If you want to jump right to the free 1st chapter (and introduction) -pdsp-intro-chapter-1. There’s also a kindle compatible version of Steve Pavlina’s book (converted from pdf, not formatted, not tested – let me know if it doesn’t work). The Kindle version should be available in a month or so. The print edition of Steve Pavlina’s book is available at Amazon.
Before the Interview – Who is Steve Pavlina?
Steve Pavlina is one of the most popular self help coaches/gurus online. More importantly, all of his material is free (except of course this new book). To validate claims of Steve’s popularity I checked rankings across quantcast, compete and alexa – not only does Steve Pavlina’s self help website rank ahead of Deepak Chopra (chopra.com – 36-43K people visiting a month), Eckhart Tolle (eckharttolle.com – 29-38K people a month), and Anthony Robbins (tonyrobbins.com – 39-42K people a month), he gets more visitors than all three combined. Compete lists him as having 140K unique visitors a month, and Quantcast lists him as having 184.K people a month.
Before the Interview – Why are you interviewing Steve?
- Firstly, his website has top notch content that is free. Plus, he’s cut down on advertising and is aiming to eliminate ads entirely (in a year or so).
- Secondly, I’ve used some of his teachings personally (the find the purpose of your life exercise) with myself and with people I worked with, and it works.
- Thirdly, and most importantly, his claim is that the book has found the self-help holy grail – the core foundational elements on which all self help and personal development strategies are based. I’ve only read part of his book (full review coming shortly) – however i can confirm that this is the closest heuristic I’ve seen to an underlying explanation of all of self-help. I don’t know and doubt I could ever know whether this really is the key.
The Actual Interview – Part 1: The 3 Foundational Elements – Truth, Love, Power.
I’m actually going to just write down the crux of what I understood and mix in some Q&A since the Q&A format by itself doesn’t work well. We started off by discussing the three core principles – truth, love, and power.
Q:Let me get this straight – you’re saying you’ve found the core principles of self development?
A [Steve]: Yes, that is what I’m saying. In all my experiences of working with and helping people I’ve found that people had one or more of three fundamental problems -
- People weren’t seeing the truth. They had false beliefs and/or they were in denial.
- People were suffering from a lot of disconnection – disconnection from love. Instead of things and people they loved they had things they did not want and people they did not want in their life.
- People were disconnected from power and from their own power.
We talked a lot about this and Steve really does believe that he has found the blueprint underlying all self help books and that these three core principles of truth, love, and power are the core underlying principles of all self-help. Various self help books and philosophies only differ in their implementation of these same core principles. They might use different techniques – however, their foundational elements are the same.
In his search to find a holistic model for self development, Steve has worked with thousands of people and read a thousand or so books – underlying all these solutions and books were these three elemental building blocks – awareness (seeing the truth), love (connecting with things and people you love), and power.
Q: How do you define truth?
A: Truth is simply having awareness of what is. Truth is accepting what your senses and intuition are telling you. [Edit: we talked a little bit about how this was similar to Jack Welch's "See Reality as it is; not as it was, or as you want it to be." ].
Q: How do you define love?
A: Love is your ability to consciously connect with people… or activities… or ideas you find attractive. The principle of love says that we should move toward whatever makes us feel good, and we should move away from whatever makes us feel bad. Technology is causing us to be more and more disconnected from each other. Love means bringing back connection with people and things that are important to us. Social networks are a good first step – people are using the internet more and more as communication. A lot of times people can take online relationships and transform them into real relationships. I think there will be further improvements and we’re heading in the right direction.
Q:How do you define power?
A: Power is your ability to consciously create or change your reality. It means taking control of your thoughts and actions, so you can create the kind of life you want instead of having to put up with what you don’t want. When you develop your power, your drive, and your self-discipline, you’ll be able to make your life better.
Q: You talk a lot about media and society as blockers and recommend turning them off – What happens when you do this?
A [Steve]: What tends to happen is that as we get the blocking influences out of our lives, we start getting more and more in touch with our intuition. When we spend time with ourselves, and are honest about how we feel about certain things – we being to realize that we are setting certain goals that are inherited from society. At that point it’s important to have courage and see what is really true for us, to listen to our internal data – our feelings, and tune into what we really are feeling, what’s true for us.
Actual Interview: Part 2 – More General Questions
Q: What are your future plans?
A: My aim is delivering the message of personal growth and conscious growth. Blogging is one medium and the book is another. There are a lot more media I want to go into – audio recordings, video, tele seminars, webinars, public speaking. The message is not attached to any medium. One aspect I really want to build up is local groups – where people can use stevepavlina.com’s forums to find local meetups. This is already happening via the forums at stevepavlina.com and I want to expand it further and have a global personal development meetup group. Social networks are great – however, it takes more courage and confidence to meet in person – to get up in front of a room, and talk about yourself.
Q: Why is your website free?
A: The role of money is to serve as a medium for trading value. The best way is to create value for people. Somehow income keeps coming back to me – I give value and money keeps coming back to me. When I first started out I had no ads – I added a donate link because people kept emailing me asking how they could donate. Focus on creating value. Focus on giving. The economic crisis creates an environment where people are very open to accepting value. Blogs are authentic communication, and are becoming more and more authentic. People are sharing more of themselves. There is nothing wrong with making money from blogging. Give out value and people want to give back value. Stop focusing on getting money and focus on creating and giving more and more value. During an economic downturn there are more people who are willing to receive what you have to give.
The End of the Interview
I’m going to put up the actual book review in a week or so. I do strongly recommend downloading the free chapter, and visiting Steve’s website. I have a lot more thoughts that i’ll hold off on until I’ve read and digested the entire book.
Filed under: content, kindle, reviews Tagged: | kindle edition, kindle interview, steve pavlina book, steve pavlina interview
“Power is your ability to consciously create or change your reality.”????
Very boring bunk…. it is good he is giving it away free.
Sorry but I have found that self-help books and the stupid management fads like the old TQM from the 90′s is nothing more than junk.
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Dennis – only the first chapter is free. you should give the first chapter a look though.
i’m writing a review of the book and i’ll talk a bit about what i think of self help.
No thanks. I am not one to read those sorts of books. I figure my life out on my own and I don’t need some stranger to tell me how.