How To Be A Straight A Student - Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina is a human like the rest of us and only has a limited number of good ideas.  One of those is the simple, obvious but often overlooked one that life is easier if you are disciplined and organised about how you go about it.  This is something we all know at some level.  Paying off your credit card on time is cheaper than forgetting it.  Doing a shopping list before you go to the shop minimises the time you spend in it and maximises the usefulness of what you end up leaving with.  Steve is particularly creative at coming up with great examples of this general principle and producing highly readable blog posts from them.   A good one is his description of how he became a straight A student.

Repetition Can Be A Good Thing

I have just read a blog post by Steve Pavlina.  In it he goes over some stuff that he has done before adding no new information, just putting it into a new set of words.  In a sense this post is superfluous because you can get the same information in his previous work.  We tend to put a premium on originality and creativity so seeing someone trotting out the same old is not supposedly a good thing at all.

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

The most popular and the most controversial post Steve Pavlina ever wrote was his 10 arguments why you should never get a job.  This is a truly brilliant piece of writing and repays rereading a few times.  It was, he claims, a throw away piece never intended to be taken seriously.  I can well believe it.  It has a playful and devil may care feel about it that suggests it was written in a jokey fashion.   But humour and truth have a very close relationship, so even if it was intended to be a joke and can be read as one there is a hint of something in there that strikes a chord with a lot of people.

Steve Pavlina - Domination and Submission workshop

Okay, it is obviously an April Fool's day joke.  And quite a funny one.  For people reading this long after the event and assuming it will get taken down relatively quickly Steve had a very convincing looking post where he advertised a workshop on domination and submission to teach people how to enjoy that particular form of sexual expression.  It was complete with venue, prices and the usual puff a personal development course advert would have.

Or at least I think it is.....

I think that the clever thing is that there is just enough doubt in your mind and it is played just straight enough for you to wonder whether it might, just might, actually be true.  I'll stick my neck out and say I am 95% sure it is a joke.  But 5% doubt is enough to make it really funny.  Well done Steve.  Nice work.

On the other hand, if it is true....

Steve Pavlina - Switching Dimensions

I haven't set this blog up to knock Steve Pavlina, far from it.  I intend to tease out the useful stuff.  And I think there is a lot of useful stuff in there.  But I have to say that his latest blog post on Switching Dimensions really is the most impenetrable load of gobbledegook.   I think I have got it now, but it really took some effort and I don't think that effort was rewarded at all.

Decline and Fall of the Steve Pavlina Empire

The Roman Empire took several centuries to fall, and I don't think stevepavlina.com is going out of business any day now. But all things have a natural life span and I have a feeling that the best is passed rather than to come.  The basic model Steve has used is to give an interesting an unusual spin to some fairly obvious ideas all of which can be found elsewhere if you look for them.  I am not knocking this, far from it. I find it an entertaining place to spend time and often quite refreshing and thought provoking.  But it does have an Achilles Heal.

Steve Loves the Bombs

My reaction to http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/08/love-the-bombs/

I have been reading Steve's blog for over six years now and I've been interested in watching it develop.  Although high production values have never been Steve's thing, even from the start you could sort of see what he was trying to do from the way it was set up.  The original blog was very austere but it took you to the meat very quickly.  You had no trouble finding the content.  In fact there wasn't much more than content and context sensitive adverts.

It worked pretty well for what Steve was obviously trying to do at the time, i.e., catch your attention with something valuable and give you the chance to generate him a bit of income.  The content was distinctive and interesting, but most of it was along the very popular 'tips and tricks' format.  Later he set out to build a community and we got a forum integrated into the blog with lots of cross links.  This was quite fun and the community he built was, and is, an interesting one.  I am sure none of the contributors would object to being described as non-mainstream.

But having created this community I think Steve is now stepping back from it.  There is still a link to the forum on his blog, but the individual blog posts don't link to the discussion on the forum any more.  The contact form has gone.  Steve contributes very sparingly in his own forum nowadays.

I think he is off in a new direction.  I guess we'll all find out soon enough and speculation isn't particularly productive.  But it is fun, so here I go.  The latest blog post is eccentric even by Steve's highly individual standards.  We should accept inequality and conflict because of the growth opportunities they represent?  Okay Steve gets real time gambling tips from dead people and proposes that the whole universe is a figment of his imagination, so it isn't necessarily the most crazy thing he has written.  But it does seem to be crazy in slightly different direction.  For a start it shows a bit of awareness of the world outside.  This is quite unusual in his writing.  He is normally very, how can I put it, Pavlinacentric in his world view.  Whatever else he has talked about, which includes his diet, his sex life and the nature of reality one thing that has never come up is his politics.

Until reading Love the Bombs I had never really thought about Steve's politics.  It didn't really come up as an issue.  But if I had I would probably have assumed that a West Coast vegan working in IT with a bias towards New Agery and animal rights would probably be a liberal of some kind or other.  But then he comes out with a straight out justification for income inequality and an aggressive foreign policy.  A totally off the wall justification for sure.  But nonetheless, if you quickly translate what this kind of thinking into an actual programme that a government might draw up it does put you in a surprising place on the political spectrum.  It implies very much the kind of libertarian approach that you might associate with say the Cato Institute.  Not mainstream Republican maybe, but definitely on their side of the fence.  It would definitely not find favour with anyone who identifies with the left in any shape or form.

So is Steve going into politics?  On the face of it, it is just about the most unlikely thing for him to do. But he does continually surprise us.  If he was running for office I have a feeling that the last people he would want behind him would be the free thinking types who contribute to his forum.   Is this why he is distancing himself from them?