Steve Pavlina quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

Hard work pays off. When someone tells you otherwise, beware the sales pitch for something "fast and easy" that's about to come next. The greater your capacity for hard work, the more rewards fall within your grasp. The deeper you can dig, the more treasure you can potentially find.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

"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."

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

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?

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

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

Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief.

The more disciplined you become, the easier life gets.

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

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.

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.

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

Don't die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be. You may go broke. You may experience failure and rejection repeatedly. You may endure multiple dysfunctional relationships. But these are all milestones along the path of a life lived courageously. They are your private victories, carving a deeper space within you to be filled with an abundance of joy, happiness, and fulfillment. So go ahead and feel the fear - then summon the courage to follow your dreams anyway.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Negative feelings mean you`re going the wrong way

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

People in their early 20s are invariably weird.

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

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

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

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.

Replace "Have to" with "Want to."

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

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.

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

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.

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

'Someday' is the day after you die.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The universe cannot show you anything which you've intentionally chosen to block from your reality.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

You are too free and untamable to be labeled.

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.

You must give before you can get.

Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself.

Your environment will eat your goals and plans for breakfast.

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