Steve Pavlina: What Happened Before the Fame?

No one builds a career overnight, and nobody skips the work on their own development and still comes out ahead. Steve Pavlina is one of the better-known personal growth bloggers writing today, but he started somewhere ordinary, same as everyone. Before you read about his earlier years, pause and take stock of where you are right now. Then compare that to the path Pavlina walked. None of it was handed to him. He put in the work, and that option is open to you too.

He grew up in Los Angeles with three younger siblings and attended a private school, Jesuit High School. That was the childhood part. What came afterward is the piece that reshaped his direction. At the end of January 1991, he was arrested in Sacramento for grand theft. By his own account, the sentence he received was lighter than it should have been because the legal system slipped up. That episode is what pushed him to start looking for something more in his life.

The jump from a theft charge to a widely read blog did not happen in one leap. Plenty happened in between. One of his first moves was founding Dexterity Software, which published a computer game. From game publishing he moved into forums, then into public speaking, and eventually into writing about self-help. On paper those steps look disconnected, but he was working through a plan he had set for himself. He knew what he wanted and kept steering toward it. At one point he cleared the games off his own computer and turned it into a tool for working on himself and sharing what he learned with others. From then on his attention did not wander.

In 1999 he served as vice president of the Association of Software Professionals, and by 2000 he had become its president. His writing was gaining an audience around this time, and the association itself remarked on the mark his words were leaving on people. In 2004 he launched a site devoted entirely to personal development and self-help at www.StevePavlina.com, which later tied in with a book he wrote. At the end of October 2006 he shut down Dexterity Software so the blog and his work on motivation could have all of his energy. Then in October 2008, Hay House published his book, Personal Development for Smart People, which expands on much of the material he had posted online.

What matters in a story like his is less the result than the route to it. He went from a quiet upbringing to a serious legal problem to the realization that he needed to deliberately work on himself. He wanted to write, and he wanted his writing to be useful to other people. That is now how he earns a living. When he hit bottom with that arrest, he recognized it, the way most people eventually do recognize their own bottom, and his thinking shifted after that. Mindset carries a lot of the weight here. Stay positive and keep moving, and your odds improve, which is roughly the arc Pavlina lived out. - Cara Havens