96. Steve Pavlina – Personal Development for Smart People

Steve Pavlina is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and the author of Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth. After an arrest on charges of grand theft auto in 1991, Steve made a conscious decision to turn his life around. He founded Dexterity Software, a computer game development company that focused on nonviolent puzzle games. He has served as Vice President and later President, of the Association of Software Professionals. Seeing himself as an explorer and perpetual student, Steve closed his software company and started a personal development blog and website to create more meaningful ripples in the world. Steve has blogged over 2 million words of content and released the copyright encouraging people to take his work and merge it with their own. As a result he is co-author of at least 200 books.

Steve joins me today to talk about how he gets his ideas for his blog posts. We talk about his many personal experiments and passions including polyphasic sleep, vegetarianism, veganism, even 30 consecutive days at Disneyland, and a 40-day water fast. We also talk about a conscious growth club he runs and a time when he realized he could work fewer hours and get better results. A free thinker testing the conventional paths, he says the smarter we are, the faster we grow.

“I decided what I really wanted to do was create a bigger growth-oriented community. And the goal is we all come together and we encourage the heck out of each other. We all help each other grow. We work together as a team. We actually get to know each other and we care about each other. We cooperate.” – Steve Pavlina

This week on The School for Good Living Podcast:

• Twelve years in Catholic school where all the answers were given to you
• A seminar with speaker Wayne Dyer changes Steve’s life
• A dream for his twenties ran its course but it wasn’t meaningful enough
• 2 million words on Steve’s blog and it’s all in the public domain
• Writing for specific people
• A long history of being connected with customers and readers of his blog
• Steve’s process of asking the universe for writing inspiration, where it feels like a meditation
• The accidental vegetarian (then vegan) – a 30-day experiment that just kept going
• 30-day trial: Spending 30 consecutive days at Disneyland...voluntarily. What would it do to a person?
• Steve created a group called Conscious Growth Club in 2017 and has now over 150 members
• Find out how to connect to people – your tribe – of like-minded people aligned and interested in personal growth
• What Steve finds many people struggle with is consistency and what that means
• Finding that purpose you want to invest in for 20 years or more
• 40-day trial: Water fasting
• The toughest part of fasting is longer for women than men
• Steve records every day of his fasting experience on his YouTube channel along with a personal growth lesson
• The risks in fasting for long periods of time – it’s not what you might imagine
• Experiments that are not worth doing
• The benefits of group challenges
• What there may be not-to-like about the personal growth field
• Steven’s travel tips and why
• The exercise that Americans don’t get enough of
• What are you willing to say ‘Yes’ to?
• Can you be wealthy without money? Holding wealth in the form of social goodwill
• Steve’s favorite TV show and what it’s taught him
• Social goals vs. Individual goals
• The benefits of not holding grudges
• The downfalls to focusing on individual success vs. investing in social bonds
• Blocks to our more heart-centered paths
• How being broke is an invitation to thinking about life differently

Resources Mentioned:

• Personal Growth and Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina
• Steve’s Blog
• Dr. Wayne Dyer
• Conscious Growth Club
• Seven Habits of Highly Effectiv...