Steve Pavlina often mentions a computer game he wrote in 1999 called Dweep. He talks about it mainly because of some important lessons he learned from writing it. I finally got around to playing it recently, and instantly became a huge fan.

I found two posts of Steve’s that tell the story of how he created Dweep: Self-Discipline: Hard Work and What I Learned From Going Bankrupt in My 20s That Proves to Be Immensely Valuable in My 30s.

You can read those posts for the details, but I’ll give you a summary of what happened.

He landed a deal with a game publisher, but they inexplicably stopped communicating, then stopped paying, then pulled out of the deal, then filed a frivolous lawsuit against him (then got caught in an accounting scandal, being fined millions of dollars by the SEC). The next year he got a deal with a more honest publisher, but they got into financial trouble and had to pull out.

The end result was that Steve had turned his life savings of $20,000 into $150,000 of debt. He and his wife Erin got kicked out of their apartment for not paying their rent, and they had to declare bankruptcy.

But before giving up, Steve wanted to make one last game, one he’d really be proud of.

Of course, he was broke, so he couldn’t compete with the flashy graphics of high budget games. Instead, he decided to make a game that was truly original and very well designed. He spent a whole 4 months just working on the design of his game. This is the step that most people skipped, choosing instead to copy an existing game. After that, it only took 2 more months to do everything else. He got the whole thing done for no money.

Dweep won the Shareware Game of the Year award in 2000. Steve was interviewed in the New York Times, and his company became profitable for the first time.

You can download the trial version of Dweep here. (It’s always a good idea to run downloads through your antivirus program.) If you like puzzle games, you’ll really appreciate how well designed this is. I was quickly hooked.

Unfortunately, Dweep has since been discontinued, so the full version isn’t available for sale anymore (though it must be out there somewhere). The most similar game I know of is Adventures of Lolo, which you can play for free at that link.

Both games will challenge your logical abilities and prevent you from getting any work done today. Dweep has a tighter design, but Lolo has more action. If you’re into puzzle games, give them a go. If you get stuck, I can provide support in the comments.

“I love Steve Pavlina. He is my dearest friend. If I had to spend the rest of my life on a desert island with only one other person, it would be Steve Pavlina, no doubt about it. I mean, you should see the way my face lights up when he walks into a room.

But at the same time, he’s also dangerously unbalanced. I mean let’s be frank, Steve Pavlina–and again, this is a man I would take a bullet for–is bad at his job, and mentally unstable. As my mother would say, God love him, but he’s a raging maniac. And a dear, dear friend.”

- Fake Joe Biden (paraphrased)

Steve Pavlina – now there’s a guy who polarizes people.

The National Debt Clock in New York ran out of digits on September 30, 2008, being unable to track the U.S. national debt once it passed $10 trillion. Since then, the clock has been used to track Steve Pavlina’s monthly visitors. He certainly gets a lot of them, and it seems that they all either love him or hate him. Sometimes both feelings occur in the same person.

I knew he had some critics, but until recently, I didn’t realize there were so many perfectly nice people who aren’t fans of Steve Pavlina. And while this puzzles me, it also offers a ray of hope for those who want to provide value.

About a year and a half ago, I had been reading ProBlogger for a while, and I was thinking about starting a blog. But what would the topic be? Darren said that while many people were starting blogs about blogging itself, most of them were failing because it was a severely overcrowded niche. He said there were niches like digital photography that paid much better, and didn’t have a lot of competition.

So I thought about starting a blog about digital photography. There were only two problems: (1) I didn’t know anything about digital photography, and (2) I didn’t intend to. Would that be a show stopper?

But when I came across Steve Pavlina, I saw that you don’t necessarily have to decide on a tightly focused niche. You could blog about “personal development,” which is basically anything that makes you a better person. Now that was interesting to me.

Still, I ran into a problem. Steve was already dominating that niche, and continuing to get better every day. He was an expert on some concepts I hadn’t even heard of before. How could I possibly compete with him?

I decided that I didn’t have to be better, just good enough. I wasn’t going to beat him at doing what he does, but maybe I could do things a little differently, and maybe there was room in the blogosphere for two blogs on personal development. (It now seems absurd to me that I was ever concerned about that.)

In her ebook How I Built A Profitable Freelance Business for Under $50 (And How You Can Too!), Christine O’Kelly said that there are people who are willing to pay for every level of expertise. Even if you’re not the best, you might be exactly what someone needs. You might not get the highest possible rate, but you could still be successful.

That was specifically about freelancing, but it’s also true in general. There’s room in this world for multiple skill levels. You don’t need to be the best parent to provide value as a parent, or the best comedian to provide value as a comedian. Most positions have multiple openings, so you don’t need to be the best. You don’t want to simply be a worse version of the best, but if you’re somehow different from the best, or cheaper than the best, then sometimes good enough is good enough.

So I figured that I could start a personal development blog, and while I wouldn’t be Steve Pavlina, maybe I could be good enough that I could provide value anyway. This is important, so I’ll put it in bold.

Major point #1: You don’t have to be the best, or even close to the best, in order to provide value.

That seems obvious to me now, and perhaps it seems obvious to you as well. But at the time, my thinking was clouded because I was projecting myself onto my potential readers. At the time, I was subscribed to maybe 5 blogs, and I thought that was plenty. I certainly had no interest in reading another blog that was remotely similar to those 5, especially if it wasn’t as good.

But that’s not how my readers were thinking. They were thinking “I want to be nice and support this new blogger,” or “I want to read as many blogs as I can,” or any of a number of other things that would make me “good enough” in their eyes.

There are lots of people devaluing themselves by saying “my idea has already been done” or “nobody would hire me when they could hire him instead.” But remember that your value is not judged by you, it’s judged by the people you’ll offer it to. What you see as being worse than the absolute best may very well be good enough to them.

But what really came as a shock to me is this:

Major point #2: People can have completely insane opinions about who the best is.

I’m not talking about matters like chocolate vs. vanilla, where there’s no right or wrong answer because it’s just a matter of preference. I’m talking about all the people who think Steve Pavlina is a bad blogger. It makes no sense.

It’s like saying Britney Spears is a better singer than Frank Sinatra, or Timothy Dalton was the best Bond. I guess these are technically valid opinions, because we can’t objectively disprove them. But how could anyone agree with them? And yet, plenty of people do.

In the same way that less is sometimes more, worse is sometimes better. Of course, no one would actually see it as worse being better. They’d just disagree about what “better” means. Value is highly subjective.

The good news: Putting both of these major points together, we see that anyone can provide tremendous value.

Even if you think lots of people are better than you, that really doesn’t mean anything. If you don’t need to be the best, and if people have all kinds of opinions about who the best is anyway, that means you always have a chance.

OK, but what is value? We’d all like to know what it is, so we can provide it. Here’s a definition:

Value is whatever people are willing to pay for.

That payment need not be in the form of money, though that’s an easy way to understand it. If you pay $3 for a hot dog, then clearly the hot dog is worth at least $3 to you, or you wouldn’t have bought it.

Maybe you’re really hungry, so you pay an outrageous $10 for a hot dog. Maybe you say the hot dog’s not really worth $10, but you’re just really hungry. Still, in your state at the time, the hot dog was worth $10 to you, or you wouldn’t have bought it. No one ever voluntarily buys something that doesn’t have greater value to them than the money it costs. (Well, at least expected value. Sometimes we make mistakes.)

Besides money, you can pay for something with your time. You don’t have to pay money to read this post, but you do have to pay with your time. Obviously you think this post will provide more value than the time it takes to read it. (If not, then why would you read it?)

You can pay for something with your attention. If you’re stuck in traffic, the time is lost anyway. But you can still decide what you do with your attention. If you turn on the radio, you expect it to provide more value than just sitting there and thinking. Whatever station you put it on, you expect it to provide more value than the stations you’re not listening to.

You can also pay for something with your reputation, security, self respect, or whatever it costs you to make that choice. Whatever the method of payment, the thing you’re buying always has greater expected value than what you’re paying for it, or you wouldn’t buy it.

So then, how do we create something that people are willing to pay for? How do we create value? I’ve thought about the rules for providing value before, and it’s tough to figure this out. For one thing, people don’t really know what they want.

On The Simpsons, when ratings for The Itchy and Scratchy Show were down, they ran a focus group to figure out how to make the show better. The guy asked the kids, “Okay, how many of you kids would like Itchy and Scratchy to deal with real-life problems, like the ones you face every day?” The kids all cheered. The guy then asked, “And who would like to see them do just the opposite – getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers?” Again, the kids all cheered. So what did they really want?

In January 2008, if you asked a bunch of people what kind of blog they wanted to read, I doubt any of them would have said they wanted to read a scientific approach to highlight and explain stuff white people like. And yet, when Christian Lander launched his blog Stuff White People Like, it was an instant success, getting 20 million hits in the first couple of months. It’s been described as “more viral than the flu,” and Christian reportedly got a $300,000 advance for his book deal.

I was subscribed to it for a while, trying to figure out why it was so popular. Yes, it was funny, but it was a one trick pony. You would read one post and laugh, then read a few more posts and laugh less, because they’re all the same joke. And then it seems that you’d be done with it. I could see why some people might become loyal subscribers, but why did it take off so much faster than the automobile, or Google, or the cell phone? Even Christian Lander says he isn’t sure.

We know the value must be there, or people wouldn’t pay for it with their time. But it’s hard for me to see it. Maybe you can see it, but you can probably think of other extremely popular things where you can’t figure out what the value is. If we don’t know value when we see it, how can we create it?

In How to Create Real Value, Steve Pavlina says you know you’re creating value when you see tangible positive changes in the world as a result of what you’re doing. He gives these examples of changes his readers experienced because of his blog:

• One couple started a successful business selling inspirational t-shirts, because of a post about not having a job.
• Someone’s father lost 70 pounds, because of some posts about raw foods.
• A reader finally got a girlfriend, because of a post about soulful relationships.
• Another person moved to Las Vegas and loves it, because of a post about the city.
• And someone else had their first lucid dream, because of a podcast about that.

As opposed to comments like “great post,” these are tangible positive changes, and clear signs of strong value. However, what if the outcomes had been different?

• What if the t-shirt business failed, and the couple got divorced?
• What if that person’s father gained 70 pounds and became diabetic?
• What if the reader lost his girlfriend and started hating women?
• What if the person who moved to Las Vegas hated it?
• What if the person who had their first lucid dream went into a coma?

Some of these aren’t too likely, but my point is that things can go either way. If something doesn’t work out, are you responsible for creating a tangible negative change?

It wouldn’t be right to blame Steve for a negative outcome that was triggered by his blog, because the ultimate responsibility rests with the reader. So if he can’t be blamed for negative outcomes, how much credit can he get for positive outcomes?

Another thing is that strong value does not necessarily produce tangible positive changes. Stuff White People Like provides strong value, judging from its tremendous popularity. But what tangible positive changes does it create? Making millions of people laugh is strong value, but it’s not a tangible positive change.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t aspire to create tangible positive changes, just that it’s not a perfect judge of value.

I can’t say that I’ve experienced any tangible positive changes from Steve’s blog. But I’ve definitely experienced intangible positive changes. I’ve also experienced one tangible change (starting this blog), but its success or failure remains to be seen. Yet I know for sure I get strong value from his blog, which is why I continue to pay for it with my time.

In a comment on my post Being Emphatically Wishy-Washy, Akemi Gaines said:

“I was thinking about you, Hunter, when I was reading Steve’s recent posts on how to make money in recession by creating and delivering value and what it is to create strong value. In the latter article, he insists to make your point — in other words, to not to be wishy washy. Because wishy washy doesn’t deliver much value.

I mostly agree with Steve (yes, my blog will have a stronger edge!), but at the same time, I was thinking about your blog and why I like it.

You deliver different kind of value. I hope you don’t take offense about this, but I don’t read your blog to get another personal development tips. I know all the tips you discuss (except about SEO and tech stuff). But I like your blog because you have a way to lighten up my mood. I LOVE your sense of humor. That is value.

It doesn’t matter whether you take what you call a “strong tone” as you say in this post. You are still funny.

Now think about it. In this stressful time, is delivering a few moments of smile valuable? Absolutely. Steve doesn’t make me smile, and I don’t go there to smile. I go there to learn. Two different objectives.”

What I got from this (aside from the fact that I need to increase the difficulty level for Akemi) is that people are free to decide what value they get from something.

I didn’t start this blog with the intent of making people smile, but if that’s what someone gets from it, great. If someone gets something different, that’s great too. I’m not going to say that someone’s getting the wrong kind of value from me. If they get something, anything, that’s wonderful.

However, I wish I had a better handle on how to create value, so I could do more of it. Which brings me to another point.

Major point #3: You might not be sure how to create value, but let that be your goal anyway.

Christian Lander, creator of Stuff White People Like, said that if he were given a budget of $500 million and told to duplicate his success, he couldn’t do it. He just doesn’t know enough about what went right the first time.

He doesn’t know how to create major value, despite having done it before. So for those of us who haven’t created something like the pet rock, Pokémon, or Harry Potter, how can we possibly learn how to do it? How can we figure out a game where the rules seem so random?

We might not have a roadmap, but we can try stumbling in the right direction. Try doing something that you think people will like. If it doesn’t create tangible positive change, maybe it will still make them better off in some way. If something works, do more of it. If something doesn’t work, try to figure out why. Maybe you need to change something. Maybe you just need to try it again.

If you maintain the goal of creating value, you’re bound to keep getting better at it. Just remember that you’re not the one who decides what has value – it’s the other people. Unfortunately, they don’t know what they want.

The good news is that nobody starts off having any idea how to create value. Even people who create strong value once often can’t do it again, hence the term “one-hit wonder.” If there were a simple formula for creating value, everyone would do it. But since there’s not a formula, you can be one of the few who tries.

Homework for Akemi only:
Prove that there is no rational number r such that r² = 2.

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.

VS.

It’s hardly a fair fight.

• There is only one Steve Pavlina, but there are six ThunderCats (counting WilyKat and WilyKit but not Jaga or Snarf).
• Steve doesn’t believe in harming animals or consuming animal products. The ThunderCats are natural predators.
• Steve carries no weapons. The ThunderCats carry a sword, bolas, nunchakus, a staff, and an assortment of devious mystery capsules.
• Steve has a spirit guide who helps him win at blackjack. The ThunderCats have the spirit of Jaga the Wise.
• Steve drives a normal family car (I assume). The ThunderCats have the ThunderTank, Feliner, ThunderClaw, ThunderStrike, and HoverCat.
• Steve is colorblind. The Sword of Omens gives Lion-O sight beyond sight.
• Steve has lucid dreams and astral travel. Tygra can project completely realistic illusions into other people’s minds.
• Steve is a decent marathon runner. Cheetara runs a 30 second mile.
• Steve does weight training. Panthro can lift a tank.
• And so on, and so on.

Do we really need to witness this massacre? Wait, don’t avert your gaze just yet. This isn’t going to be a real fight. We’re just going to compare their principles of personal development.

In Steve’s new book, Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, he describes his seven core principles. The three primary principles are truth, love, and power, from which we can derive the secondary principles of oneness, authority, courage, 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 myself too much.

The ThunderCats live by the Code of Thundera: truth, honor, loyalty, and justice.

Truth, love, and power vs. truth, honor, loyalty, and justice. Which is better?

Everyone has their own set of principles:

• Virginia Tech’s motto is Ut Prosim (That I May Serve).
• Harvard’s motto is Veritas (Truth).
• Yale’s is Lux Et Veritas (Light and Truth).
• The school in Kindergarten Cop uses the 3 Cs: caring, courtesy, and courage.

(These schools will all fight on the side of the ThunderCats.)

There are endless combinations of principles out there, but which is best? And does it really matter?

What Steve wanted to do with his book was to write about the roots of personal development, instead of writing about the branches like he and everyone else had done before. He wanted to uncover the common pattern behind all successful growth efforts and come up with a set of principles that was universal, complete, irreducible, congruent, and practical.

I was looking for more information about how he came up with these particular principles and decided that they were the principles of personal growth and not just some principles. I have an upcoming interview with him where he’ll shed some light on that. For now, we can at least accept that these can potentially be the fundamental building blocks of personal growth.

Consider the ThunderCats’ principles of truth, honor, loyalty, and justice. How do they differ from Steve’s principles of truth, love, and power?

First of all, they both have truth in common. But then the ThunderCats get a little redundant. Honor, loyalty, and justice are similar to truth, so the Code of Thundera is more complicated than it has to be. Steve only wanted to include the most basic principles, with no overlap between them. I bet a lot of kids would have found truth a lot easier to memorize and understand than truth, honor, loyalty, and justice.

Also, while honor and loyalty touch on love, not all aspects of love are covered. And while justice touches on power, power is largely missing from the code. Therefore, the Code of Thundera can’t serve as a complete set of personal growth principles.

Now let’s go back to those schools I mentioned before:

• Virginia Tech’s Ut Prosim (That I May Serve) touches on love and truth, but misses power.
• Harvard’s Veritas (Truth) is missing love and power.
• Yale’s Lux Et Veritas (Light and Truth) is missing power. I don’t really know what light is, but I guess it’s truth and love.
• The kindergarten’s caring, courtesy, and courage are heavy on love, but a little light on power and completely missing truth.

Does that make these bad mottos? Not at all, and I’m sure Steve doesn’t want everyone to change their motto to truth, love, and power. But we need to realize two things:

1. Any set of principles that omits truth, love, or power (and doesn’t allow them to be derived) is not a complete model for conscious living. But not everything is meant to be, and that’s perfectly fine. I’m sure Harvard doesn’t think that truth is everything, just that it’s what they strive for at that institution. And the ThunderCats embraced power even though it wasn’t in their code, so maybe their code was designed to temper their power (after all, it’s what separates them from the power-hungry Mumm-Ra and the mutants).

2. Any set of principles that conflicts with truth, love, or power conflicts with conscious living. You might not be convinced that truth, love, and power can be used to derive all essential principles, but you probably agree that none of them should be violated. Without truth, you’re living in lies and denial. Without love, you’re alone and empty. Without power, you’re a weak victim. None of this is good.

These are not restrictive principles, and there’s plenty of room for variation. Your truth can be different from my truth. Steve points out that the principles don’t dictate any particular spiritual philosophy, as long as your choice doesn’t conflict with truth, love, or power.

I’m probably in the minority in that I didn’t find his book as enjoyable to read as his blog. I think that’s because he toned down his voice considerably to make the book more universally accepted. To see what I mean, compare his attitude of complete religious tolerance in his book to his highly controversial post 10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion. Of course, for that same reason, some people will like the book better.

I like how the book is not simply a collection of blog posts, but a brand new framework of personal development that he hadn’t talked about before. This really had to be a book and not a series of blog posts. I also like how he takes several areas of our lives (habits, career, money, health, relationships, spirituality), and treats them all the same, showing how the seven core principles apply to each of them.

I don’t know what effect this will have on my life. He includes a lot of exercises to increase your ability to use the seven principles, and I’ll have to read it again because I skipped over the exercises the first time. I realize that love and oneness are by far my weakest areas, so I’ll have to pay special attention to them. In fact, many people will find oneness to be pretty wacky. Steve’s sense of oneness now has him befriending spiders, while I’m still trying to accept spammers as human beings.

The verdict: Steve would be helpless in combat against the ThunderCats, but his book Personal Development for Smart People would have been highly appreciated on Thundera.

Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth is still 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 (truth, love, power, oneness, authority, courage, and intelligence), and how they form a holistic framework for solving any problem in your health, career, finances, relationships, etc.

As a little appetizer while we wait, Steve has released a free PDF containing the introduction and first chapter. He says that while the PDF lacks the formatting and page design of the printed book, the content is the same. (But I have to wonder if they fixed the typo in the first paragraph.)

The first part of the book (chapters 1-7) is about the theory of the principles, and the second part (chapters 8-13) is about their practical application. The free chapter in the PDF (chapter 1) is about truth, which is one of the seven core principles and also one of the three primary principles. He talks about the five key components of truth, the blocks that prevent alignment with truth, and how to become more truthful.

I found it very interesting, especially what he says about 7s (when you rate areas of your life from 1-10). And it ends with a great poem for people like me, who don’t like poems.

The free PDF is definitely worth a read. If you like it you can pre-order it now, and it will ship when it’s released on October 15th. The list price is $24.95, and the current price on Amazon is $16.47. If the price drops before it’s released, Amazon guarantees you the lowest price.

So what are you waiting for? Do you want to be aligned with truth or not?

Steve Pavlina has just written his first book: Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, and it’s already reached the Amazon top 100 bestseller list. Not bad for a book that hasn’t even gone to the printer yet.

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.

Photo by Jason Gulledge

Personal development blogger Steve Pavlina is considered by many people to be a great example of an overnight success. His blog achieved an income of $40,000 per month after only two years. But most people who create blogs fail to make any profit at all, and give up in frustration. Why?

In his article titled Skill, Steve gave what I think is the best answer to that question:

“There are several ways to answer this, but perhaps the most obvious answer is that most new bloggers give up within the first six months. The web is littered with abandoned blogs. But six months is nothing. It takes six months just to get your bearings in the blogosphere.”

In his first 6 months, he made $167, which by his estimates works out to 17 cents per hour. If you don’t have a blog, you probably think 17 cents per hour doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, it’s way above average! And it grew exponentially from there, reaching extraordinary levels after two years.

But many people don’t realize that it actually took Steve far longer than two years to get to that point. Before he started his blog, he read 700 personal development books. He also had experience with writing articles (some paid, some unpaid). He also had ten years of experience in running a computer games business, where he learned many valuable lessons in entrepreneurship after turning $20,000 in cash to $150,000 in debt. These were the dues he paid before he earned the privilege of making 17 cents an hour.

Compare this to an anonymous blogger I heard about last September. This person had written to Darren Rowse at ProBlogger with some questions about his make money online blog, and Darren replied with a video post. The anonymous blogger’s letter went something like this:

“Darren, thanks for your great blog. I’m amazed at how much money you’ve made from blogging, and I’ve decided to do the same. I’ve just started my own blog on how to make money online, and I’ll have some really great tips. I have some questions though, because this is my first blog. How do I set it up? How do I find advertisers and make money quickly? And what tips should I write about?”

Amazingly, Darren almost managed to keep a straight face in his video reply, something I sure couldn’t have done. Coming from nowhere, this person is starting a blog in an overcrowded niche, with no experience in the subject, and asking how to be an overnight success when he doesn’t even know what to write about.

Let’s look at this in a more visual format:

	Steve Pavlina	Anonymous blogger
Number of relevant books read before starting blog	700	0
Years of relevant experience before starting blog	13	0
Money spent gaining the experience	At least $170,000	$0
Knows what to blog about	Yes	No
Income for first 6 months	$0.17/hour	Probably $0
Income after 2 years	$40,000/month	Hasn’t made it 2 years yet, will probably quit well before then
Continues to work hard	Yes	Never did in the first place

Given the difference in the dues each blogger paid, is the difference in their results unexpected, or unfair?

In the Fortune Magazine article What it takes to be great, Geoffrey Colvin points to research indicating that hard work is far more important than natural talent. This applies to sports, music, chess, business, and pretty much every other field. People don’t become an overnight success just because they stumble into a field they were born for.

“Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule…And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, ‘The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.’ In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.”

When people reach the highest levels of success at a young age, we might think they were an overnight success, when really they just started early. Bobby Fischer became a chess grandmaster when he was only 16, but after 9 years of practice. Tiger Woods won the U.S. Amateur Championship when he was only 18, but after 15 years of practice.

The article went into more detail about the link between practice and performance:

“Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.”

How are you reacting to hearing this? Are you disappointed that you can kiss your chances of overnight success goodbye? Or are you inspired to know that there’s no reason you can’t reach any level of success you desire if you’re willing to put in the work?

Steve and Erin Pavlina have just recorded the first podcast that they’ve done together. It’s called Being Psychic, and it focuses on Erin’s explanation of what being a psychic is all about. After falling off a kitchen barstool and splitting her head open at the age of 4, she started running around telling everyone she had ESP. Today she’s a professional psychic, in high demand and charging $295 for a 30-minute reading.

The podcast covers topics such as lucid dreaming, astral projection, spirit guides, what happens when you die, psychic impressions vs. emotions and imagination, what happens during a reading, how to develop your own psychic skills, and skepticism.

I don’t think it’s necessary to be a believer in order to enjoy it. If you’re at least somewhat open to the possibility of psychic phenomena, you’ll probably find it very appealing. It’s pretty long at 96 minutes, and the sound quality isn’t as good as Steve’s other podcasts, but it’s good enough.

I thought it was very interesting and entertaining, and I learned some things about Erin’s psychic journey that I didn’t know before. She seriously rocks, and now I’m even more appreciative that she picked my How To Be A Woman post as her third favorite of 52 submissions (and her #1 favorite by a guy).

Has anyone here ever gotten a reading from Erin?

To be highly productive, you need a fancy system like David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), right?

Actually, I’ve never seen the point of making productivity complicated. While I haven’t read GTD, the summaries I’ve seen don’t impress me. I think most people are overdoing it. Spending countless hours learning and implementing elaborate productivity systems and reading so-called productivity blogs seems a lot less effective than just doing stuff.

Steve Pavlina is well known for being productive. He finished college in just 3 semesters, taking triple the normal course load while also working a full time job in his last semester. In the latest issue of his newsletter (sign up on his home page, a few issues a year, free), he described the productivity system that allowed him to do this.

He just used a notebook. When a new assignment came in, he added it to the end of the list, along with its deadline. He decided which one to do by scanning the list and quickly picking one that seemed like a good choice. Then he’d work on only that task until it was done, and cross it off.

If anything stayed on the list too long, it would eventually be the only thing left on its page, with everything else crossed out. When this happened, he’d either do it immediately, decide it wasn’t worth doing, or possibly move it to the end of the list and try again later.

I was glad to see Steve agreeing with me that productivity can be simple. My system is very similar to his, but I use Windows Notepad instead of a physical notebook. I like Notepad because I can easily reorder items, as well as copy and paste URLs. And unlike Steve, I don’t automatically add new tasks to the end. I sometimes add them near the front if I think I’ll want to do them soon.

I’ve tried reading some productivity blogs, but I haven’t been able to get into any of them. I couldn’t understand how reading a productivity blog that posts ten times a day was going to do anything other than destroy my effectiveness. Clay Collins had a good take on this, when he discussed the difference between the productivity habit and the productivity hobby.

Never forget that sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

In the movie “Rocky,” there’s a scene where Rocky confronts Mickey to ask why he’s always been so disappointed in him over the years. Rocky says:

“You know, I’ve been comin’ here for six years, and for six years you’ve been stickin’ it to me. I wanna know how come.”

“You don’t wanna know.”

“Yeah, I wanna know how come.”

“You wanna know?”

“I WANNA KNOW HOW!”

“OK, I’m gonna tell ya. ‘Cause you had the talent to become a good fighter. And instead of that, you became a leg breaker for some cheap, second-rate loan shark!

“It’s a livin’.”

“It’s a WASTE of life!”

This is nothing new, just a typical case of not following one’s calling. Most people are in this situation, either because they never found their calling in the first place, or they lost their way at some point. But nothing is more important than knowing for sure what you’re supposed to do with your life. If you get this one thing right, then almost everything else naturally falls into place.

When you spend the bulk of your time doing the wrong thing, you find life to be very hard because you’re living someone else’s life instead of your own. Because you don’t really want to do the things you do, you find it hard to get motivated, or even just to get up in the morning. Everything you manage to get done takes a lot of effort for mediocre results. You’re always sick, tired, and afraid that your situation could become even worse. You resent having to do what you do, and that makes you miserable even when you’re not working.

On the other hand, if you follow your calling, your life is wonderful. Getting things done is effortless because you have boundless enthusiasm and incredible talent for what you do. You have no problem getting down to work because there’s nothing you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to choose between doing what you love and making money because the world places great value on what you do. The immense joy you receive from your work spills over into other areas of your life, and onto other people. Everyone wonders what you’re on, and how they can get it.

If finding your calling is so important, then why does hardly anyone do it?

Many people think that their calling is dictated by their major. You picked the major that was best suited for your abilities, and now you’ve invested a lot of time and money in studying that field, so you have to stick with it, right?

Um, no. There are certainly some elements of your major that fit you well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get the obvious job that corresponds to your major. It’s not realistic to expect to decide on your calling before you graduate anyway. You might choose to put a creative twist on the common path in your field, or maybe even do something completely different. What you learned in school may or may not be directly helpful to you, but that’s not really why you went to school anyway. I’m sure Bill Gates doesn’t regret changing his mind about becoming a lawyer, and some things he learned in school no doubt helped him with Microsoft.

Some commonly given advice is “do what you love,” but that’s awfully naive. You can’t just pick something you love and assume that it will become a viable career. I don’t think there’s much market demand for people who just want to smoke pot and play Nintendo in their parent’s basement. Nor would that ultimately result in a fulfilling life, even if it seems appealing as a teenager. This is pretty obvious, which may be the reason people largely ignore this advice.

Many people fear change. You’ve gotten good at what you do, and if you switch to something else, then you’ll have to take a step backwards. Well, maybe. But continuing to take steps forward won’t help you if you’re walking off the end of a plank. If you know you’re heading in the wrong direction, it’s best to correct course now so you can move full speed ahead to where you want to go, instead of drifting heedlessly towards an iceberg. Even if you pick the path that’s right for you at the time, the world is going to change, and that will present new challenges and opportunities that make you want to change things. (Case in point, my school didn’t offer a blogging major.)

To get started on finding your calling, you’ll want to do a little introspection. Here are three resources to help you look inside yourself and figure out what you’re supposed to do with your life:

• What Color Is Your Parachute? 2008: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers. There’s a reason this is the #1 best-selling career book of all time. But don’t just read it; do the exercises too.
• Steve Pavlina’s “The Meaning of Life: Discover Your Purpose.” Your life purpose (who to be) is much broader than your calling (what to do), but this is still related, and definitely useful.
• Brian Kim’s “How to Find What You Love to Do.” Step by step advice on how to find what you love to do. Pay attention when he says to write it down!

Next time, I’ll write about an alternative way to find your calling that does not involve introspection.