Personal Development for Smart People^TM

I decided to start doing podcasts once every two weeks instead of every week, so there won’t be a podcast today. I’d like to see the audience grow a bit more as podcasting becomes more popular (and more people understand what it is). Right now it’s only a small fraction of the blog […]

After experimenting with having blog comments turned off for a couple weeks now, I’ve decided to keep it this way. I thought it would be a tough decision, but after having tested it for a while, it actually wasn’t a tough decision at all. While comments provide a wonderful degree of interactivity with […]

I added a new article to the free articles section called “Life After Death.”
Rather than being religious in nature, this article attempts to tackle death and the possibility of an afterlife from an intellectual/analytical standpoint, using what we can reasonably know about death to help us make better decisions about how to live.
Going through the […]

Why should we study consciousness?
Your power as a human being lies with your consciousness. It is the seat of your free will, your ability to choose. If you can improve your ability to use your consciousness, you can radically change your experience of life for the better. In fact, I would say […]

To what degree is it possible for us to seek and discover the “truth” as we explore consciousness itself? How knowable is our inner reality?
Of course we have the scientific method. Observe. Hypothesize. Test. Draw conclusions. Put the results to good use. And obviously the repeated application of […]

In this post I’ll share some of my personal experiences shifting through different belief systems.
At the age of 17, I first began to seriously question my beliefs about reality. In my case it had a lot to do with the religion and culture in which I was raised. I was Catholic at the […]

What gives rise to your goals? What determines whether you even set goals at all?
I believe the answer is your context. Your context is your collection of beliefs about reality. It’s the soil in which your thoughts grow.
For example, if you have very materialistic goals and have become skilled at achieving them, […]

Over the past year, many of the posts I’ve made on this blog have been about topics which for me represent the past — ideas and challenges I worked through years ago, such as productivity and getting organized. But for at least the rest of this month, I’m going to fast-forward to the present […]

StevePavlina.com Personal Development for Smart People podcast #4
This podcast is a live recording of a 30-minute mini-seminar I presented in Las Vegas on Monday, titled “Using Patterns for Personal Development.”
During the recording you’ll hear references to a handout. I’ve included the complete text of that handout below, so you’ll have the same support material the […]

Today is StevePavlina.com’s one-year anniversary (from the date I did my first blog post). A big thanks to everyone who has helped this site grow! Last month there were over 410,000 visitors.
For those of you who are curious — I know a lot of fellow bloggers read this site — traffic has grown […]