If you head over to Steve Pavlina’s site, you’ll see plenty of reviews of his book, Personal Development for Smart People. I want to take a little different route here. I want to focus on what this book can do for you as a writer.

What makes this book different is that he doesn’t focus on one aspect of your life to improve. This isn’t a book about making more money, improving your career, finding better relationships, or improving your health. It’s not a book about writing, becoming a writer or becoming successful at it.

Yet the book is about all those things, and more. In short, it’s a manual for improving whatever aspect of your life you choose to work on. That may sound overly ambitious, and maybe it is. However, I think he does a good job of presenting the material and giving readers the tools needed to walk away and use what he’s put forward.

Will you get a to-do list to fix your life? No. That isn’t what this book is about. What you will get are some tools that you can use to reframe you current situation and make decisions about where you want to go and how you’ll get there.

Part I

In part one, Steve discusses what he calls the fundamental principles. You’ll use these principles later in part two, when you focus on specific aspects of your life you’d like to change.

The three primary principles are truth, love and power, and they’re covered in the first three chapters. I found these chapters a bit abstract, but I read Steve’s blog, so I’m used to his approach. He might take a while to give you the background you need, but rest assured, he’ll get to the practical application.

Truth

For those of you who think of the truth as being a big nebulous and subjective, you might be better served to think of this chapter as “fact.” One of the most important things you can do is learn to take an honest assessment of your current state and use that to predict what your future will be like. Of course, if you don’t like the prediction, changing it is what this book is all about.

• Think about your writing habits. Where can you honestly expect your writing career to be in five, ten, twenty years given what you’re doing now? Be honest.

• If you asked a colleague or family member for an honest assessment of your writing future, what would he/she say?

• What is your honest assessment of your talent, drive, commitment? Would people who are familiar with your work answer these questions the same as you would?

Love

Love isn’t, in this book, really about romantic love, although it does encompass that concept. Think of love as being connected to others, and you’ll have a good idea of what Steve is getting at.

You may ask yourself why this is important to writing. After all, writing is a solitary activity, and it would seem that truth and power would be the dominant forces in making you successful.

I’d argue that writing that leaves out the emphasis on love, on being truly connected to others, tends to be the sterile, plot-driven writing that tends to lack depth. Don’t send me hate mail if you’re a writer who focuses on plot! That isn’t what I’m getting at.

Most of us have read books or stories that leaned too heavily on plot. The characters are wooden, almost indistinguishable from one another. The author moves the story along through plot devices that are more daring with each turn, but the story still leaves you cold. Why is that?

It’s because you don’t care about the characters. You don’t care because the author didn’t care.

Power

Power includes concepts like self-discipline, focus, and effort. Obviously, writing is work, like anything else, and no matter how much you enjoy it, it will still demand a certain amount of commitment and focus in order to succeed.

Think about your current level of commitment to your writing and ask yourself if it’s enough to get you where you want to be.

Part II

Here is where we get to the “meat” of the book. Resist any temptation to skip ahead to this half; you’re not likely to be able to follow it unless you know what Steve means by his principles discussed in part one.

Here Steve talks about practical things you can do to improve specific areas of your life. He covers habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirituality. However, you’ll find techniques within these chapters that will help you evaluate where you are and work on changing your life into what you want it to be.

As a writer, I enjoyed his discussion of career and choosing one “with a heart.” I also found the chapter covering habits very useful. If you’re a writer, you know how powerful simple habits can be in getting words on the page and getting submissions out the door.

I’m not a big fan of personal development books in general. I think many just rehash old ideas and make suggestions that just about anyone with a bit of common sense could have come up with. This book has the advantage of taking a unique approach.