Self-Help
Here are some pages I made related to Steve Pavlina's fantastic book Personal Development for Smart People:
- About Steve Pavlina's Book Personal Development for Smart People - a review.
- Expanded Table of Contents
- Expanded Table of Contents Printable Web Version (probably prints best with Firefox)
- Expanded Table of Contents Printable PDF Version
- JavaScript Random Generator: 66 Personal Effectiveness Habits from Steve Pavlina's Book, Personal Development for Smart People
The main reason I created this section of my site to begin with is because I needed an appropriate place to put this article:
- How to Be a Woman - An article that never would have been written if Steve Pavlina hadn't asked on his blog for people to try writing an article by this title, and offered to link to the best ones. I don't take the idea of gender roles very seriously - maybe I've had too many past lives as a man :-) - so, it's written in a not altogether serious (but unfortunately not incredibly humorous) way. :-) It's actually applicable to anyone of any gender.
External links
My favorite self-help/personal development sites
- NickPagan.com - A blog with a very down to earth, logical, very cerebral style.
- PhilosophersNotes.com Big Ideas - Tons of short articles with audio versions that start to automatically play when you open the articles; and also quotes. Plenty of good stuff here.
- StevePavlina.com - a site with a tremendous amount of incredibly useful, interesting, well-written material on a wide range of topics related to personal development.
- ErinPavlina.com - There's quite a lot of fascinating, well-written stuff here too. Since Erin is a psychic, a lot of it is about paranormal topics.
- BetterExistenceNow.com - Among other interesting things, this site has a free 126-page ebook in PDF format called Breaking Free from the Eggshell Existence by Rafael Perez. I'll always be grateful to this book, it helped inspire me to put aside my fear and do something that I had been avoiding.
I have a hard time believing that reality itself is influenced in some magical way by how positive your thinking is. But, there's no doubt in my mind that being more positive and not letting your circumstances and negative beliefs about yourself get you down can assist you greatly, particularly if part of the reason your life is a mess is because you're full of despair and/or self-loathing, and it's preventing you from making the most of your circumstances or causing you to self-sabotage or push away or not appreciate the good things you already do have in your life.
- Lettersquash - by John Freestone. This blog is by a very intelligent skeptic. Among other things, it points out and criticizes many of the things I find most objectionable about the Law of Attraction. New, 12/27/2008
Some of my favorite articles
Not a complete list, so, this list will likely grow, eventually, as I discover (or rediscover) more articles.
- How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly, by Nick Pagan (PDF File) - Incredibly logical, sensible, and practical ideas. I just need to remind myself to keep putting them into practice... :-)
- ThinkArete.com Big Idea #37 - Michael Gelb: 100 Questions - An enjoyable exercise which might help you figure out what's most important to you in life. By the way, just so you know, there's an audio version of the article which will automatically start to play when you go to this page.
- Violent Acres Blog: Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason - I love this article... :-) The blog itself is fantastic and well-written, too. (It's more of a personal blog rather than a blog focusing on personal development tips, so that's why I didn't link to it in the previous section).
- Overcoming Depression, by Steve Pavlina - Useful advice even if the "Law of Attraction" stuff doesn't literally work. Hooray for paying the bare minimum of attention to your problems, and thereby getting yourself into such a good mood that your life improves just because you're in a good mood. :-) Just one of zillions of fantastic articles on Steve's site.
- The Law of Attraction is Repulsive, by John Freestone - A great article which expresses many of the things that have always bothered me about the Law of Attraction, which I never got around to putting into my own words. As well as many criticisms I never thought up on my own, but which I agree with. New, 12/27/2008