Last week, we discussed how travel is a powerful catalyst for growth. This week, we’re going to discuss growth in a more general (and thoroughly geometric) sense.

Ever since I wrote my review of Steve Pavlina’s wonderfully unconventional self-development book Personal Development for Smart People, I’ve wanted to create a Truth-Love-Power Pyramid worthy of the ideas that it expresses. And today, I’m really pleased to be able to present you with the picture that was more or less in my head.

If you’re not familiar with the Truth-Love-Power Pyramid, it’s a visual representation of 3 irreducible principles that Steve Pavlina, the most well-known person growth writer on the web, has identified as being the keys to growth. There are also secondary principles like Oneness. The short version of all this is, the more in alignment you are with Truth, Love, and Power in your daily experience, the more intelligent you are. If you’re curious to learn more, I highly recommend you checkout my review of Steve’s book, which I found to be the most unique and useful book I’ve ever read on personal growth, as well as the basis for the principles visually represented in this article.

An Alright Start

The pyramid to the right is the pyramid Steve has used on his blog in the past. Not a bad start, right? It clearly shows how the principles of Truth, Love, and Power combine in different ways, such as a combination of alignment with Truth and Love opens you up to greater alignment with the concept of Oneness, for instance. And it clearly shows that the combination/culmination of all 3 principles is Intelligence.

So while this simple graphic is clearly functional, it’s not much else. It doesn’t communicate the ideas with as much depth as the ideas deserve. (For instance, it’s not leveraging color or depth to communicate the ideas.) In the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to do this when I originally wrote my review of the book, but I had other projects on my plate at the time. Because of this, I published my review of Personal Development for Smart People without any graphics included.

Today, that changes.

Networking Works

Then, while reading some other reviews of the book, I came across this graphic over at Life Coaches Blog:

Now this was a HUGE improvement! By using color to represent the principles, Alvin draws an elegant parallel between how color frequencies combine and how the principles themselves combine in a very similar way. And although he missed out on a great opportunity to emphasize Intelligence as a natural combination of all these colors (i.e., a beacon of white light), his elegant parallel with color really inspired me.

Fast forward almost two years to a couple months ago, and I stumbled upon this colorful graphic once again. And, after setting aside some time, I decided to begin experimenting with this idea, this metaphor of colors combining just as the principles of Truth, Love, and Power do. I realized I didn’t agree with Alvin’s choice of color. Love should definitely be red, right? At least in the Western World, it makes more cultural sense for Love to be colored red. (That being said, I fully realize that many of you are not from Western countries, and I’m very grateful for you!)

For slightly more complex reasons, I decided that blue is an appropriate color for Truth. (And as I write this article, I’ve noticed that “trueness” is listed as a common connotation of blue in its wikipedia page). So that leaves green for Power, which is excellent for the logical inferences of which I’m sure I don’t have to explain.

The Perfect Parallel for Intelligence

So! With the colors set, the secondary colors came automatically. After creating and tweaking the appropriate radial rainbow gradient in Photoshop, I started adding in the labels of Truth, Love, Power, Intelligence, etc. And I realized that white is the only logical color for Intelligence.

Think about it.

When you combine of all three primary colors of light (those being red, green, and blue) the wavelengths overlap each other and produce white light. You can see the reverse of this effect when white light enters a prism. Even beyond the obvious logical parallel to white light, there are also cultural parallels such as knowledge being the light of the world, and so on.

And so, through much experimentation and testing, I’m very pleased to present to you two new desktop wallpapers today. One with the labels, and one with the TLP Pyramid without any words to distract from its spectral beauty.

I’ve exported these as PNG files because the gradients needed more color depth than a JPEG file could provide. They should work fine, but if you have any problems with them, please let me know in the comments.

Get Them!

Widescreen Wallpapers (up to 2560×1600) →

All content released under a Creative Commons license. These wallpapers will look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600. With so much free content in the Gallery, why not tell a friend?