Tools for Thought

Over the weekend I received a copy of Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People, read it, and wrote a draft review without running a word count. I spent this morning cutting it by half, after realizing that the draft was closing in on 5000 words. Evidently the book got to me.

I always prefer books to blogs, since they have a beginning, middle and end, and have greater focus and depth. Like Lifehacker’s blog-turned-book, Upgrade Your Life, Personal Development for Smart People (slated for release October 15) puts a frame around Steve Pavlina’s ongoing writing, allowing the reader to take a break from keeping up with constant updates to focus on the author’s core principles. Let’s dive right in.

Introduction. Steve recounts his history in personal development: his commitment to pursue personal growth after a brief stint in a jail cell, his attainment of two college degrees in three semesters, his success in creating a computer game company, and the founding of StevePavlina.com.

He outlines the seven principles of personal development that he distilled over that period. These principles were designed to satisfy the four criteria that characterize them, for the author at least, as laws. They had to be universal, complete, irreducable and internally congruent. The three core principles are truth, love and power; and the four secondary principles are oneness, authority, courage and intelligence. Part I of the book addresses each of these principles, and Part II deals with their practical application.

Chapter 1: Truth. Truth has five key components: perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance and self-awareness. Pavlina makes fine distinctions between these, but they boil down to perceiving and accepting reality as accurately as possible without denial. Before someone can improve his financial situation, he has to first acknowledge the current reality of that situation, even if he can’t immediately see a way out of it.

Prediction is the realization that certain behaviors lead to likely outcomes. What are the long-term effects of staying in your current job, of maintaining your current diet, of keeping your current network of friends? Instead of looking at behaviors in isolation, determine their trajectory to see if you’re on the right path, and make a change if necessary.

Since our level of self-awareness varies from moment to moment,  it’s important for us to make our assessments and decisions at times when we’re the most clear-headed and rational, writing them down for reference during lower states of self-awareness. The goal is to operate from conscious, principle-centered actions instead of low-level emotional reactions.

Blocks to truth are media conditioning, social conditioning, false beliefs, emotional interference (denial), addictions (including negative habits, not just substances), immaturity and secondary gain. Secondary gain is a short-term benefit from behavior we know to be destructive in the long term, like accepting a paycheck from a dead-end job.

Chapter 2: Love. Steve has an extremely clear bottom-line definition of love. “Love is obviously an emotion, but it’s also much more than that. One of the fundamental choices you face in every encounter is the choice to approach or avoid.” The choice to approach or avoid applies to people as well as to work, places, or anything with which a person can have a relationship.

Love involves connection and communion. We connect with whoever or whatever we put our attention on. We can expand our capacity to communicate to first connecting to the familiar, then gradually branching out to the unfamiliar. Communion is the rapport that cultivates the emotional dimension of love. This rapport stems from our belief in the degree of connection. Because communion depends on our own belief, it’s really a reflection of ourselves. “By communing with others, you learn to love yourself more fully.”

The exercises included here might be a little New Agey for some people’s tastes, but the principles behind them don’t require much suspension of skepticism. This isn’t The Secret.

Chapter 3: Power. Power is “the ability to consciously and deliberately create the world around you,” rather than force, coercion or some other negative attribute. Power has six key components: responsibility, desire, self-determination, focus, effort and self-discipline

Steve heavily emphasizes the need to take responsibility for one’s current situation as a prerequisite to changing it, regardless of whoever or whatever else contributed to it in the past. You’re the one who has to live with your life, not your parents, not society, not your boss. By accepting responsibility, you agree to be an active participant in shaping your life, which is crucial for empowerment.

Desire is related to truth — honestly acknowledging that you want what you want, even if you don’t know how to get it at first. By cutting yourself off from desire, you demotivate and disempower yourself. Self-determination is the recognition that you are the only person with ultimate control over your life. If you relinquish that control to others, you’re still the one in control of doing that.

Chapter 4: Oneness. This is one of the more metaphysical chapters. To wit: “I tried to imagine what it would be like to experience a sense of total oneness. I instantly grasped that the birds in front of me were just as much me as my physical body was.” When Pavlina talks about oneness, he means it literally. Perhaps more accessibly, he also discusses oneness from the standpoint of values: empathy, compassion, honesty, fairness, contribution and unity. A frequent, Gaia-like analogy he uses throughout the book is that we are like cells in a larger body, unified through a single organism.

For a complete perspective on oneness, we need to intellectually understand the interconnectedness of everything, and sense it on a visceral level. Exercises for developing oneness include spending time in nature, physically embracing others while visualizing a complete lack of separation, and visualizing a world where everyone is in complete solidarity.

Chapter 5: Authority. The degree of control you have over all elements in your life is authority, a faculty consisting of five key aspects: command, effectiveness, persistence, confidence and significance. Command is achieved by recognizing that you are the only one in control of your life, not your spouse, boss or guru. Effectiveness is achieved by consistently reviewing the results of your actions, and correcting course whenever necessary.

Persistence requires the recognition that when learning any new skill, an initial phase of mediocrity is inevitable, and the only way out of it is through it by refusing to give up. Confidence builds with concurrently with genuine skill. It’s not necessary to “fake it till you make it,” since starting out unskilled is inevitable, and therefore, truth. Significance is the focus of energy on the projects with the most impact, requiring constant triage.

Chapter 6: Courage. Some people would define courage as the ability to take risks, but Pavlina defines it as the combination of power and love. For courage to have meaning, it has to spring from the desire to create a deep connection, to choose the path with a heart: “If your path has no heart, you’re on the wrong path.”

Courage also requires initiative, directness and honor. Those waiting for life to happen to them will find themselves in for a lifelong wait unless they take learn to take initiative. Instead of timidly feeling out situations before making requests, directness demands that we cut through unnecessary complexity and simply ask for what we want. By risking rejection with as few intermediate steps as possible, we either get what we want or build our courage — something gained either way. Honor is the principle-centered behavior that flows from oneness, from a deep connection to self and others.

Steve suggests a few approaches to building courage. We can reduce our fear of the unknown by educating ourselves on the subject we want to get involved with. We can make an advance commitment to others. We can make low-level risks of rejection, then increasing the outreach over time; and filtering one’s plans for the day with a triage question: “Where is the path with a heart?” By asking this question, it becomes easy to discard the options that feel disconnected.

Chapter 7: Intelligence. The intelligence defined here has less to do with the mental resources need to pass IQ tests as it does with wisdom. Intelligence is the mutually reinforcing union of truth, love and power. Behavior aligned with these core principles begets several emergent qualities: authenticity, creative self-expression, growth, flow and beauty.

In authentic communication, our we express ourselves congruently, without exaggerating or downplaying what’s true for us. Creative self-expression directs our intelligence by tuning ourselves into our message to the world, then cultivating an appropriate medium for that message. Intelligence has the unique quality of seeking it’s own improvement, or growth, so consciously pursuing growth is inherently intelligent behavior. Flow is the wind on our backs that comes from making perceived progress toward something meaningful and important. Beauty is what we experience when we see the underlying order of truth, love and power as governing forces in every aspect of our lives.

The chapter ends with assessment and challenge exercises for each of the seven principles. For instance, one “truth” challenge is, “Confess to a lie or secret you’ve been concealing.” One of the “courage” exercises is, “Make a new request of someone who recently rejected you.”

Chapter 8: Habits. This is the first chapter in the “Practical Application” section. Each chapter includes sections on the application of the core principles of truth, love and power in context.

Habits are automated behavior that spare us the inefficiency of having to reinvent solutions for every situation. But our existing habits can be suboptimal or counterproductive, so considering how much of our behavior consists of habits, they represent enormous improvement opportunities. We can upgrade our habits by enlisting truth, love and power.

We come to terms with the truth of our current and future habits by making three lists: one for our positive habits, one for our negative habits, and another for the habits we’d like to create. One way of eliminating bad habits or forming better ones is with love — overcoming our isolation and connecting with others undergoing, or having gone through, the same struggles. Sometimes we have to do the opposite: disengage from peers whose influence is negative. Power is the disciplined application of effort to achieve the desired habit.

Pavlina recommends using 30-day trials to install or eliminate a habit, where you commit to a certain behavior pattern for 30 days straight (or some other length if desired), after which time you’re free to keep or cancel the behavior. Another approach is stair-stepping, where you increase or reduce a behavior incrementally instead of going for one big change — committing to one less cup of coffee each day, for instance.

Chapter 9: Career. Career is related to creative self-expression. We should identify our core message, then find the ideal medium for expressing it. Our careers need to be true to our creative needs, desires and sense of service, but they also need to be true to our material needs. A career that doesn’t reconcile authentic self-expression with paying the bills is ultimately unsustainable. There’s usually a small overlap between the needs of the market (what Pavlina calls social value) and our own need for self-expression (personal value). The object is to find a career path that exists within that overlap.

Love involves the “message” of your career — connecting with its purpose. Steve recommends a journaling exercise: spending a session writing out an answer, in as many variations as necessary, to the question, What is my true purpose in life?, until you reach the wording that resonates enough you cry. Power involves the commitment to build the career you want instead of settling for something you don’t really want. Not surprisingly, his advice is heavily skewed toward the entrepreneurial path.

Chapter 10: Money. This isn’t a business or personal finance chapter, but a meditation on your relationship with money.

Money is a social resource. When you contribute to society, society remunerates by assigning that contribution a certain cash value. Pavlina underscores the difference between absolute value and social value. A professional athlete’s absolute value may be low, but as someone who’s compensated on the basis of the advertising and licensing revenue he generates for others he has high social value, in the commercial sense. This might seem academic, but it’s an important standard to think about when creating products and services for the market. Many entrepreneurs and employees overprice, or sometime underprice their work by failing to pay adequate attention to market norms.

It’s also possible to make money by exploiting market inefficiencies to bypass the need to make any contribution. In short, we can either contribute, or mooch. Mooching is antisocial and disconnected from love, since it violates the principle of oneness. The only way to adopt the moocher mindset long-term is to lower one’s awareness. When a person operates from the contributor mindset, she has no conflicts about the money she earns, since it directly reflects the social value she’s created for others.

Chapter 11: Health. Pavlina mostly avoids recommending a specific program of diet and exercise (though veganism inevitably creeps in) to invite readers to reflect on their relationship with their bodies. He recommends getting undressed and looking at yourself in the mirror honestly, noting what you like about yourself and why you don’t like. What aspects of what you don’t like can be improved or remedied by predictable behaviors?

Love helps has connect with the foods that we are most naturally attracted to. Even without a knowledge of carbohydrates, calories and other metrics, most people intuitively know in a big-picture sense if what they’re about to ingest is right or wrong for them. Power is the self-discipline necessary to take control of one’s health, through progressive training, 30-day trials and other techniques. Oneness is a twofold principle here: enlisting the help of others for support (such as running groups or 12-step programs), and realizing the social or global impact of one’s consumption choices (from “modeling” smoking behavior for nearby children to animal cruelty).

Chapter 12: Relationships. Truth is the first foundation element of any relationship. Pavlina argues that true relationship only exist in our minds, as we perceive them, so we have to look within to assess their current status and pay close attention to our feelings, acknowledging the truths we discover without hiding from them. Inattention can be as damaging to a relationship as self-deception.

Our interactions with others involve some mix of truth, love and power, and in unhealthy relationships, there’s an imbalance. Some people are better at expressing themselves through asserting their authority (power) and creating connections (love). Some people have trouble representing themselves to others authentically (truth).

A key relationship concept is oneness. By starting from the assumption that we’re one rather than separate, it becomes much easier to approach others. You don’t have to break the ice when you assume no ice in the first place.

Chapter 13: Spirituality. Steve takes a pluralistic aproach to sprirituality that may even be a bit much for those who consider themselves open-minded. He sees any belief system — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism — as one lens with which to perceive reality. The commonalities consists of truth, love and power; within the differences are usually falsehood, disconnection and disempowerment.

We see the world through a number of spiritual sensory organs: objective and subjective viewpoints, logic and intuition, dreams and visions, religious and philosophical beliefs, and so on. Pavlina argues that by accessing a diverse enough set of channels, we can develop a more accurate and complete picture of reality. Personally, I see this as a cultural rather than ontological argument. A knowledge of alchemy has value in understanding the history of chemistry, but to give it credence as “another perceptual filter” in understanding reality is beyond my capacity, which I’m sure will be seen as a validation of the point.

On the other hand, I totally agree with Steve’s contention that we should stop identifying with a belief system. “When people ask me what religion I am, I tell them the question doesn’t make any sense. I’m a human being, not a religion.” Moreover, he asserts that we should avoid yielding control of our spiritual lives to someone else, whether it’s God, a guru or a counselor. The principle of authority maintains that we are the masters of our own fate.

How Smart is Personal Development?

I’m in the middle of re-reading Personal Development for Smart People, since I enjoyed it that much. If you’re allergic to the Law of Attraction and other mysticism, it’s definitely in there (though the LoA only gets a couple of passing references), but not enough to overwhelm the book’s core principles. The book’s focus on principles and ethics rather than tips and hacks makes it a great antidote to current trends in the personal development field.

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