Whenever you set a new goal, you’re unlikely to achieve it unless your habits already support it. If your goal runs afoul of your current habits, you’ll need to change your habits in order to achieve your goal. Suppose you set a goal to write a book, but you aren’t already in the habit of [...]

My Facebook Experience I’ve been using Facebook for a few months now. I currently have 1,907 Facebook friends. I’ve been a fairly active user ever since I joined. I get new friend requests, comments, and emails there every day. Overall I’m glad I joined Facebook. It takes extra time to keep up with it, and [...]

In personal development terms, calibration is the process of progressively refining your thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors until you shift your equilibrium to the point where you can consistently achieve the results you desire. Just as you might calibrate a scientific instrument to provide consistently accurate measurements, you can calibrate your skills to generate consistently good [...]

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 [...]

Some miscellaneous updates and news to share… Twitter My Twitter trial is going well. There are 600+ people following me on Twitter so far (my blog obviously bestows an advantage there). I’ve shared some links as well as various minor updates. I’m grateful for the helpful advice from fellow Twitterers (Tweeters? Twits?). For example, one [...]

It wasn’t until this year that I realized that one of the blocks that prevented me from improving my diet was figuring out what to do with the extra energy I’d gain if the change became permanent. For example, when I was going through my 30-day raw food diet trial earlier this year, I had [...]

If you’re attracted to many different pursuits and can’t commit to any single one of them for your career, college major, or income source, then good for you! Leonardo da Vinci was in the same boat. He’s considered by many to be the greatest genius of all time. The notion that you have to commit [...]

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 [...]

Have you ever fallen off track while trying to install or maintain a not-quite-daily habit such as exercising 3-4 days a week or getting up at 5am on weekdays? This article will share some simple ideas to help you maintain such habits more easily. If you perform a certain task every day for weeks on [...]

Many people are really bad at estimating how much time a task will take. Perhaps you estimate you’ll need about an hour, and it really takes you 3-4 hours to finish. Or maybe you allocate 30 minutes for a task, and you’re done in 5 minutes. What can you do to get better at making [...]