Today I’m going to shout the praises of a personal development blog that has made a huge impact on my life over the last few years. Steve Pavlina’s blog is subtitled “Personal Development for Smart People” (As opposed to PD for Dumb people, I suppose!) About 3 years ago when I was doing research for my book, I would google certain subjects and inevitably, at the top of that search was Steve Pavlina’s Blog. From The Law of Attraction to Personal Development to Achieving a goal in 30 days…..there he was! (Obviously the guy is brilliant at Search Engine Optimizers as well.) At first I was completely baffled by this and slightly annoyed. I didn’t want to read someone’s “blog” to get their personal opinions about topics that I was researching. Little did I realize (in the beginning) that Steve Pavlina, was far from the “personal blog” movement that was just hitting critical mass. His blog wasn’t just some short, quickly written quip on these topics….NO, Steve has paid the price, experimenting with the topic prior to writing a well thought-out and researched “blog post”.

I was amazed at the depth of his writing and the new ideas he had on even “old” topics. After reading several blog posts that I just couldn’t get out of my mind (that ultimately compelled me to action), I decided to make reading Steve Pavlina’s blog post a part of my daily Power Hour for personal growth.

Let me give you three examples of ways that reading Steve’s blog has either changed my life or at the very least changed my routine!

1) As a result of reading “How to become an Early Riser”, I now get up daily at 5:15. This is a habit that I’ve developed over the last few years and it seems to be permanent. And speaking of habits, his article on “How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits” is amazing!

2) It was when I read his articles on journaling that I decided to give it a shot. I was excited that there were options out there on journaling programs that would make writing so much easier and also be able to do a search with keywords.

3) His blog post on a 30-day trial really resonated with me and I have used it to try cutting out sugar, go vegetarian (just 30 days), exercising daily etc. That blog post alone shifted my ability to stick to something for 30 days without the emotional weight of having to do my new goal “FOREVER”!

Other favorite posts:

How to Discover Your Life Purpose in about 20 minutes
Self-Discipline
The Law of Attraction
How to Get up Right Away when your Alarm Goes Off
33 Rules to Boost your productivity
How Intentions Manifest

So apparently I’m not the only one that likes what Steve Pavlina has to say. He reports that he averages nearly 2,000,000 hits per month! I guess that makes him a bit of a celebrity in the blogging world. And for good reason. The guy has some interesting twists and ways of looking at life in general and personal development. I also think one of the main reasons that many of his posts resonate with me is because he’s very concrete and definitive in his approach. It’s not just fluff & philosophy…there’s always some sort of “tangible” involved.

I will be honest and say that I certain don’t read everything Steve writes, nor do I agree with a lot of it. His focus on Polyamory this year was a disappointment and so I’ve spent some time in the archives in 2009 looking at some of his old stuff that is incredibly valuable. Sometimes I read every single word, other times I know right from the start that this particular blog post isn’t for me. But over all, he’s created a lot of value for me.