Steve Pavlina: What Is He All About?

Steve Pavlina doesn't seem to hold much back. If a thought crosses his mind, odds are it has ended up in a blog post somewhere. Most people who follow personal development have run into his name at some point, whether through his writing online or his book, Personal Development for Smart People. What stands out is how much of it he puts out for free. No paywall, no catch. The reason comes back to the thing that drives him, which is the growth of himself and, by extension, anyone paying attention. His own plan for self-improvement carried him a long way, and the pitch is that yours could do the same.

Here's the odd part. Plenty of people recognize his success without really grasping what sits underneath it. Alongside the personal development material, Pavlina has staked out positions that fall squarely into pseudoscience. He opposes water fluoridation. He treats large pharmaceutical companies as bad actors. He pushes back on the idea that statistics should guide decisions, arguing that each person is a case of their own, so a single health condition won't play out the same way in two different people and can't be met with one standard treatment. Stretch that far enough and you arrive at his stance that the scientific method is close to useless for most of the choices a person faces in life.

Pseudoscience tends to attract argument, and it has done so for a long time. That won't change. People are free to believe what they want, and Pavlina has used his blog to lay out exactly where he stands on these questions. Those posts have reached millions of readers around the world, and a fair number of them come away satisfied.

The pseudoscience is only one slice of his thinking. He describes himself as a fairly uncomplicated person. His plan points him where he wants to go, and his own drive carries him there. Underneath that, though, sit a set of beliefs, same as with anyone.

One habit he's known for: he doesn't follow the news. No newspapers, no news sites, nothing. The logic he shares, and that others share with him, is that reaching your full potential depends on letting yourself be happy. News rarely reports on good things. By his count something like 98 percent of it covers disasters, violence, and crime, and steeping yourself in that pulls your mind into a dark place. Ask him about the tradeoff and he'll admit it means he's out of the loop on politics and current events. He just doesn't think any of that is required for him to succeed or to become who he's capable of being, and he points to his own results as the proof.

The other piece is how he holds onto himself. Like everyone, Pavlina had to work out what he actually wanted, then take his early plan and build on it until the life he was after started showing up. Whatever he's been doing clearly paid off. A big part of it was refusing to drift from who he is. Once he settled on what he wanted, he ran with it and didn't glance back. No fear of failing, no second-guessing the point of what he was doing. The goal was personal growth, and the goal, in his telling, is the whole story of the man.

By Cara Havens