Steve Pavlina Blog :: Channel 1

A powerful personal growth tool is the 30-day trial. This is a concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you're required to buy the full version. It's also a great way to develop new habits, and best of all, it's brain-dead simple.

In the book Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins, there's a hierarchy of levels of human consciousness. It's an interesting paradigm. If you read the book, it's also fairly easy to figure out where you fall on this hierarchy based on your current life situation.

In the book Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior, Dr. David Hawkins describes a hierarchy of human emotional states beginning with shame and guilt on the low end and leading to peace and enlightenment on the high end.

One factor that makes a big difference in how much control you have over your life is your time horizon. In the span of a day or a week, you have a fair amount of control over your life, but it's certainly not 100%. But in the long run, when you hit time horizons of 5, 10, or 20 years, your degree of control is closer to 100%. The short-term randomness tends to cancel out.

Clear goals and objectives are essential to the success of any business, and this is no less true of building your own career. If you don't take the time to get really clear about exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish, then you're forever doomed to spend your life achieving the goals of those who do.

Whenever you attempt to learn something new, go into it with the expectation that you're eventually going to master it, however long that will take. Expect to become an expert. Think of yourself as a top pro in training.

Success literature going back hundreds of years espouses the benefits of hard work. But why is it that some people seem to feel that "hard work" is a dirty word nowadays? I define "hard work" as work that is challenging. Both hard work and "working hard" (i.e. putting in the time required to get the job done) are required for success.

When you view your life as a series of different compartments, each with different rules, then life gets pretty complicated. Trying to achieve balance is very difficult because you constantly feel the need to task switch.

It's been said that if you want to increase your success rate, you should increase your failure rate. Success comes at least partially from your volume of attempts.

It's fair to say that if you don't know your purpose in life, you won't be spending much time working on it. So what will you end up doing with your working time instead? Three things: 1) Working on your needs, 2) Working on other people needs, 3) Working on other people's purposes.

How do you discover your real purpose in life? I'm not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you're here at all - the very reason you exist.

What if you currently live a very comfortable lifestyle and you have a lot of assets? How can you justify running off to do what truly makes you happy if it might put all your current assets at risk?

This article guides you through a step-by-step process to discover your personal values hierachy. Part II (still in progress) will explain how to use your personal value system to make conscious decisions and achieve your most important goals.

I don't think I need to convince you just how much influence other people can have over your identity. If you've ever experienced a major shift in your people environment, then you know that you change as well.

One of my favorite poems is The Guy in the Glass, which is about integrity and honesty to oneself. I first encountered it 20 years ago.