Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina

I've been reading StevePavlina.com for about a year. There are some excellent articles and blog posts on personal development, creating new habits, setting goals, motivating yourself, and the like. What I've always liked is that he's very personal. After reading how much he shares of his own inner thoughts and experiments he's tried, I feel like I can trust him to be honest. (I started to write "very honest" but I don't think you can have a modifier. You are either truthful or not.) His 30 day experiments, where he adopts a new habit or a new method of something for 30 days and reports on his experiences, are fascinating.

When I saw that he had a book being published, my first thought was "about time." My second thought was "Oh, but I've already read so much of him I wonder if reading the book will be worthwhile or if it will be just a rehash of old blog posts." I've seen other bloggers have books come out and several have been disappointing. So I didn't order it right away or try to get a free copy from him to review, as he offered to those of us who blog.

But I kept reading his blog and one day when I was on Amazon ordering something else, I added his book, Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, to my order.

I should have known that he would create something with a new focus and not just a rehash. It's not actually a new focus and he does write about some of the same incidents that he's blogged about. But the book has a framework that I am guessing he couldn't have spelled out so succinctly before he set down to write the book. Blogs let you wander and explore ideas and I think he was figuring out his framework as he blogged. The book gives him a place to present a orderly progression and lay out his beliefs and ideas within a framework that helps tie it all together. It's not that it didn't exist before. It just hadn't been mapped out so clearly. The design already existed though, as his blog posts all resonate. But because the web site was written as things emerged, it didn't have this framework that is now so clearly defined.

So in summary, if you're interested in living better, striving to improve not your circumstances but your way of thinking and living, go buy Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, even if you already read the web site.