Personal Development for Smart People^TM

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the Million Dollar Experiment, so here’s an update.  The MDE has been going strong since November 2005.  I continue to receive updates and new submissions every day, and the online database is refreshed once or twice a week.
For those unfamiliar with the MDE, it’s a group thought experiment whereby […]

The self-help industry is frequently criticized for being poulated by scam artists who overpromise and underdeliver.  Is this a valid criticism?  Let’s take a deeper look into the dark side of self-help.
False promises
One of the biggest problems in the self-help industry is that promoters make false promises.  They promise hugely unrealistic results, as if reading […]

If you want to expand your horizons and try new things in life, the strategy of immersion is one of the best ways to do it.  Instead of merely dipping your toes in the water, immersion means you dive in head first.  This isn’t a strategy that appeals to the timid; however, with a sufficient […]

Recently I’ve been having some fun with something I call “bear bombing.”  If my wife and kids decide they want to keep sleeping well past dawn, I grab my trusty digital kitchen timer (one with a very loud alarm), set the fuse for 4 seconds, and take up a position just outside one of their bedroom […]

StevePavlina.com Personal Development for Smart People podcast #12
Today’s podcast is about building confidence, a topic that many readers have requested I cover.  This podcast will give you four different methods for boosting your confidence.
One of the reasons people don’t feel confident is that they harbor limiting beliefs that block them from tapping into this inner resource.  […]

According to a well-known stereotype, left-handed* people such as myself are supposedly more creative than right-handed people.
For example, in the previous sentence, I just alienated most of my readers while simultaneously giving myself a compliment – pretty creative, eh?
I don’t know if that stereotype has any basis in reality, but when I learned about it as a child, I assumed that […]

No time management system is worth much if it doesn’t tell you what to do at 9am on Monday morning.  Suppose you have a list of all your tasks and projects.  Which one should you work on first?
My answer is that you should work on the task that you believe will yield the greatest long-term […]

In various religious texts, there can be found some interesting personal development gems.  One from the Bible is “The Parable of the Talents.”
The Parable of the Talents is one of the stories Jesus told to teach a moral lesson.  Although the word “talents” in the story refers literally to money, you can obviously extend the […]