Steve Pavlina Quotes & Sayings

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

You must assume 100% responsibility for your financial life. If you're going to improve your situation, you have to put the full burden of doing so squarely on your own shoulders. First and foremost, you must hold yourself responsible. — Steve Pavlina

If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief - always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don't actually believe it. You're only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn't. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results. — Steve Pavlina

Willpower is a concentration of force. You gather up all your energy and make a massive thrust forward. — Steve Pavlina

When in doubt, act boldly, as if it were impossible to fail. In essence it is. — Steve Pavlina

If you dislike the answers you're getting from life, try asking better questions. — Steve Pavlina

No one on earth has lived through the exact same experiences you have, and no one thinks the exact same thoughts you do. — Steve Pavlina

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

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside. The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right. Take such deals whenever you can get them if the odds of success are halfway decent. — Steve Pavlina

Think for yourself. Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy). Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns. When you're just starting out, people will tell you you're wrong. After you've blown past them, they'll tell you you're crazy. A few years after that, they'll (privately) ask you to mentor them. — Steve Pavlina

The more disciplined you become, the easier life gets. — Steve Pavlina

If you try to impress an alarm clock, it will simply tell you the time. — Steve Pavlina

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

Side effect of overemphasizing the importance of personal security in your life is that it can cause you to live reactively. — Steve Pavlina

Waiting for clarity is like being a sculptor staring at a piece of marble, waiting for the statue within to cast off the unneeded pieces. Do not wait for clarity to spontaneously materialize-gra b a chisel and get busy! — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

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

Separate yourself from your ideas and your work and see them as something separate from yourself, you'll feel you truly have the right to be wrong. If an idea fails, why not let it be the idea's fault instead of your own? Allow your ideas to fail without turning them into personal defeat. When you fail you discover your boundaries. You map out the edges of your capabilities. And this allows you to eventually move beyond them. Being wrong eventually leads to being right. And even where it doesn't, it's still a more interesting path than being nothing. — Steve Pavlina

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

Fuzzy thinking leads to hesitancy in acting. Clear thinking makes it easier to act boldly and consistently. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

I got screwed over in some bad business deals, but as long as I focused on those past problems, I couldn't move forward. I had to let all of that go and forgive everyone and everything first. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

Any relationships that would reject you for being true to yourself are - by definition - abusive relationships. You'll be much better off when you let them go. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

If you experience chronic difficulties in a particular area of your life, there's a strong chance that the root of the problem is a failure to accept reality as it is. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

If someone offers you a gift, and you decline to accept it, the other person still owns that gift. The same is true of insults and verbal attacks. — Steve Pavlina

Our brains are fairly powerful, but our conscious minds are still extremely limited in their ability to hold onto multiple simultaneous thoughts — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it's something you're tremendously passionate about. — Steve Pavlina

Security is worthless if you have to sacrifice growth to get it — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

It's been said that the first hour is the rudder of the day. I've found this to be very true in my own life. If I'm lazy or haphazard in my actions during the first hour after I wake up, I tend to have a fairly lazy and unfocused day. — Steve Pavlina

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

Believing that you must do something perfectly is a recipe for stress, and you'll associate that stress with the task and thus condition yourself to avoid it — Steve Pavlina

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

Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision. — Steve Pavlina

A man doesn't require the approval of others. He's willing to follow his heart wherever it leads him. When a man is following his heart-centered path, it's of little consequence if the entire world is against him. — Steve Pavlina

Replace "Have to" with "Want to." — Steve Pavlina

To work effectively you need uninterrupted blocks of time in which you can complete meaningful work ... I've found that a minimum of 90 minutes is ideal for a single block. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

You are too free and untamable to be labeled. — Steve Pavlina

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

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. — Steve Pavlina

One of the fundamental choices you face in every encounter is the choice to approach or avoid. — Steve Pavlina

Are you one of those people who notices the problems of the world and says ... somebody ought to do something about that? Why not you? If you feel a strong urge to see a problem fixed, then why not act on it? — Steve Pavlina

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such." - HENRY MILLER — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

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

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

Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

Productivity = creating value and delivering it to people. All other busywork is unproductive fluff and should be minimized. — Steve Pavlina

Do what you love, but be damned sure it's profitable. If you do work you love, but it doesn't generate income, your business will fail. If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail ... and your business along with it. If you can't do what you love and make it profitable, you've either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business. Don't settle for anything less than passion and profit. — Steve Pavlina

Courageous people are still afraid, but they don't let the fear paralyze them. — Steve Pavlina

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

Risk the stuff. It's worthless anyway. But don't make the insane choice of sacrificing your happiness for stuff. — Steve Pavlina

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." — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief. — Steve Pavlina

I realized that my bliss and my heartbreak both point in the same direction. I follow my joy and my heartbreak simultaneously because they're two sides of the same coin. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

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

For good or ill, your habits will make or break you. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina

Discipline is like a muscle. The more you build it, the more you can rely on it. — Steve Pavlina

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

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

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

Motivation starts the race, but self-discipline ultimately crosses the finish line. — Steve Pavlina

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. — Steve Pavlina