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The book arrived in the mail Saturday. I finished it today, Sunday, around 12 AM. So it’s a pretty good read. Actually it reads more elegantly than most books I’ve recently read. I kept looking down to the page count and think to myself: fifty pages already? I went through the whole thing in about 24 hours, including sleep, two meals, watching one Google Tech Talk (Everything is Miscellaneous) and so forth.

The writing is typical for Steve. There, I keep calling him Steve although I’ve never even been to the same continent. That’s how close and intimate his advice is. As he writes in the book, you can feel like you’ve known someone for a long time when you really just know his creative self-expression.

And this book is Steve’s pinnacle so far. The writing is simple, elegant and even self-evident. Most of the time after I read a chapter I thought: yes, of course. It’s so obvious. Phrasing something so complex as the whole concept of being in all it’s facets in terms simple enough to make them seem obvious is a very difficult task, and Steve does it effortlessly. There you go, I just made a sentence with 33 words, one of them “effortlessly”. Sentences like that are not in the book. The writing is just amazing.

But what about the content? I admit I’m biased, because most self-help books just suck content-wise. They introduce their key concept at length in one chapter. Then they fill the remaining 300 pages with fluff, repeating over and over how great the idea is and how person X and person Y love it and it changed their lives for the better.

Not here. Steve knows he doesn’t need to convince us with his ideas. The ideas themselves convince us.

The book is separated in two parts. The first part explains the abstracts and fundamentals of, well, being. The three core principals are Truth, Love and Power. Truth and Love form Oneness, Truth and Power form Authority, Love and Power form Courage, all three together form Intelligence.

The second part of the book divides life in Habits, Career, Money (notice the difference between Career and Money), Health, Relationships and Spirituality. If you’re a atheist-gone-cynic like me, don’t worry. Spirituality has nothing to do with crappy New Age agenda, nor does Steve dictate what to believe or which religion to join. It’s more of a step back: what is a religion, what does it for me, and how can I optimize my “use” of faith?

While all of these ideas and concepts have been covered in some book or the other, Personal Development for Smart People is the first book I’ve read that puts them all together. Steve builds a framework of being, gives you easy methods to analyze your current situation and build a path towards your goals. It’s almost a meta-book of self-help, since you find every useful concept ever mentioned in the genre condensed into one congruent and self-evident big picture. After finishing the book I feel like I’ve been given read access to the source code of my own class.

If you’re fed up with “pump yourself up” selp-help and are looking for a simple, universal and objective look at yourself and other people, get this book.

It’s also only 17 Euros, and Amazon charges no shipping for books.

If you liked this review and live in Germany, please buy the book using my Amazon.de partner link: Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People

Also note: the book is already available, no matter what the Amazon page says. I ordered it right there on Amazon.de and it’s already been shipped.