unconsciously, you do the exact opposite. You succumb to falsehood and denial, you get stuck with what you don’t want, and you wimp out on really living.

By working on your consciousness while you’re here, you gain the best of both worlds. You get to enjoy an amazing physical life, filled with love, opportunity, and adventure. And you also feel grateful for your experiences and prepared for death. You squeeze all the juice out of life instead of wallowing in regret. But in order to do this, you must accept – really, deeply accept – that your physical life is temporary. Its purpose is to help you grow, to become a more conscious, more expansive, more courageous being. If you can accept that, you will enjoy a very blessed existence, regardless of how long you live.

Hunter: Steve, thanks for doing this interview. I know how busy you are, and I appreciate your taking the time to shed some light on the principles of personal growth.

Steve’s book Personal Development for Smart People is available in bookstores and on Amazon.com. His blog can be found at stevepavlina.com/blog.

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