Today was another great day. The daily routine of living on juice is gradually becoming a habit, so I don’t have to think about it so much anymore. Emotional Detox I still had some mild emotional detox today. Unexpected feelings would surface and then subside after an hour or so. For example, I started feeling [...]

Now here’s a surprise — my book Personal Development for Smart People has launched early. The original release date was October 15th, but the book has already shipped and is available now. You can get it at Amazon.com and in many major bookstores, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Hastings. The major [...]

On Thursday a good friend and fellow Toastmaster named Ron Lewison was in a serious car accident. He was rushed to the hospital, but his injuries were too severe, including a broken pelvis and a punctured lung. Shortly after his family arrived, he passed away. He was 69 years old and is survived by his [...]

In case you haven’t noticed the links I splattered all over StevePavlina.com during the weekend, my new book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com (with a discount off the cover price). The official release date is October 15, 2008, so we [...]

In a recent forum thread about starting a new business, someone asked about the best way to handle competition. How do you ensure that your efforts will pay off instead of merely jumping into a giant pool with everyone else and being unable to stand out? My strategy for dealing with competition is the same no matter [...]

It’s time to share the results of the personal branding experiment from the previous post. I asked visitors to this website to submit 3 adjectives to describe me. I let it run for 2 days and received a total of 1,101 responses, which included more than 3,000 adjectives. First of all, a big thanks to everyone [...]

Personal branding is basically the way you market yourself to the world. Your personal brand is what other people think of you. In some ways it’s outside your control, but you obviously have some influence over it. Personal branding is unavoidable. As others interact with you, they’ll automatically form mental associations that connect you with certain labels, often within [...]

Authenticity has become the modern currency of blogging. Unlike traditional media sources, most bloggers aren’t beholden to any puppeteers.  To some people this is a whole different kind of problem, but it’s also clearly a key strength of the new media.  With 175,000 new blogs launching every day, blogging is becoming a popular alternative to the filtered, agenda-driven drivel that passes as [...]

Overcoming jealousy has been one of my most requested topics for new articles, but in the past I’ve always declined such requests because I don’t have much personal experience in this area.  I’m not prone to jealousy, so I can’t explain from personal experience how to overcome it.  Nevertheless, due to the demand for such [...]

Today I’m happy to share an exclusive interview with David Brooks, an award-winning professional speaker and trainer who has taught more than 10,000 business professionals to speak and write clearly, concisely, and confidently. Recently David came to Las Vegas to give a presentation for Toastmasters, and I was so impressed with his content that I immediately approached him about doing [...]