Steve Pavlina
stevepavlina.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Steve Pavlina writes personal development articles on productivity, sleep experiments, habits, and quitting conventional jobs.
What HN saysHN commenters cite him for his polyphasic sleep experiment and as a source of self-improvement advice, including his formula Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power.
186HN people shared it
107linked it in comments
111stories submitted
931story points
3 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Polyphasic Sleep: One Man's 6-Month Experiment (2005)27 people · 69 points · first shared 2008 · 61 comments on HN
- 2Sleep hacks: How to Become an Early Riser14 people · 85 points · first shared 2008 · 43 comments on HN
- 3How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off14 people · 6 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN
- 4Do It Now8 people · 81 points · first shared 2007 · 39 comments on HN
- 5Homepage8 people · first shared 2008
- 6Reasons You Should Never Get a Job7 people · 24 points · first shared 2007 · 4 comments on HN
- 730 Days to Success6 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 8The Five Pillars of Self-Discipline4 people · 3 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 9Polyphasic sleep one year later4 people · first shared 2009
- 10Jobs vs Passive Income3 people · 53 points · first shared 2012 · 33 comments on HN
- 11How to Be a Man3 people · 26 points · first shared 2008 · 20 comments on HN
- 12How to Get From a 7 to a 103 people · 3 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 13Tips for College Students - Maximizing Efficiency3 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 14Becoming Addiction-Free (2017)2 people · 53 points · first shared 2020 · 54 comments on HN
- 15Leaving Facebook2 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
innertracks · 2016-08-24
Been down in the deep depression pit of darkness myself. Your career isn't worth losing your life.
There's lots of good advice in these comments. Don't make any final decisions in your current state of mind. Seriously. Seek help out of the darkness. Finding a therapist who is a good fit may take some doing.
For some great perspectives:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/
http://theancientwisdomproject.com/
hungh3 · 2010-09-09
I like the formula suggested by Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/): Intelligence = Truth + Love + Power.
edw519 · 2008-07-02
Any coincidence that OP has exactly 168 karma (as of this post)?
I clicked on this when I read "How to..."
Nice stream of consciousness essay, but I'm still waiting for the "how to".
http://www.stevepavlina.com/ has lots of good answers to OP's original "how to" question.
I also love this quote:
“Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 on a sustained basis, but it’s hard – you have to get down to eating once a day, showering every other day, and things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours a week.” - Len Bosack, Cisco co-founder
swombat · 2008-05-05
That's just one method. There are numerous successful blogs that post much more rarely, much weightier posts. E.g.:
http://www.stevepavlina.com
http://www.randsinrepose.com
To name but two.
4000 words might be a bit hard to digest for a blog post, but there's a happy medium in 1000-2000 words which you don't need to publish every day (or even several times a week, as Rands has shown), so long as it's worth reading.
Daniel
chch · 2023-12-27
I was actually just talking about this yesterday!
That schedule I'd read about was the Überman schedule, where you sleep 20-30 minutes six times a day. Definitely a much more extreme form than most polyphasic sleep schedules. :)
I read a series of blog posts about it, probably around the same time as you did, and found them again [1] last night. I didn't actually read through it again, but if anyone's interested in reading more about someone's firsthand experience with it, could be a good classic read.
[1] https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
Torwald · 2021-12-31
Two ressources that I found most helpful:
https://stevepavlina.com/?s=relationships
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4553092-real-time-relationships
koheripbal · 2020-05-18
This reminds me of Steve Pavlina who successfully slept 2-3 hrs per day for 5.5 months and reported no ill effects.
source: https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
We definitely need more people to try variations on this. If you're in confinement, this is actually a great time to try.
andai · 2019-04-13
I was going to suggest Dr. Peterson, but Ctrl+F revealed a veritable graveyard of downvoted comments about him already. That's too bad.
So I'll go with Steve Pavlina's [0] work instead.
Steve Pavlina's blog is a mix of solid personal development advice mixed with a journal of his self experimentation.
His most interesting work is on belief systems, and on deliberately installing new belief systems to improve your life.
An interesting note is that he has released most of his work into the public domain. I'm working on audio versions of his articles.
[0]: https://stevepavlina.com/
dceddia · 2019-01-08
This other one was much more useful. I tried this a few years ago and it seemed to work, but it was also really easy to fall back into old habits. Still though, might be worth a try.
> This is going to sound really stupid, but it works. Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off. That’s right — practice. But don’t do it in the morning. Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.
https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-whe… (actual strategy starts about half way down)
Dewie3 · 2015-05-14
Steve Pavlina did an experiment with polyphasic sleep when he was 34. It worked great for him. But he quit because that sleep schedule is unsociable. He is a personal development guy, though, so he isn't that keen on chanting the old "everything is hard or impossible after 40" which people on HN seem so keen on. "You did what? Oh, but you're probably young so it doesn't count. I could do anything too when I was your age."
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
xutopia · 2013-12-03
Steve Pavlina stopped because he was bored and it was not giving him more time with the people he loved (which was the point of it in the first place). Source: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
jschuur · 2013-04-15
Also worth a read, this piece by Steve Pavlina on Overcoming News Addiction, all the way from 2006:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/overcoming-news-addiction/
tagawa · 2012-05-31
The first I heard of lucid dreaming was this introduction to it in Steve Pavlina's podcast. Highly recommended for anyone with a passing interest:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-podcast-010-l…
unreal37 · 2012-05-17
He once posted that he has calculated every article he writes earns him $2400 in revenue[1]. From that, he can calculate that if he wants to increase his annual income by $5,000, he just needs to write 21 more blog posts.
So from that perspective, this article is just another $20 per month in his pocket. That's the point.
[1] http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/how-much-is-a-blog-post-worth…
Loic · 2012-04-06
If you are interested in polyphasic sleep, the best long run experiment I know is from Steve Pavlina. 90 days of polyphasic sleep:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
fractalcat · 2011-09-03
The NYT only found out about this now? O.o
Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/) has some good stuff on training willpower (willpower is like D-Day, a huge violent bloody assault which was used to establish fortifications on the ground so that you didn't need to launch a huge violent bloody assault every time you wanted to get things done). Use willpower to build habits that will stay with you even when you have the mental energy of a marketroid.
lhnz · 2011-06-01
I wrote them and can only speak for myself since I'm a developer not a researcher. Though, I do spend a lot of time trying to learn new things, and in an unstructured settings this is not that easy to do effectively. The points I make I have either read elsewhere [1] [2] [3] or common sense and experience have lead me to believe them -- main idea is just to stay occupied and engaged by difficult tasks: I think being overly structured or 'pushing through' isn't necessarily a good idea if it stops the former. That's just my opinion though. I love to hear what others do themselves. :)
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2562632
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1754281
[3] http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/02/goals-into-habits/
nickpp · 2011-05-25
This is Gold, Jerry, GOLD.
And the best advice on creating these rituals, or HABITS is Seifeld's "Don't break the chain", coupled with Pavlina's 30-day trials.
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/
michaeldhopkins · 2011-03-15
1. Read this article and follow the advice. If it works for college in three semesters, it will work for high school in eight semesters http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/10-tips-for-college-students/
2. Solve the bank account problem by buying prepaid debit cards. If you really need 30 dollars for VPS and a domain name (and I agree with others that free services are the way to go here), you can get that quickly by walking around asking to weed gardens or mow lawns.
3. You need to get connected, so go to meetups, try to get informational interviews with local software companies, etc.
imp · 2011-01-28
The morning works out best for me. I consider myself a "night person," but that can easily be changed. Have you read this: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/ ?
Also, the fitness subreddit is a great place to talk about this stuff too: http://www.reddit.com/r/fitness
sireat · 2011-01-14
I remember someone recommending Steve to me a few years ago, and I found most of his early writing very inspirational and grounded in reality.
However, at some point something changed in his writing. I started seeing some "glitches in the matrix" Steve was projecting and soon the esoteric articles overtook the normal, logical ones and I could bear to read no more.
Notice, that the main reason he is releasing copyrights is because he feels, we are all the same (that is you are Steve, I am Steve, we are all Steve...no joke) and he has created content by channelling some cosmic energy..
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/08/moving-beyond-copyright/
On one hand it could be it is a highly advanced form of pantheism, on the other hand it just sounds crazy to me.
forgottenpaswrd · 2010-09-27
My advice is to face the unknown, but very little by little, you can be whatever you want. Our (small) decisions change us, read "the brain that changes itself", I have seen "introverts" become social beast, but not overnight, over the years.
The first thing is that you need to know what do you want to be in a very specific way, write it down, study it.Maybe you want to feel great among people, identify the current blocks or obstacles.
The most important thing is not trying to change overnight, you have already an "introvert" training of years:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/
You need to be able to get over your comfort zone regularly, my best advice is find a mentor, a person that is very social, talk to him.
joshkaufman · 2010-09-21
Confirmed - the only thing he sells directly is a weekend workshop (http://www.stevepavlina.com/conscious-growth-workshop/), which I've personally been to and recommend.
ezl · 2010-08-13
I used to really like it. There's a lot of good, but in the last 2 years, increasing content that I'm not so much a fan of. For the most part the stuff in his "Best of" column on the blog is worth reading.
One of my favorites was applying the 30-day free trial to life habits: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success/
Also found his article on timeboxing useful.
More recently, posts like http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/how-to-be-a-man/ don't really ring as helpful to me:
2. Put your relationships second.
A man who claims his #1 commitment in life is his relationship partner (or his family) is either too dishonest or too weak to be trusted. His loyalties are misplaced. A man who values individuals above his own integrity is a wretch, not a free thinker.
Just not my flavor.
stoney · 2010-07-09
Steve Pavlina has a couple of interesting blog posts about this kind of thing, possibly worth a read if you haven't seen them already:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/09/how-to-go-from-introvert-to-e…
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/09/a-question-for-introverts/
[EDIT] The second link is more something for you to think about than useful information
alastair · 2010-03-29
on a similar note, a great article on why a fixed income is a 'sucker bet' - http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/09/a-fixed-income-is-a-sucker-be…
jodrellblank · 2009-12-24
Anyone want to read through these replies and place some bets on how many goals will have markedly progressed by this time next year?
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/08/how-to-set-goals-you-will-act…
"work at becoming a better Dad" - Unspecific. Should being a better dad have the same negative connotations as work?
"Release one app every 15 days and spend 1hr a day..." - Specific, determined. I'd bet on this.
"Stop slacking" - Vague, phrased in the negative, no chance.
"Launch my startup no matter what" - Also vague, low chance.
"I plan to end 2010 with 10x as many customers as I start it with." - Great. I bet he will progress this.
"Go full-time", "Eat healthier and become more active", no and no, bet against these.
"Start eating a proper breakfast" - What, when will you prepare it, how will you stick to it?
pfedor · 2009-09-06
nopassrecover · 2009-07-27
Good read and some other interesting links on the site. He might go well to read Steve Pavlina's "Willpower" piece (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline-willpower/) which describes how willpower is a short-term boost and should be used to structure the right environment for sustained work.
mixmax · 2009-07-09
There's an amazingly good article on the subject here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/