10 articles
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 1
Steve Pavlina's framework starts with an arrest at 19. Reading notes on Truth, Love, and Power — the three pillars beneath all genuine growth.
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 2
Pavlina derives Oneness, Authority, Courage, and Intelligence from three primitives. The framework is elegant — but does the math actually hold?
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 3
Pavlina's seven-principle theory collides with habits, career, and money — and the friction is instructive.
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Full Book Synthesis
What Steve Pavlina's seven-principle framework gets right, where it strains, and why it still matters for people who think too much.
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 4
Pavlina's Truth-Love-Power model encounters health, relationships, and spirituality — where it holds up, where it strains, and what to do with the uncertainty.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (2nd Ed.) — Full Book Synthesis
A synthesis of Van K. Tharp's complete argument: why trading success decomposes into psychology, position sizing, and system development — and how each pillar supports the others.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part Four
The culmination of Tharp's framework: what profitable traders share, why Expectunity adds a third dimension to expectancy, and why position sizing — not entry signals — is the real holy grail.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part Three
A coin-flip entry beats most retail traders. Tharp's Part Three explains why: setups, entries, stops, and exits are not equal — exits are where profits are actually made, and most traders have their attention allocation exactly backwards.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part Two
Van Tharp turns the question around: instead of predicting markets, build systems with measurable statistical edges. Notes on system philosophy, macro context, and why expectancy — not win rate — is the only number that matters.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part One
Van K. Tharp opens with a confrontational claim: most traders fail not for lack of a good system, but because they've never examined themselves. Notes on trading psychology, cognitive biases, and the R-multiple.