I recently took advantage of a deal where Steve Pavlina was offering his new book Personal Development for Smart People for free to bloggers. Now that I received the book a few weeks ago and have had some time to go through it I’d like to offer my opinion on it.

Intro

Reading the book showed me how because Steve had literally spent years of his life studying personal development prior to launching his website which made to an easy transition for him into blogging full time about personal development.

“Within three years I’d created enough material to fill about 20 book, and I still felt as though I was just getting started.”

This quote just stood out to me because it just shows how if you really spend a lot of your time whole heartedly on a specific niche you can be successful with it.

Putting Principles into Practice

But rather than focusing on the back story and how he grew to be such a rock star in the personal development niche I’d like to post a few of the quotes that had a profound impact on me and offer some of my feedback on these quotes and the book as a whole.

“Your first commitment must be to discover and accept new truths, no matter how difficult or unpleasant the consequences may be.”

In an effort to cultivate more self awareness I want to be cognisant of the fact that I’m an incredibly stubborn person and need to rethink the way I act when people challenge my ideas.

“You can connect with people very easily by tuning in to the connection that already exists. Instead of having to break the ice with someone, assume that there is no ice. On some level you’re already connected.”

“Just as a salesperson might have a monthly sales quota to meet, you can use the concept of quotas to improve your performance in any endeavor.”

As a salesperson myself, it’s easy for me to take these two quotes from separate parts of the book and combine them together to not only help improve my confidence on the phone while talking to potential new clients but also to apply the idea of quotas to improve my performance in my web business as well. I rarely look at each of my websites and chart out growth targets, set goals etc. (other than this blog), but at work I practice this behavior all the time.

“One of the best things you can do to attract new people into your life is to focus on your own created self-expression. By expressing yourself authentically, you draw others to you, making it easer to form compatible new relationships.”

This is another quote that I took away from the book. Often times I shy away from expressing myself freely around others but if I just let loose I can see how it’d be easy to attract other like minded individuals.

One of the most empowering choices you can make is to decouple your spiritual beliefs from your identity. Despite how firmly held your beliefs may be, they can never define you. If you change your faith, you’re still you. A fixed belief system can only limit your ability to grow; it’s like permanently closing one eye and denying yourself access to your natural stereo vision.

Overall I don’t really agree with Steve’s ideas in the spiritual sections of this book and the above highlights just one portion that I’ve selected to comment on. In my opinion, it’s short sighted to say that just because you have a fixed belief system it can limit your ability to grow personally. Perhaps his definition of “grow” is different than mine. I also don’t think that the argument that your spiritual beliefs don’t define you because they have to shape you in at least in some way.

In any case I got the impression that he was saying to anyone out there that is part of a religion that it was you can’t grow as well as others.

Conclusion

I’ve just barely scratched the surface of some of the ideas and concepts discussed in this book. Also, some of the ideas I’ve applied to the quotes I took out of this book are not what conclusion you may have come to as a result of reading these sections of the book, but I think that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that at the end of the day you take something from this book and apply it your life to grow personally. Especially if you’re a member of a fixed belief system with an inherent inability to grow as well as others

Disagreements aside this book does offer some great ideas for personal development.

Click here to purchase Personal Development for Smart People

If you’ve read the book what do you think?