Review of Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina

I first heard of Steve Pavlina when a friend referred me to his blog during his polyphasic sleep experiment. For over 150 days, Steve abandoned sleeping nights, and instead took six, twenty minute naps a day. I was immediately intrigued. And the more of his writing I read, the more I liked the message.

There are hundreds of articles on his website, all about how to grow as a person. His approach is an intriguing mix of hippie, mainstream American, and strait-up crazy person, and from my perspective, the best of each. His thinking and writing is decidedly left-brained, and he doesn’t shy away from financial or career growth issues. At the same time he eats a 100% raw-vegan diet and talks with dead people.

From no other author have I found such accessible, intelligent, practicable personal development advice, and rarely such a warm and inviting tone. So when Steve announced he was publishing a book and would offer free advance copies to bloggers who would review it, I immediatly wanted to participate. That was the original impetus to start and grow this blog, and this review is the result.

The aims of the book - Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth - are ambitious on at least two counts:

1. To be sufficiently different from and superior to the hundreds of articles on his website to satisfy his massive readership (he claims two million visitors a month).


2. To lay out the fundamental principles of personal development.

The book is highly structured, and will probably work better for "thinkers" than for "feelers" on the MTBI T/F spectrum, which may be what Steve alludes to with his tag line “Personal Development for Smart People.”

The book is divided in two parts. The first is the seven fundamental principles of personal growth. Truth, love and power are the three primary principles. From those are derived oneness (truth + love), courage (love + power), and authority (power + truth). And the seventh is intelligence, which is defined as alignment with truth, love and power, and is the "highest form of human expression." Here’s a graphical representation:

I’m not convinced that these principles represent any sort of underlying order to personal growth, mostly because I'm unconvinced there is any such order. The three primary principles seem right to me, but the secondary ones feel forced. I’m not sure, for example, that courage is a combination of love and power. In the section on how to build courage, one of the suggestions is to educate yourself, which I agree is a great way to overcome timidity, but seems to come from the primary principle of truth, not love or power. I can also think of no compelling reason why personal growth should rest on such a neat foundation.

As a tool though, a way of thinking about and planning growth and handling life’s problems, I think this scaffolding will be valuable. Perhaps it is the neatest possible representation of an inherantly complex, chaotic pursuit.

Each of the seven principles is broken down into its key components. Truth, for example, breaks down to perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance, and self-awareness. Each component is explained and described, and sometimes a how-to improve this component is given. On prediction, for example, he says, we grow from exposure to new patterns: when our expectations are met it reinforces our beliefs; when they are not, it forces us to build new ideas about how the world works. Thus we should seek stability and routine only as a launching pad for exploring new areas. In order to side-step denial we can bring the process into the conscious part of the mind by making conscious predictions and comparing our expectations to how reality turns out to operate. He also says that emotions are predictions: when we have negative expectations we feel bad and when we have positive expectations, we feel good. That’s just one component of one of the seven fundamental principles. I wanted to detail it to illustrate the depths the book reaches.

For each principle, he also lays out some common blocks to alignment with the principle. For truth, for example: media conditioning, social conditioning, false beliefs, emotional interference, addictions, immaturity, and secondary gain. And each block is described and explained with similar detail. As I read these, many of the obstacles to growth that I face, some of which I've been struggling for years to elucidate, become immediately clear.

Finally, for each principle, he provides several techniques for coming into better alignment. For truth, he suggests a quantitative self-evaluation in various aspects of life (the process is described in detail), journaling on a regular basis, and forgoing all media, at least for a trial period of time.

In the intelligence chapter, there are extensive quizzes and evaluative material to determine where and how you can best serve your personal growth.

The second part of the book details six primary areas of life: habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirituality. Suggestions are offered for how to improve congruency in each area with each of the seven principles. If that sounds overwhelming, it reads as detailed and useful.

For example, in the section on habits and oneness, there is a discussion of how our habits influence others and how we might be role models to the world with them, and also how we can use habits to develop congruency with the principle of oneness, like going for long walks in nature, smiling at strangers on the street, or offering hugs instead of handshakes.

I thought there was more value in the first part of the book, and it was more fun to read than the second. When I return to the book to do the exercises suggested — which I will begin this weekend — I plan to spend more time in the first section. On the other hand, if I ever feel in need of help in a certain area of life, the organization of the second section would be of great value.

In sum, this is an excellent book and one that I will use for years to come. I fully recommend it to everyone, and especially those who prefer a rational/logical approach to complex issues (which can be hard to find in the “self help” section of a bookstore). I’m not sure that it succeeds in its most ambitious task, but it is still immensely valuable, even to someone who has read almost all of Steve Pavlina’s website.

9/10 stars.

Review of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

I picked up this book - about an attempt to summit Mt. Everest gone horribly wrong - while in the middle of two non-fiction books. I wanted a story to read before bed one night and figured I'd read a bit and then put it down until some more convenient time. But Krakauer's writing has tremendous gravity - I find it very difficult to put down. After three days of reading before bed, on the bus and between classes, I had finished it. For those three days, I felt like I was part of an Everest expedition.

I should have seen it coming. I remember when I was given Into the Wild, Krakauer's story of recent Emory Univeresity graduate Chris McCandless running away from society and into the Alaskan wilderness. I read that with a similar voraciousness, and then read it again, and then again.

I think the draw is largely in the subject matter - I identified strongly with McCandless in my college years, and I find it easy now to identify with Krakauer and the tourist-come-climbers in Into Thin Air. Even more alluring though is Krakauer's writing style.

Krakauer writes in a very compelling manner. His ability to put the reader in situations far from anything we've experienced is second-to-none. While reading, I felt a part of the climb, as though I were on the mountain struggling to breathe the thin air while ascending the Lhotse Face against gale-force winds.

The story started as an assignment from Outside magazine to cover the commercial expeditions that guide clients up Everest in increasing numbers each year. It is a controversial subject, and one that landed square in the lime light after the tragedy described in Into Thin Air.

Krakauer travels to Everest with Adventure Consultants, the pre-eminent high alpine guiding company (and at $65,000 by far the most expensive). The group is led by Rob Hall, among the world's most accomplished climbers and guides. At the time they began, there were over a dozen groups on the mountain, ranging from outfits as tight as Rob's to a team shooting an IMAX movie to a solo Swede who had traveled from Stockholm to Everest entirely under his own power (on a bike to Kathmandu, then walking) to groups at best marginally qualified. Many mused early on that the lack of high alpine experience among climbers could cause trouble high on the mountain.

Krakauer does a marvelous job of describing the process of climbing Everest. The reader feels what it might be like to cross the massive crevasses of a glacier's fall out on lashed-together aluminum ladders in mountaineering boots and crampons; how it might feel to breathe air with just a third the oxygen we are used to; and what it's like to enter into a situation in which you know your life is on the line under a hired leader with other clients whose abilities you don't necessarily trust.

The bulk of the book takes place on "summit day," May 10, 1996, when 34 climbers, guides and Sherpas departed from 26,000 feet just after midnight to try to reach the top of the world. Krakauer aims for an objective journalist's reporting of the facts and analysis of the causes of the tragedy, and he does an admirable job for someone so deeply involved in the events.

In the end the book pulls off a rather amazing feat: it represents an objective journalistic account of an event, and at the same time an emotive, evocative narrative of one man's experience of an incredible situation.

If you have any interest in mountaineering and Everest, the limits of human potential, or group dynamics in high intensity situations, I would unhesitatingly recommend this book. It is also just a fine read.

10/10 stars.

Goal Reached

I just got word that I'm getting a free copy of Steve Pavlina's new book. When I started this blog a month ago, my first goal was to get to "a non-embarrassing level of readership" within a month, so that I could take part in Steve's offer of a free copy of the book in exchange for a review on the blog. I'd like genuinely thank all of you who have been reading and helped me reach my goal.

It has been empowering to watch readership and Google rankings for this blog grow. This blog now ranks on the first page of Google's results for many searches that include gangwon-do. As we've been (still) negotiating for an apartment closer to our school, I've felt quite confident knowing that I have this as leverage -- whichever way it turns out, every prospective teacher that does a modicum of research on the program will read about my experience. With a platform like this, I suddenly feel like the esteemed food critic sitting down at a fine restaurant while the kitchen staff goes into overdrive to get his dish just right.

More than that, I've had a long-term goal of building a stream of passive income through websites. This site isn't that, but it's reassuring to know that my writing does well over this medium, and that people will choose to visit a site that I've written. It makes that dream feel more attainable.

So it's worth repeating: thank you for reading.

I'm excited to read and review the book. I love Steve Pavlina's blog for personal development advice and inspiration. If you're not familiar with it, it's definitely worth having a look. And, no that plug was not a part of the book deal. ;^>

Review of Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn is the Chief Editor of the magazine Adbusters, which I've read as regularly as any other over the past five years. Adbusters central tenet is that corporations manipulate us to consume via marketing, and that process is destroying us psychologically, socially and ecologically.

The book is no different. For much of it I felt I was reading the same ideas that have been recycled through Adbusters over the years, perhaps because Culture Jam was published in 2001. The exploration in the book is more linear and more fact-based, where the magazine tends to offer a more right-brain experience, but the ideas are largely the same. Where the book differs, and where I found real value in it, was in the exploration of what Lasn thinks ought to be done.

He begins with an overview of what's wrong. For those whose are in the know about these things already, what he describes is what's expected, though the statistics are often shocking. For example, “worldwide rates of major depression in every age group have risen steadily since the 1940s... [and] as Asian countries Americanize, their rates of depression increase accordingly.” The average hour of American prime-time TV contains five acts of violence (killings, gunshots assaults, car chases, rapes). “Ninety percent of news editors surveyed... said they'd experienced 'direct pressure' from advertisers trying to influence content.” “In 1997, Chrysler, one of the five largest advertisers in the U.S., sent letters to one hundred newspaper and magazine editors demanding to review their publications for stories that could prove damaging or controversial... According to a spokesperson at Chrysler, every single letter was signed in agreement and returned.” 77% of American adults are afflicted with a psychological ailment. And so on.

The second part of the book attempts to flesh out how we've gotten to where we are. Neoclassical economics, and the rise of corporations, and how we've been molded into a nation of “Manchurian consumers.” How brand loyalty and consumerism enter our consciousness as adolescents. How the global economy is basically a pyramid scheme, and that our children and theirs will be the dupes. The analysis isn't so much off, in my opinion, as it is superficial. But this isn't a dissertation, it is a manifesto more than anything else, and an instruction manual, and Lasn has more to get to.

The third part is the heart of the book, what Lasn sees as opportunities for those who have grown dissatisfied. He uses many pages describing the ebb and flow of the Situationist movement in the late-fifties and sixties, and uses that as a spring board to suggest that ours is a “society of spectacle,” and that what's need is a massive detournement, a jujitsu-like approach to art and revolution in which the elements of the consumer marketing and mainstream media are used to create a subversive message that wins the minds of the people and turns them away from consumption. He describes what he calls “meme wars,” which are essentially battles for the consciousness of the society, where a meme is basically a contagious idea. He goes into detail about the meme wars that were fought against the tobacco companies, starting with anti-smoking ads in 1969 and leading to the massive law suits against those companies in the '90s as an example of what can be possible. Then he details battles that he sees as needing to be fought, for example, developing an economics that tells the ecological truth and getting rid of the idea that corporations have an intrinsic, or legal, right to exist.

Finally, the book closes with some ideas of what could be possible: two minutes of every hour on public airwaves reserved for public announcements granted on a first-come, first-serve basis. Anti-corporate activists that stand up to corporations while on the line with 800-numbers. TV anti-ads that combat the idea that Calvin Kline's image of cool is cool. General strikes and such.

I think many of his ideas are good ones, I think some are less useful. I didn't like that they were presented as a prescription, as if the one true way and the one true group that would bring about the revolution had been revealed. Rarely is an author's arrogance so palpable in text. If our culture is to heal, it will take more than one group of people to do it. And since culture jamming is a movement that aims to decentralize power, to restore the generation of culture to a bottom-up enterprise, surely we the readers and potential culture jammers can be entrusted to “jam” as we see fit.

Nevertheless, I agree with Lasn's aims, and I like many of the ideas he puts forth to get there. There are plenty of useful statistics in the first half of the book, and many worthy actions in the second half. For those who are unfamiliar with the ideas Adbusters explores and put off by its aesthetic or lack of evidential support, Culture Jam could be a transformative book. For regular readers of Adbusters, unless you're looking for specific ideas for actions, there's probably not a whole lot of value in the book, inspiration aside.

7/10 stars.

Review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would be a tough book not to love. I laughed a lot reading it, and I cried some too. Foer creates characters so three dimensional that they feel like old friends, and for Melanie and I at least, come up in conversation as if they really were.

Set in New York City, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close revolves around Oscar Schell, an adorable nine year old boy who lost his father in the 9/11 attacks. The story explores Oscar's search for understanding and meaning in his father's death, and through that reminds the reader of all that there is to be joyful for in life. In Oscar's suffering is revealed the purity and joy of childhood.

The parallel story is that of Oscar's father's father's life, and while the two work well together and come together in a nifty way toward the end of the book, I found the sections about the grandfather painful to read. Maybe because I loved reading from Oscar's perspective so much that I missed it when I was away from it, but during one particularly long and arduous grandfather passage, I put the book down for almost a month and might not have picked it back up if it weren't for Melanie's urgings. Some of the passages about the grandfather's youth are quite beautiful though, and the parallel story reveals something profound about the transformations that occur between having one's life to live to having lived one's life.

A very pleasant read, and plenty of meaning about joy, sorrow, grief, family and aging. I will definitely be picking up Foer's other novel Everything is Illuminated soon.

8/10 stars.