The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth
One Sentence Summary: Being happy means being in perfect harmony with the universal principals of Truth, Love and Power, and their derivatives, Unity, Authority, Courage and Intelligence; this book guides us to be better versions of ourselves by showing us the theory and practice of each of these principles.
By Steve Pavlina, 250 pages, published in 2008.
Summary and Book Report:
(Note : This book is not part of the PMBA challenge)
Do you know Steve Pavlina? Video game programmer who was somewhat successful in the shareware domain – these are programs that you can try for 30 days before you purchase them – in 2004 he launched his blog about personal development with the ambition of becoming an important player in this sector, even though he had no references, no related degree, and had not written any books on the subject. But for 10 years he had read about 50 books a year on personal development and, feeding off this gigantic body of accumulated knowledge, he began to make connections between seemingly disparate concepts, and to innovate by testing and making mistakes. After two years, his blog was bringing in about $1,000 a day in advertising and affiliation revenue without him having ever spent a single penny on publicity or marketing!
I am myself a fan of Steve Pavlina and have read most of his blogs, which recommend hundreds of articles on a wide variety of subjects, of which some are pure jewels sparkling in the middle of a pile of gold nuggets – don’t miss his best-ofs in the left-hand column, which are all must-read (they are really worth their weight in peanuts – as we say in France).
So Steve Pavlina published his first book about personal development, which is named after his blog Personal Development for Smart People. I am one of 400 happy bloggers who received a free advance copy, and I read it as quickly as possible, slipping it between the books for my challenge.
First of all, even though there are numerous passages from his blog, this book is clearly not a compilation of his best articles: Steve goes much further by recommending a personal development system, which I would go so far as to call a philosophical system, in as much as it is coherent, profound and universal, and, at the same time, practical and progressive. I will paint you a picture.