Mar 30, 2007
Good habits, and other memes
By: Alvaro Fernandez
Meme: “The term “meme” (rhyming with “theme”), coined in 1976 by the biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to a “unit of cultural information” which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes.
If you haven’t read Dawkins’ classic book The Selfish Gene…it is never too late to enjoy it!
There are some “memes” floating now around bloggers and I have been “tagged” (included) by 2 of them. So here you have:
1) On good daily habits: this is the original post, and here are Hueina’s My Simply Successful Secrets.
My “Simply Sucessful Secrets” habits that I follow close to every day, in more or less that sequence:
- Perform 10-15 minutes of breathing exercises to improve grounding, balance, and breathing capacity
- Spend 10 minutes visualizing and writing down the key objectives for the day
- Eat a nice and healthy lunch-never in front of the computer
- Read something completely unrelated to my work in the evening
- Kiss and compliment my wife before going to sleep-never go unhappy/ stressed to sleep
2) On “5 things you may not know about me”. Senia: thanks for your patience…
- I defined myself as a “Learning micro-organism” in the Stanford class that probably influenced me the most. I love learning, and learning about learning-which is what led me to learning about how the brain works
- Originally from Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country, and very proud of it, I am now very happy to be living in the global community of the San Francisco Bay Area
- When I was working very very hard in consulting company McKinsey & Company, I started to take salsa dancing lessons-probably one of my wisest decisions ever
- The other one was to marry my wife Lisa and celebrate a World Wedding Tour to share the party with friends…instead of asking everyone to come to meet us, and given how much we love to travel…we decided to take the wedding on the road, including printing some tour T-shirts…
- My role models are the social entrepreneurs, many of them friends by now, who devote their lives to solving social problems in very pragmatic and scalable ways. My wife and I have been active in networks such as Ashoka and The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, so I am then very proud that SharpBrains has just been nominated for the The Tech Museum Awards – Technology Benefiting Humanity.
I tag, for both memes:
- Bora from A Blog Around The Clock
- Brett from Trading Psychology
- Michelle from Trading Mike
- Stephanie from idealawg
- Jane from NakedMedicine
Enjoy the final hours of the weekend!
Alvaro, NICE! I’m a big fan of the salsa-dancing (it’s just so much fun!), and am so glad to hear about this cool thing you did with your wedding world tour – did you and Lisa make up that idea? It’s just great!!! Sounds super fun. Best, S.
[...] I now tag these super folks! David Seah (uppdate: David’s list of five things! 2/1) Dave Shearon (update: Dave’s list of five things! 1/31) Alvaro Fernandez (update: Alvaro’s list of five things 4/1) Alvin Soon (update: Alvin’s list here 2/4) Chris Harrison (update: Chris’ list of five things! 1/30) Anna Farmery « Links: Role Model, Brain Activity Habits » [...]
Alvaro:
Thanks for joining the fun. I enjoyed reading about your success habbits as well as about you. Your World Wedding Tour must’ve been a blast!!
Warmly,
Hueina
Hello Senia and Hueina:
Well, Lisa and I had to come up with a way to celebrate our wedding in a way to integrate our respective cultural and religious backgrounds and share the joy with as many friends and relatives as possible…so we decided to have 4 stops in our “tour” and to write our own 10 loving couple commandments…it was a fun process!
Alvaro,
Thanks for participating in the Simply Successful Secrets project!
One of the things that I love about your list of success habits is that they are basic, but effective.
Many people have this misconception that anything useful in their lives also has to be extremely difficult, which is clearly not the case.
Great stuff, thanks again for participating, and I want to also extend my congratulations on the GREAT wedding idea that you and your wife had.
That’s out of the box thinking if I’ve ever seen it.
Hello Aaron: you asked a great question, and I am glad to contribute.
am looking forward to reading your final summary write-up and learn from others a few “quick wins”!
I agree with you: many people don’t understand what we can call the “rolling snowball” effect. We can not alter our brains drastically from A to Z, but we can move from A to B, then to C, then to D…and shortly enough we can find ourselves in a continuous learning loop.
Regarding the wedding, let me share later our 10 couple commandments…that was a truly fun and creative process