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.

The official release date is October 15, 2008, so we still have about three months to go before it’s publicly available. I was told the book will go to the printer on July 15. The initial print run is 30,000 copies.

I’ve been fairly quiet about the book up to this point, but I’m happy to share some details about it now.

Personal Development for Smart People will be published by Hay House. Hay House is the #1 self-help book publisher in the world. Other authors they’ve published include Dr. Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and hundreds more. Founder Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life has sold over 35 million copies and continues to sell about a million copies a year. Wow!

The best part is that Hay House came to me, so I didn’t have to go through the slush pile submission process. They originally found me because I reviewed their 2006 I Can Do It! seminar in my blog. From there they checked out some of my articles and liked what they saw. Cool, eh?

The book will come out in hardcover with a retail price of $24.95, but you can get it for a good discount online. Amazon.com currently has the lowest price. If you pre-order the book from them, they guarantee you’ll get the lowest price they offer between now and the book’s release. Last I checked they were selling it for about $16.

About a year after the hardcover release, the paperback version will be released. Apparently that’s fairly common in book publishing. It’s possible there may be an audio version if the book sells well, but so far there’s been no commitment to that. If Hay House sees demand for an audio version, I’ll be happy to record one.

This week the book’s Amazon sales rank has been bobbling around in the 3,000 to 10,000 range. It’s been popping on and off the top 100 lists for the motivational and personal transformation categories. It’s no Harry Potter, but I imagine that’s pretty good for a book that’s still three months from release.

Book vs. Blog

Personal Development for Smart People definitely isn’t a rehashing of previous blog posts or articles. The ideas in the book are new and original. Only a small portion of the content is based on existing material from this website.

This is a very unique book. Even if you’ve read 1000 or more personal development books like I have, I dare say you’ve never read anything quite like this.

You’ll find this to be an incredibly well-structured book. I spent a disgusting amount of time on the book’s high-level organization to make it as clear and easy to follow as I could.

I put a lot of effort into achieving a good left-brain / right-brain balance for the content. Even though I’m left-handed (and supposedly right-brained), I tend to be very left-brained and analytical in my writing, so I made a special effort to include plenty of right-brained material such as personal stories and application exercises to illustrate the book’s key points. Even so, this is a very content-rich book. I shied away from including anything that seemed lightweight or fluffy. I wanted to ensure that every page would feature hard-hitting ideas.

Since I worked with a publisher, the book was professionally edited. I’ve never worked with an editor before this project, and I was very impressed with how much the editing process improved the text. The editing work went way beyond checking for typos and tweaking sentence structure. I received a ton of feedback that I used to improve the ideas, stories, and examples as well.

I received a copy of the proofs last week, and I love the design and layout Hay House created for the interior of the book. It has an almost mathematical look to it — you won’t find any flowers or butterfly patterns on the inside. 🙂

How This Book Came to Be

I originally started writing Personal Development for Smart People in the Spring of 2005, more than three years ago. My plan was to write a very grounded, practical book of personal development advice. I’d been blogging for less than a year at that point, but I had plenty of ideas to fill a book. I completed an outline, did a ton of research, and wrote three chapters (about 30,000 words). Then realized I had a problem.

I felt I just wasn’t going deep enough. The book had many unique ideas, and the writing was solid, but I was disappointed with how it was turning out. It didn’t strike me as truly inspired. I said to myself, “This isn’t me. This isn’t the book I’m supposed to write. I can do better than this.” But at the time, I didn’t know how to write a better book.

I began to sense there were deeper truths I needed to discover before I could write the book I felt I was meant to write. So I put the project on hold for a couple years. During that time I received unsolicited offers from three different book publishers, but I turned them all down. The timing just wasn’t right.

I’d written many articles about personal growth, but I still didn’t have a clear definition of what it means to grow as a conscious human being. What the heck does it mean to grow anyway? Basically it means you make your life better in some way. But how do we define better? I realized that if I was going to write a book about personal growth, I needed a clear answer to these questions. It was clear that my original outline for the book had to be scrapped.

We have all these experts giving us different rules for how to manage our health, our relationships, our finances, our spiritual development, etc. But why should we compartmentalize our lives like this? Why should growth be so complicated? I wanted to find a smarter, simpler approach — a set of universal principles that we can trust no matter what problems or circumstances we face in life. Like many others in the field, I’d been writing about the branches of personal development, but what was really needed was a book about the roots.

The Core Principles of Personal Growth

Well… it took about 2-1/2 years, but I eventually discovered the core universal principles I was seeking. The process wasn’t remotely easy, but the end result is a book I feel incredibly good about. I honestly expect this book will permanently change the way you think about personal growth. Instead of a monstrous sea of complexity, this book simplifies all growth efforts to a fairly simple set of core principles.

Those principles can be summarized by this diagram:

There are seven principles total: truth, love, power, oneness, authority, courage, and intelligence. All of these are universal principles, so they can be applied to any area of your life — health, relationships, spiritual development, finances, daily habits, etc.

These principles are so universal that you can pick up any decent self-help book, and you’ll be able to recognize some combination of these principles in the writing. These principles are the roots.

Truth, love, and power are the primary principles. The other principles are secondary because they can be derived from the first three. The diagram shows how this works:

• Oneness = Truth + Love
• Authority = Truth + Power
• Courage = Love + Power
• Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power

What arises from this model is a new definition of human intelligence: Intelligence is one’s degree of alignment with truth, love, and power.

You can’t be intelligent if you turn your back on truth and succumb to falsehood and denial. Similarly, it isn’t intelligent to withdraw and isolate yourself from everyone and everything because that would rob you of all your best learning and growth experiences. And lastly, it isn’t intelligent to weaken and disempower yourself. You can’t live as a truly intelligent human being unless you’re willing to embrace truth, love, and power.

Intelligence is our highest expression of personal growth. The purest aim of all growth efforts is to live as intelligently as we can. We aren’t talking about IQ here. We’re talking about aligning ourselves with the true nature of reality instead of railing against it. This requires that we continually strive to become more truthful, more loving, and more powerful — both as individuals and collectively. Anything that turns us away from truth, love, and power also makes us less intelligent.

I realize these principles must sound very abstract, but in practice they’re extremely practical and grounded once you learn how they work.

Any solid personal development book will give you advice for bringing your life into better alignment with truth, love, and/or power. Unfortunately the vast majority of books do this in a very partial, fragmented way. For example, suppose you read a book about wealth strategies. Such books will usually try to teach you how to make more money by increasing your financial authority. You’ll be taught some financial rules (truth), and you’ll be encouraged to take specific actions (power). But it’s rare that you’ll encounter money-oriented books that successfully incorporate the principles of love and oneness. What you often get is a cold, largely heartless approach to making money centered on greed and pushing yourself to succeed. If you’re a fairly conscious person, such strategies will only make you nauseous, and you’ll fail to achieve the level of financial abundance such books promise. It’s time to set aside these partial solutions. It’s time for us to transition to a holistic approach to personal growth that satisfies our heads, hearts, and spirits. No more compromises.

Table of Contents

Here’s the Table of Contents for the book:

Introduction

Part I: Fundamental Principles

Chapter 1: Truth

Chapter 2: Love

Chapter 3: Power

Chapter 4: Oneness

Chapter 5: Authority

Chapter 6: Courage

Chapter 7: Intelligence

Part II: Practical Application

Chapter 8: Habits

Chapter 9: Career

Chapter 10: Money

Chapter 11: Health

Chapter 12: Relationships

Chapter 13: Spirituality

Afterword

About the Author

Resources

As you can see, the book is organized into two parts, which you can think of as theory and application.

Part I 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. This is a holistic model, not a fragmented approach. Although the high-level concepts may seem a little abstract at first, there are plenty of stories, real-world examples, and exercises to teach you how these principles work on a practical level. I think you’ll find this material fairly easy to understand.

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. By the time you’ve finished the book, you should have such a clear understanding of the principles that you’ll be able to apply them to any problem or situation you face in life.

The Universal Principles of Conscious Growth

The seven principles function as a universal growth compass. You can use them to diagnose any problem or challenge you face, and they’ll always point you in the direction of positive growth and change. Because the principles are universal, it doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a health problem, financial problem, relationship problem, spiritual problem, or just general laziness or confusion about what to do with your life. These principles will help you gain a level of clarity you’ve probably never experienced before.

The great thing about universal principles is that once you understand how they work, you can apply them to solve an endless variety of specific, real-world problems. Consider that after we figured out the fundamental laws of mathematics and physics, we became empowered to solve a wide variety of practical problems. If we didn’t discover those principles first, it would have been impossible for us to create rich structures such as the Internet.

While physical laws empower us within the physical universe, the laws of conscious growth empower us within the conscious universe. These laws are so universal that if your consciousness survives your physical death, you could continue to use these principles to further your conscious growth in the afterlife. The principles are independent of physicality, even though they can be applied with great effect in the physical universe. I like to think of them as the underlying geometry of consciousness itself.

If you’re dealing with a major problem in your life right now, I guarantee that your specific problem can be redefined as a problem of alignment with one or more of the three primary principles. Either you’re having a problem with truth, allowing too much falsehood and denial to creep into your life. Or you’re having a problem with love, failing to reach out and connect with the people, ideas, and activities that are most compatible with you. Or you’re having a problem with power, wallowing in weakness and/or cowardice instead of feeling strong and taking consistent action. In many cases you’ll have issues with all three areas.

Benefits of a Principle-Centered Approach

I know this book will have an impact on you because these ideas have had such a huge impact on me.

For the past several months, I’ve been doing my best to bring my life into greater alignment with truth, love, and power. The results have been amazing. I’ve experienced major breakthroughs in every area of my life. For example, my transition to a 100% raw vegan diet earlier this year was largely a result of discovering these principles. After multiple failed attempts at going raw, I finally gained the perspective I needed to make the leap. That diet has been working wonderfully for me, and today I’m enjoying an almost ridiculous abundance of physical, mental, and emotional energy. I had similar breakthroughs in overcoming some blocks in my relationship with Erin, gaining clarity about my future career path, increasing my spiritual centeredness, improving my speaking skills, and feeling more deeply committed to my life purpose. I even beat my course record at disc golf yesterday. 🙂

Whenever I’m facing a problem or challenge now, I immediately turn to these principles. They allow me to generalize the specific problem I’m having, reinterpreting it as a problem of alignment with truth, love, and/or power. Once I redefine the problem in these simple terms, I can apply the known solutions to solve the problem in a general way. Then I can use that general solution to devise a specific solution to the real-world problem. The process is similar to how you might define a physical world problem as a math problem. Once you solve the math problem on paper, you essentially have a solution to the real-world equivalent. Since we’re dealing with problems of consciousness instead of physical objects, the solutions aren’t as crisp and precise as mathematical formulas, but I think they’re as close as we can reasonably get. Perhaps the most important benefit is that we gain a clear sense of where the solution lies, so we don’t have to waste so much time and energy making futile growth attempts that can’t possibly work.

Principle-Centered Balance

Most likely you’ll find that your current alignment with these principles is unbalanced. My strongest areas are truth and power. I usually have to work harder to stay aligned with love. Erin’s strongest areas are truth and love. She finds it much more difficult to stay aligned with power. One of the great benefits of our 14-year relationship is that Erin and I do a great job of balancing each other. She helps me become a more loving, compassionate person, while I encourage her to pursue her dreams and goals with more energy and less fear.

If you’re in a relationship right now, I think you’ll really enjoy Chapter 12 of the book, which explains how truth, love, and power dynamics play out in our relationships. That chapter alone could save you years of frustration by helping you avoid incompatible relationships. You’ll discover what you should look for in a truly compatible partner who can help you grow.

As you continue to increase your alignment with truth, love, and power, you’ll find that your life keeps getting better and better. You’ll solve problems more easily, enjoy a flow of abundance, and have the strength and energy to tackle meaningful goals. But when you fall out of alignment with any of these principles, you’ll find your situation stagnating or declining; however, the bright side is that you can diagnose where you went wrong and clearly see how to get back on track.

Very interestingly, aligning ourselves with truth, love, and power also points us in the direction of service to others. The principle of oneness (truth + love) tells us that we’re all inherently connected. We can’t isolate ourselves from other people or from the problems of the world. When we step out of our cocoons and grasp the truth that we’re all one, we can achieve an incredible synergy between helping ourselves and serving others at the same time.

OK, I’ve blabbed enough about the book for now. Obviously I’m very passionate and excited about these ideas. It pains me to have to wait three more months to see people reading it, but the benefit of working with a strong publisher is that they’ll help spread these ideas well beyond the Internet, reaching people that otherwise may not have found this website.

If this book sounds like it would be helpful to you, please take a moment to pre-order Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth. The book will be shipped to you as soon as it’s available.