Steve Pavlina Quotes

Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you're afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure's lessons are essential to success.

Our beliefs act as lenses. These lenses can help us see things we can't otherwise see, but they can also block us from seeing parts of reality.

If you don't make a conscious choice ... someone else will decide for you. It may be your boss, a family member, an advertiser, a collective social influence, or someone or something else, but it won't be something of your deliberate choosing.

People in their early 20s are invariably weird.

Spiritual development requires the freedom to connect with different parts of reality in order to understand them more fully. The more you're able to explore, the more connections you can form, and the greater your spiritual growth will be. When you feel a strong desire to connect with something in your reality, listen to your intuitive guidance, and make the connection.

It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog - you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.

The only thing stopping you is fear, and the only thing that will get you past it is courage. What you do with your life isn't up to your parents, your boss, or your spouse. It's up to you and you alone.

By all means listen to other people's advice, but when in doubt go with your gut instinct.

Everyone you meet in your life - even total strangers - are already intimately connected to you. The idea that we are all separate and distinct beings is nothing but an illusion. We are all parts of a larger whole, like individual cells in a body.

You can move beyond the ego's perspective and see reality from the perspective of a higher consciousness.

If you want to achieve some really big and interesting goals, you have to learn to fall in love with hard work.

The stuff that?s most important to me in life can?t be bought ? it can only be earned.

When you live for a strong purpose, then hard work isn't an option. It's a necessity.

Security is worthless if you have to sacrifice growth to get it

When you discipline yourself to do what is hard, you gain access to a realm of results that are denied everyone else. The willingness to do what is difficult is like having a key to a special private treasure room.

If you aren't working on your goals, you aren't working. You're just wasting time.

When you go to bed whenever and allow yourself to get up whenever, you reward your brain for continued laziness and inefficiency.

Regardless of others' reactions, do your best to stay true to yourself. Make the choices that allow you to look in the mirror and feel good about the person gazing back at you.

One of the secrets to success is recognizing that motivation follows action.

Imaginary testing is unreliable, and in many cases, it's a huge waste of time and energy. In truth you just don't know what will happen until you try. You may start a business, and it could take off in ways no one could predict. Or it could be a complete failure. You could ask for a date and end up with the partner of your dreams. Or you could be rejected cold. It's great to visualize what you want, but you never really know what's going to happen until you act.

One of my core beliefs is that belief itself is a choice that can be made of our own free will.

Pour the bulk of your time into action, not deciding. The state of indecision is a major time waster. Don't spend more than 60 seconds in that state if you can avoid it. Make a firm, immediate decision, and move from uncertainty to certainty to action. Let the world tell you when you're wrong, and you'll soon build enough experience to make accurate, intelligent decisions.

If you want to experience abundance, then don't choose a path that ensures scarcity or limitation. Choose a path that has a shot of leading to prosperity. Say no to non-prosperous choices like a job with a fixed paycheck.

Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself.

Passion requires focused direction, and that direction must come from three other areas: your purpose, your talents, and your needs.

It's a serious character weakness to think you can get something of value for little or nothing, to believe that life will flood you with abundance when you won't commit yourself to delivering your best contribution in exchange. In fact, it's a safe bet that you'll subconsciously sabotage yourself from being in such a place for long. You won't allow yourself to receive what you don't feel you've earned. To receive life's bounty, you must know without a doubt that you deserve it.

I learned that accepting others and accepting myself are two sides of the same coin; you can't love and accept yourself without doing the same for others.

The exact process you use to build courage isn't important. What's important is that you consciously do it. Just as your muscles will atrophy if you don't regularly stress them, your courage will atrophy if you don't consistently challenge yourself to face down your fears. In the absence of this kind of conscious conditioning, you'll automatically become weak in both body and mind. If you aren't regularly exercising your courage, then you are strengthening your fear by default; there is no middle ground.

Tackling challenges that are too big for you is what makes you grow as a human being. Why do you think this problem keeps coming up in your life, staring you in the face? Do you think you're supposed to ignore it and hide from it and wait for someone else to solve it for you? If you notice it, you own it.

Fear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing you to the areas where you need to grow

People often overestimate what they can reasonably achieve in a year. But they vastly underestimate what they can achieve in 5 years.

Spend time cultivating your deepest desires, no matter how impractical or impossible they seem. It's perfectly OK to want the impossible. It's not OK to pretend that your desires don't matter.

Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision.

Using passion as your only fuel will no more assure you of success than being in love will ensure a successful long-term relationship.

The most intelligent thing you can possibly do with your life is to grow.

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.

Saying no isn't easy, but it's a required skill if you wish to have any degree of focus in your life. If you say yes too often, you'll likely fall into the common trap of saying yes to the good while simultaneously saying no to the best.

Hard work is painful when life is devoid of purpose. But when you live for something greater than yourself and the gratification of your own ego, then hard work becomes a labor of love.

I think the best friendships are those that can stand the test of time, where the friendship is based more on who you are than on what you do or what you have.

If something is important enough to you that you feel the urge to donate your money or time to it, I think it's best to try to express that form of giving through your career, not just as something you do on the side. If you enjoy your volunteering and charitable activities more than your career, it means your career is in serious need of an upgrade. In my opinion your career should be your best outlet for giving.

When you reach the point of becoming independent of external events, you're truly free.

If you want to express your creativity, then don't choose a path where someone else tells you what to do and how to do it. Choose a path where creativity is rewarded, not punished.

To abandon a comfortable lifestyle that isn't deeply fulfilling is to abandon nothing.

Your environment will eat your goals and plans for breakfast.

Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief.

Replace "Have to" with "Want to."

Thought and action can be perceived as two different dimensions of who you are: the mental you and the physical you

We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality.

I believe we can proactively choose to believe whatever we want instead of merely letting our beliefs coalesce as reactions to events.

I want my life to have had more value than just acquiring stuff and living comfortably. I may die rich, or I may die broke. But I won't die with my music still in me.

It's funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it's time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

"Stop asking "What should I do now?" That question only brings up what others expect of you. Free people don't have shoulds. They have choices."

I believe the ultimate goal of living and refining your values is to identify and achieve congruence with universal principles.

Planning allows you to mentally create a model of your future.

You are too free and untamable to be labeled.

Don't die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be.

Whatever happens to me during the course of my life - physically, socially, or financially - I can always choose to focus on giving. When I'm in that state, nothing else matters. I cease to exist as a separate being and merge into an expression of divine oneness.

Understand that relationships are more important than contracts. Business deals are relationships between people. The signed piece of paper is important, but it's merely the result of the relationship, not the cause. If the relationship crumbles, the contract won't save you, although it could be very lucrative for your lawyer.

It's important to note that you don't have to earn money from all of your interests. If you just dive in and pursue what you enjoy, you may be surprised to find out which interests help you generate income and which don't.

Achieving meaningful goals requires that you commit your entire ass, not just one cheek.

Your values are your current estimations of truth. They represent your answer to the question of how to live.

Realize that you earn income by providing value - not time - so find a way to provide your best value to others, and charge a fair price for it.

Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships). Formality puts up walls, and walls don't foster good business relationships. No one is loyal to a wall ... except the one in China.

Thoughts are like seeds. If you want different results in life, you have to figure out which thoughts are capable of growing those results and which aren't.

The momentum of continuous action fuels motivation, while procrastination kills motivation.

When you feel lazy and unmotivated, the simple reason is that you're feeling disconnected. You've fallen out of alignment with truth, love, and power. When you recognize that you're in this state, stop and reconnect with the real you. Remember who you are. Reconnect with what excites you. Revisit those times in your life when you were on fire - not because of external events, but because you were aligned with your truth, your love, and your power. Turn your gaze within and ask yourself: Where is the path with a heart, and what can I do to honor that path right now? Whatever answer you come up with, summon the courage to take immediate action. Growl ferociously if you think it will help, but get yourself into motion no matter what.

Money itself is too weak to motivate much discipline. This is one reason so many people are deep in debt.

Network selectively. Nothing says "business newbie" like shotgun networking. "You never know when someone might say yes" is marketing for dummies. Take the time to build a profile of your ideal customers, and target your networking activities to reach them. Speak to those who are already predisposed to want what you offer. Almost any profile is better than "anyone with a pulse."

Are you trying to live a safe life? The word safe is both an adjective and a noun. As an adjective it means "being free from danger." As a noun it's "an enclosed storage container with a lock." If you're living the adjective, you're living the noun. Don't trap yourself in a cage of false security by trying to avoid rejection. In the long run, building your courage is a smarter choice than running from imaginary dangers.

So you have two basic options: deny the unpredictability of life and create your own false sense of security, or accept the vagaries of life and learn to live with them.