Personal development

Personal development covers activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations. Not limited to self-help, the concept involves formal and informal activities for developing others in roles such as teacher, guide, counselor, manager, life coach or mentor. When personal development takes place in the context of institutions, it refers to the methods, programs, tools, techniques, and assessment systems that support human development at the individual level in organizations.

Personal development may include the following activities:

Motivation

Motivation is a theoretical construct used to explain behavior. It represents the reasons for people's actions, desires, and needs. Motivation can also be defined as one's direction to behavior, or what causes a person to want to repeat a behavior and vice versa. A motive is what prompts the person to act in a certain way, or at least develop an inclination for specific behavior. According to Maehr and Meyer, "Motivation is a word that is part of the popular culture as few other psychological concepts are".

Types of theories and models

Motivation theories can be classified on a number of bases.

Psychological theories and models

Motivation can be conceived of as a cycle in which thoughts influence behaviors, behaviors drive performance, performance impacts thoughts, and the cycle begins again. Each stage of the cycle is composed of many dimensions including attitudes, beliefs, intentions, effort, and withdrawal which can all affect the motivation that an individual experiences.

Zero to One

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a 2014 book (release date September 16, 2014) by venture capitalist, PayPal co-founder, and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel along with Blake Masters. It is a condensed and updated version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups taught by Thiel at Stanford University in Spring 2012.

Promotion

To promote the book, Peter Thiel sent out his first tweet ever on September 8, 2014, from a Twitter account that had been dormant for years. He was also interviewed by Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch. On September 9, Thiel did a podcast with Timothy Ferriss for the latter's show. On September 11, Thiel did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

On September 13, Thiel appeared on NPR with host Wade Goodwyn to discuss the book.

Reception

Early mentions

An article in Business Insider in May 2014, four months before the official release of the book, and said that it "sounds like an interesting read."

Zero-marking in English

Zero-marking in English is the indication of a particular grammatical function by the absence of any morpheme (word, prefix, or suffix). The most common types of zero-marking in English involve zero articles, zero relative pronouns, and zero subordinating conjunctions. Examples of these are I like cats (where the absence of the definite article the signals that cats is an indefinite reference whose specific identity is not known to the listener), that's the cat I saw, in which the relative clause (that) I saw omits the implied relative pronoun that that would be the object of the clause's verb, and I wish you were here, in which the dependent clause (that) you were here omits the subordinating conjunction that.

In some varieties of English, grammatical information that other English varieties typically express with grammatical function words or bound morphemes may be omitted. For example, where most varieties of English utilize explicit plural morphemes (e.g. singular mango versus plural mangoes), West Indian creole speakers refer to plural objects without such morphology (I find one dozen mango.).

Crash Course

Crash Course (also known as Driving Academy) is a 1988 made for television teen film directed by Oz Scott.

Plot

Crash Course centers on a group of high schoolers in a driver’s education class; many for the second or third time. The recently divorced teacher, super-passive Larry Pearl, is on thin ice with the football fanatic principal, Principal Paulson, who is being pressured by the district superintendent to raise driver’s education completion rates or lose his coveted football program. With this in mind, Principal Paulson and his assistant, with a secret desire for his job, Abner Frasier, hire an outside driver’s education instructor with a very tough reputation, Edna Savage, aka E.W. Savage, who quickly takes control of the class.

The plot focuses mostly on the students and their interactions with their teachers and each other. In the beginning, Rico is the loner with just a few friends, Chadley is the bookish nerd with few friends who longs to be cool and also longs to be a part of Vanessa’s life who is the young, friendly and attractive girl who had to fake her mother’s signature on her driver’s education permission slip. Kichi is the hip-hop Asian kid who often raps what he has to say and constantly flirts with Maria, the rich foreign girl who thinks that the right-of-way on the roadways always goes to (insert awesomely fake foreign Latino accent) “my father’s limo”. Finally you have stereotypical football meathead J.J., who needs to pass his English exam to keep his eligibility and constantly asks out and gets rejected by Alice, the tomboy whose father owns “Santini & Son” Concrete Company. Alice is portrayed as being the “son” her father wanted.