Personal Development for Smart People: Book Review
I just finished reading Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People, and I really enjoyed it. It was jam packed full of simple but not easy steps on how to improve all aspects of your life.
It was divided into 2 sections: Fundamental Principles and Practical Application. It took me a long time to get through the Fundamental Principles, but after that, the Practical Application seemed to go much more quickly.
The above diagram explains the layout of the Fundamental Principles Steve writes about.
- Love, Truth and Power are the primary components;
- Oneness, Authority and Courage are combinations of two of the elements;
- Intelligence is a combination of all 3 elements.
If you’re looking for a book that you need to chew on, take notes, and implement a little bit at a time, buy a copy of Personal Development for Smart People.
If you’re looking for an easy read that you can read in 60 minutes, do NOT buy Personal Development for Smart People. It’s much longer, much more detailed than 30 minutes.
Even if you’re a reader of Steve Pavlina’s blog, this book has a lot of new lessons on how to improve yourself. It’s nicely laid out, full of information and things you can actually DO to improve your life.
I’m hoping to do an interview with Steve later this year, so if you have questions you’d like to ask him about, please leave them in the comment and I’ll see if I can work them into our conversation.
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POSTED IN: Phil Gerbyshak, book reviews
3 opinions for Personal Development for Smart People: Book Review
csbmonkey
Oct 10, 2008 at 10:48 am
Another blog I read regularly (well, to which I subscribe to the RSS feed as I do with this one) is Flowing Data: http://flowingdata.com/
What I love about Flowing Data is that they cover so many wonderful ways of visually expressing ideas as well as what works and what doesn’t work when trying to express an idea.
I find for myself that a visual representation works mostly when it can be intuitively understood as to what it represents. Now, of course, it might not always be the case that what you intuit from a visual representation is accurate. In some cases what you intuit is downright the opposite of what the graphical representation is supposed to visualize.
I kept this in mind as I looked at this triangle thing. Frankly, I really didn’t intuitively pick up that it represented anything about intelligence. It might be meaningful to the author and he may provide an explanation of how it all fits together, but I really don’t see why the points of the triangle and the edges could not be represented by any number of things that are important to a particular individual that would lead to “intelligence” being the centerpiece.
csbmonkney
Oct 11, 2008 at 8:12 am
From Flowing Data:
http://flowingdata.com/2008/10/10/great-data-visualization-tells-a-great-story/
“Think of all the popular data visualization pieces out there - the ones that you always hear in lectures, read about in blogs, and the ones that popped into your head as you were reading this sentence. What do they all have in common? They probably all told a great story. Maybe the story was to convince us of something, compel us to action, enlighten us with new information, or force us to question our own preconceptions. Whatever it is, truly great data visualization reaches us at a very human level and that is why we remember them.”
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