Steve Pavlina's Principle #1: Truth

The first principle of Steve Pavlina’s personal development framework is that of Truth. Basically, this means to embrace reality as it is, and then using that information to make changes to your life. This doesn’t assume that reality is inherently bad to begin with. When you accept reality 100% as it is, you will discover that there are certain aspects of it that you absolutely love, and there are certain aspects of it that you’d like to change. Here is where the principle of Truth does a lot of the heaving lifting to help you first accept what’s going on, and then in conjunction with the other principles help you make changes as you go ahead.

In Steve’s book, he breaks down the principle of truth even further according to the following components: perception, prediction, accuracy, acceptance, and self-awareness. I’ll describe each one according to how I understand them and will then finish off with a personal example of how this applied to the current business that I run.

Perception is looking at your reality for what it is, and not what you want it to be. This means accepting every area of your life as it stands, and not creating a fantasy model of it that makes you feel good. This also doesn’t mean, as I said at the beginning of this article, that you feel that everything is bad. No, there will indeed be parts of your life (I’ll use life and reality interchangeably going forward. I think of life as being our internal experience of reality, and reality as being the external reflection of our internal experience) that are indeed going well. Perception means that you’re able to be as close to the truth as you can. Prediction is the mind's way of making sense of reality, especially since the future is mostly unknown. We predict or expect things to turn out a certain way, whether we want to predict or not. The main benefit of prediction is to make you more intelligent when your expectations don’t match the reality that you experience. You predict that a certain event will turn out a certain way, and it does not. Now, you learn something new, and your predictive powers increase and you gain a more accurate understanding of the world.

I’ll quote directly from the book for the next one: “The closer your internal model of reality matches actual reality, the more capable you become. Greater Accuracy means greater fitness for life as a human being.” The more you expose yourself to life and its immense variety, the more your mind will be tuned to understand it, including the chaos that life sometimes seem to be full of. As you develop a more accurate model of how life works, you become better at making decisions for yourself, decisions that are aligned with your personal truths.

The penultimate component of truth is that of Acceptance. Now you’ve perceived your reality, predicted what would happen, and through the feedback that you continue to gain you keep on developing a more accurate model of reality. Acceptance means not only accepting the present, but accepting the future using your predictive capabilities. If you project your life 20 years from now and aren’t satisfied with what you see, that means that you need to change what you’re currently doing. No acceptance, no growth. Admitting the full truth is incredibly challenging since self-denial and living is falsehood is the norm. However, not admitting the full truth makes us even more powerless. Accept the truth, no matter what.

The culmination of all the above happens with gaining much stronger Self-Awareness about ourselves. “Accepting the truth” is no longer a fluffy self-help term but now has been described in a way that we can dissect it to see where we’re living intelligently, and where we might be deluding ourselves. Self-awareness means having the ability to view ourselves from a much higher vantage point, and using thinking that is the best that we can must given where are in life, to take us where we want to be.

Here a short description about how I used these principles unconsciously (as in, I didn't sit down and write down all these aspects when I first started) when starting my business of creating mastermind groups:

Perception: In early 2013 I felt like a self-help junkie. I’d read books, go for seminars, both small ones held at coffee shops and large ones held in theatres, and talk to others also immersed in similar thinking, but I didn’t feel like I was making any real progress. I wasn’t really contributing anything to the world, and felt that I wanted to but wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing it.

Prediction: If I continued absorbing information and not creating anything, I’d end up with a pretty powerless life. I’d know a lot, but it would feel comfortable. I wouldn’t be as engaged with life as I could be, and this would mean a pretty boring and selfish existence. Prediction told me that continuing the way I was going about things would be an immature way to move through life.

Accuracy: At this point I used as accurate thinking as I could muster and decided to start my first in-person mastermind group that met weekly. This accuracy worked well, because the past showed me that I was already fairly adept at leading small groups, and this would be a bit different, but not by much. It worked well enough that even 2.5 years later, I still am part of a mastermind group even though the initial group of people changed, and I even earn a small side income from it.

Acceptance: I accepted the fact that my long-term journey of continuing to create mastermind groups is indeed one of the best things that I can do, both for my personal life and as a viable business. I also accepted that this is going to be an incredible amount of hard work and that it would take years, if not decades, for me to manifest the vision of creating 4 to 5 person mastermind groups that use the system I’ve developed as a guide to accelerate their personal growth, in every major city in the world.

Self-Awareness: As I embraced this path of creating mastermind groups, I grew in self-awareness. I learned a lot more about people, the nature of reality, the way business works, the way I work, my strengths, weaknesses, biases, stupidity, habits, instincts, and overall intelligence. My understanding of life, and more importantly, doing business this way is nowhere closer to complete, or do I think it ever will be, but as I continue accepting the truth, I know that 20 years from now I will be considerably more self-aware than I am right now.

I encourage you to do the exercise for any part of your life that you want more clarity on and predict where you will end up if you continue with that path. This exercise might only take 20 minutes, but it’s an important 20 mins. if you want different areas in that part of your life.

Embrace the truth, and only then it shall set you free.

The next post in this series will be about the principle of Love, and, to remind you, these principles are based on Steve Pavlina’s work and I’m paraphrasing and sharing them with you. I don’t claim to get his message exactly across as he intended, but as long as the core message gets through, which it does, that’s what matters.