Pavlina’s book review: Personal Development for Smart People
October 24th, 2008 by joseSummary: I didn’t like the book, and won’t go into detail here; instead I marvel at how many people read, believe and act on things that are completely unsubstantiated by any evidence. But that only shows my naivety: it seems that most of the world outside science -and some inside- works that way.
Who is Steve?
Steve Pavlina is a top-100 blogger and a personal development guru. He has done several impressive things like majoring in Math and CS in three semesters, trying polyphasic sleep for 6 months, and testing several extremely demanding changes on his habits like eating raw food only.
In my view, the field of personal development feels scam-ridden. It preys on people who may not have the strongest will. So the title "Personal development for smart people" feels tonge-in-cheek (Oxymoron?). I’m sure many readers, with an empirical bias, may be bothered by all the new-agey chat out there that passes for advice (with no solid evidence backing it up). Now, is Steve different? Is this book better? The answers are no, and ‘maybe, I don’t know what else is out there’.
Problems with his method: Who in the academia should be doing Steve’s job?
One thing that bothers me is that Steve’s book uses no references whatsoever. He claims to have read most self-help books, but does not acknowledge any specific ideas from them. If all the ideas in the book are new and his, then I’m very impressed -I wouldn’t know-, but that seems unlikely. Again, I’m sure self-help books are all like that; making reference to other people’s ideas in a way you can track them down, as sensible as it sounds, remains a signature of the academia.
In the same way, Steve rarely uses links on his blog, unless he is advocating a product or a person.
Which should be a red flag. Still, the guy is tremendously likable because you can see that his intention is to help people, and that he is honest about that.
Someone in the academia should be doing the work that Steve does, but more systematically.
Who is this group? Social psychology? I have no idea. My first reaction is that I’d feel ashamed of being part of that group. Loads of taxpayer money, hordes of grad students, and entire institutions protecting them… and they got their ass kicked by a guy with a blog. Maybe it’s not the academia’s fault.
Another people that should be ashamed is religious organizations, but I won’t sidetrack the discussion in that direction.
Take any of Steve’s topics. For example: does polyphasic sleep produce an overall increase in productivity? If this turns out to be the case, it would make all the sense in the world for policy makers to advise entire nations to encourage people to be polyphasic sleepers. That would remove the social awkwardness of being a polyphasic sleeper (the reason Steve quoted for him to stop!).
I have not checked the literature on polyphasic sleep. I’m sure there’s work on this. But I’m also sure nobody has made the same impact as Steve converting people to polyphasic sleep.
Also, nutritionists should take note on how a single person can switch the food habits of a large group of people by blogging.
This may sound terribly negative, as if we academics were playing some zero sum game with bloggers and other influentials (in fact, Steve advices against this mentality, and encourages thinking in terms of abundance). But isn’t it sad when academics spend entire lives working pretty much every hour they are awake, and nobody cares? For an academic, chances of changing society at a scale Steve does are slim. Very slim.
I may sound like an ‘academic absolutist’, who believes that nothing out of the academia has any value. Far from it; if you have followed this blog, you know we are critical of the academia and are disgusted by several common practices in it.
But wouldn’t it be good if more non-academics actually cited where their ideas come from? Note: this doesn’t imply all good ideas come from academics, and I’m trying to fish citations for them. If anything it’d make the reader’s life easier if he decided to master the topic he is reading. With more people writing content for others (that never gets revised or filtered properly, thanks to the wonders of self-publishing and the Internet), I’d love to see more use of citation. It doesn’t have to be compliant with any of the standards (APA, Chicago, etc): just tell me where you got your idea from so I can investigate more if I want to.
The basic question that keep popping in my mind and the book fails to address: "How do you know what you know?"
Take any claim. For example : "Many people set goals and then assume the path to reach them will require suffering and sacrifice. This is a recipe for failure." Why? If we know something about expertise is that it is acquired through deliberate practice and that is not a pleasant thing to do. Playing scales on a piano, training a repetitive move that is key for your sport, memorizing chess openings etc are all key for success on those activity. And they are ’suffering and sacrifice’.
If I can find a counter argument in a few seconds, the claim is not backed by any kind of evidence, and there’s no reference I can look for to satisfy my curiosity, my bullshit detector buzzes. Sorry.
Not that citation is the panacea, either. Most people I know agree that 90% of the published papers they read are horrible. Peer review (the traditional variety) is crushing innovation and make science look like a political game. But still… why are most bestselling books missing the most basic form of referencing where their ideas come from?
And one could count the millions of readers that Steve has as evidence that his stuff is good. But can it be that there are millions of people whose bullshit detectors are not in the same category as ours?
Should we aim to educate people so they look for better indicators of authority? And what are those indicators of authority? This is the question we’ll address in a future post.
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October 24th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I’m an academic and I found Pavlina’s book to be the best personal development book I’ve read in a long time. The book’s content is based on values such as truth, love, courage, etc. I would disagree that this kind of content is empirically testable. If you operationalize and reduce these values to something measurable, you lose their essence.
Pavlina specifically says he is nobody’s guru. His position is modest and realistic, in my opinion. He tries things out for himself for 30 days and encourages other people to do the same. Pavlina has never claimed that his personal experiments are generalizable. In fact, what he’s doing is actually systematic single-case experimentation. I find his 30-day tests to be extremely interesting, based on the kinds of objective measures he chooses.
Pavlina’s ideas are his own. He says in his book that they have come from constantly reading personal development books, constantly testing out ideas in his own life, and reflecting back on his own intense, personal development journey. I think he’s honest about his claims. He’s not claiming to have universal truths for everyone. So I respectfully take exception to your review.
October 25th, 2008 at 6:54 am
EDIT: minor formatting problems fixed.
I agree that the level of detail and measurement if his 30-day trials is impressive. And I’m glad more and more bloggers are mimicking him and publishing their results.
I should have added somewhere in the review that I respect what Steve is doing, read his blog, and use him as an example of how different things are in the publishing business after the Internet. I have implemented some of the things he writes about, and they were pretty effective. I actually tried raw food for 6 months in 2006 before he started blogging about it, so I feel very aligned with what he does.
What I still think is that is his experiments are not generaliable, maybe they should. Imagine that many bloggers decided to do a 30-day trial on some habit. Then, they should get together and plan what to measure beforehand. Pavlina is the perfect example that one can be very systematic. He is also very far from the average, and this makes his studies less useful. Single-case experimentation is criticised on that exact same basis.
In fact, people in Pavlina’s forums do post threads where they report their progress with some 30-day trials. That is great, with some footwork someone interested could collect stats on how often changes stick on a more representative sample of people.
October 26th, 2008 at 1:22 am
I have sent your blog to all of our friends that are attending college. Explaining you are important to read!
Devin Willis
October 30th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
It’s interesting to read a review from someone that is not a Steve Pavlina super fan. As a fellow blogger, it is annoying that he never links out or discusses topics outside of himself.
However, your review strikes me as being more about your own issues with popular writing, rather than Steve’s book. Non-academic writers have a few motivations for not constantly referencing sources. The truth is that few if any ideas are original, so if a writer was forced to cite every source the text would be cumbersome and dull, just like academic papers. They would also look like an amateur quoting the words of others, when it is in their best interest to appear authoritative.
Popular writing is as much about entertainment as information. It is a one writer to many readers relationship, rather than an interlinked community of academic writers. I think most people are happy to avoid references because the uninterupted idea is more potent and people like having gurus to believe in.
November 1st, 2008 at 3:31 pm
John, that’s a great comment.
I also find academic papers “cumbersome and dull” but I think references are the least of their problems. Writing style is just horrible in most papers. No wonder they are read by so few people.
Still, imagine that browsers/editors etc had a magic button that would show or hide references. Do you think readability would improve? maybe, but not much.
I still think popular writing could be as snappy and interesting as it already is while still citing sources. If you link to your sources, you don’t break the reading flow, compated to when you use a citation format.
There’s yet another issue with citation online: it transfers pagerank, and most people treasure it. Pavlina knows that a link from his post is worth a lot, and thus uses them sparsely. Bottom-of-the-barrel blogs have even less reasons to be generous with their linking, so they don’t.
It may well be that the way pagerank is designed, it’s better not not cite sources!
November 8th, 2008 at 1:38 am
I’ve written a part of my review of Pavlina’s book, where I cite your review here, saying:
I share in some part [your] misgivings, but I think it is problematic to reject an exercise-based program that in part is meant to work by changing one’s subjective orientation on the grounds that it is not evidence based. Perhaps the trickiest issue is how to get a handle on assessing the effectiveness of the techniques, which I hope to make some inroads into in [a planned sequel to this review].
Review at http://www.advogato.org/person/chalst/diary/210.html
November 11th, 2008 at 4:26 am
I love your blog!
January 28th, 2009 at 3:47 am
Although Pavlina’s methods and books sound like there would be little to gain from them, I don’t think we can toss out all books that don’t have references. When I’m reading for pleasure and I’ve chosen a good book, I sometimes don’t want to deal with the references.
Also, there are a lot of good self help books and methods out there, and it sounds like you want to throw the whole thing out. Maybe 80% are nonuseful and 13% are pretty good, and the remaining 7% are insightful or very insightful. Take “The Structure of Delight” for instance from Nelson Zink. It’s a book of stories written to stimulate the subconscious mind and allow you to grow as a person and it’s all just a story of metaphors.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I find Part I most use full then II. Get on to Part I, it explains the seven core principles, one chapter per principle. This part of the book is intended to give you a new “big picture” model for understanding what it means to grow as a conscious human being. And on other hand, Part II is all about the practical application. After you learn how the principles work, you’ll receive an abundance of instruction on how to apply each of the seven principles to improve your results in six major areas of your life: habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirituality.
I recommend recommend
I recommend recommend recommend
and I highly recommend.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:13 am
I see ….
People figuring out their own beliefs around truth, love and power is exactly the point I was trying to make – not so much being dependent on what Steve believes, but rather because this is the case, just wondering how he then is able to describe these as essential principles people will follow to achieve personal growth. I think if I’m wearing my NLP hat I’m always interested in modelling how people do x, y or z and the more subjective something is, I guess the more difficult that becomes! Even it’s a valuable book to think for opening up another point of view, however of course if you’re uncertain perhaps you can look through it in the bookstores first to observe if it’s incredible you’d forfeit for.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Nice, very nice for any personal development.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:17 am
I think this domain of practical psychology (personal development, self help, self improvement, etc.) is by its nature somewhere between social science and mysticism. It depends on the author of a book or a blog, in this area, if he have science as model then his writing will more precise, clear and argumentative, but if incline towards mystical views of the life and world in general then his writings will be more metaphorical and interpretative.
Cheers.
March 31st, 2009 at 8:59 am
Jose, thanks for this. I’ve been reading reviews from various personal development related blogs on Steve Pavlina’s book and yours have given a pretty unique dimension to it
you’re brutally honest! It’s refreshing to hear from a different side of the camp 
Cheers,
Ellesse
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Although academics might be known for accuracy and scientific validity, academia evolves slowly. The leading-edge of new ideas will be driven by creative free thinkers – the personality type that academia despises because they do not fit in their cookie-cutter form.
When these people find an idea that works, they are the first, and they profit it from it. Academics, with their lack of creativity and free will, will always be regurgitating old information.