Reviewing Steve Pavlina's Personal Development for Smart People
This is the preface to my critical series on Personal Development for Smart People.

I signed up in August for Steve Pavlina's advance review copies of his personal effectiveness book (announced How Bloggers Can Get My Book for Free), and a couple of weeks ago, an email arrived in my inbox with the book's PDF attached. This was not what I expected: the offer was for a printed copy; furthermore, due to a printer's hiccup, the PDF is not much of an advance copy (cf. Personal Development for Smart People Book Is Here from 22nd September). These snafus are far from disastrous, but they do not inspire confidence in the professionalism of Hay House, the publisher.

So who is Steve Pavlina, and why did I offer to give my time to a publisher's marketing effort?

Steve Pavlina is a self-help blogger, who is widely admired in the for-profit weblog community for his professionalism and the effectiveness of his joint- venture advertising (cf. his DailyBlogTips interview).

I ran into his writings first in 2005, when researching David Allen's GTD phenomena, in The Essential Missing Half of Getting Things Done, an essay that identifies a failure in the GTD system to keep one's workflow in touch with the purpose that should be driving one's activities. I've been subscribed to his RSS feed on and off for the intervening three-and-a-half years; more on the "off" later.

There have been several points of interest in his writings —beyond his essentially sound comments on David Allen's GTD system— that deserve highlighting:

1. His discussion of mental focus —eg. in How to Set Goals You Will Actually Achieve— might count as an alternative "missing half" (or one of the two missing thirds) from the GTD system. His thoughts on this seem to me to be in congruence with John Kotter's deeply influential ideas on leading change and urgency; ideas normally thought of in application to organisational, rather than personal, development and change;
2. His documentation of his personal experiments on polyphasic sleep and raw food veganism have been interesting; I would be interested to read the efforts of a decent journalist to cover such experiences;
3. His how-tos on habit change: I've linked to his post on achieving goals, also interesting are 30 days to success, and Triple your personal productivity.
4. And last —with real hesitation— his ideas about life purpose. His How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes is certainly an exercise worth trying, but don't be disappointed if it, or its successor method, doesn't work for you. Pavlina subscribes to an eccentric view that we have a life purpose, one that is true for us for our whole lives, and that we can easily find if we really want to. This is because he believes in a brand of spiritualist reincarnation, where our immortal souls choose to incarnate and wear our mortal bodies like clothes, so that they can achieve a particular purpose. Finding your life purpose means finding the purpose that your immortal soul had when it incarnated you. Ho hum.

So to my major reservation about Pavlina: his spiritualism, which by itself I could tune out as harmless eccentricity, comes hand-in-hand with a polite, open but lively hostility to science. I ran into this first in his Are Humans Carnivores or Herbivores?, where he argues from inconclusive typological evidence that humans are naturally vegetarian. Several commenters posted arguments showing holes in this argument; I pointed to evidence that chimpanzees, our typologically closest simian neighbours, fare better on a diet with a substantial meat component. He engaged commenters, but tended to meet commenters indirectly, and once suggested that people posting evidence look inside themselves. I first unsubscribed shortly after that.

I've since decided that the positives in terms of useful ideas about productivity much outweigh the negatives of wrestling with problematic metaphysics and an imbalanced approach to evidence. My reason for offering the review is that I had hoped to beat the crowd to reading the book, and valued the offer of having my review linked to. I expect to find Pavlina's streamlined approach to GTD that is both simpler than David Allen's and better connected to questions of purpose and focus. I also expect to find interesting thought experiments. But I also expect to find that Pavlina's seductive but bizarre cosmology and his slightly Humpty-Dumptyish approach to terminology will have the power to mislead the unwary. I intend to advertise what is good in the book and cast light on what is problematic.

Review to follow...