What an event yes­ter­day night. My wife and I were for­tu­nate to visit the Google Cam­pus and attend the Sixth Annual North Amer­i­can Fel­low­ship Induc­tion Pro­gram of Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, a social ven­ture fund where we have been involved for a num­ber of years, and thanks to which (thanks Michele!) my wife and I met in the first place.

18 new Ashoka Fellows/ social entre­pre­neurs were elected, and after a fun cock­tail recep­tion the cer­e­mony began. Sergei Brin (Google Co-founder), Sheryl Sand­berg (who helped launch Google Foun­da­tion and google.org), Salar Kaman­gar (the mind behind AdWords) gave intro­duc­tory remarks. Salar explained how he first heard of Ashoka (through the book How to Change the World, by David Born­stein) and how he saw tremen­dous sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ashoka and Google: both Read the rest of this entry »

We would like to join other blog­gers in con­grat­u­lat­ing Muham­mad Yunus for hav­ing been awarded the Nobel Peace Price.

The gen­e­sis of micro­fi­nance, in Pro­fes­sor Yunus’ own words.

Not often can we find per­son­i­fied exam­ples of what we write about. For 3 out of the last 4 entries in this blog, I can not think of a bet­ter exam­ple than Muham­mad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank–that launched the field of micro­fi­nance.

The entries:

- The Learn­ing Cycle, includ­ing Con­crete Expe­ri­ence and Active Test­ing: in 1976, when he was a Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics, he gave a small loan to a num­ber of vil­lagers. He didn’t preach. He acted.

- Reflec­tion, that led him to an Aha! moment : “If you can make so many peo­ple so happy with such a small amount of money, why shouldn’t you do more of it”? (quoted in NY Times today). His direct expe­ri­ence, and this Reflec­tion, gave him the moti­va­tion to try and lit­er­ally change the way many poor peo­ple live world­wide. It led to the birth of microfinance.

- The joy of giv­ing: I am sure Muham­mad Yunus, and thou­sands of peo­ple involved in his work, has been amply rewarded with free dopamine and oxy­tocin. To quote today’s Finan­cial Times, “With­out col­lat­eral, the sys­tem has to rely on trust and social inter­ac­tion to secure repay­ments. It is these fun­da­men­tal aspects of human nature that can help for­ward not only devel­op­ment, but also peace”.

Plus, given that he has announced he will donate the $1.4m prize money, we can pre­dict an even higher dopamine and oxy­tocin release in his brain, cer­tainly higher than in the brain of the writer of this sur­pris­ing arti­cle.

Good news: there is a solid pipeline of future Muham­mad Yunuses, opti­mist and prag­matic social entre­pre­neurs (“New Heroes”, accord­ing to PBS):
– A great book titled How To Change The World, that pro­files the field and some of its most inspir­ing par­tic­i­pants
– The pio­neers in sup­port­ing social entre­pre­neurs world­wide: Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic
– Another great foun­da­tion: The Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship
– The Change­mak­ers com­mu­nity
– And of course, Con­stant Learn­ing at Grameen

Finally, a post on resiliency. Enjoy the weekend.

We would like to join other blog­gers in con­grat­u­lat­ing Muham­mad Yunus for hav­ing been awarded the Nobel Peace Price.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today:

6.30pm: I leave the office, down­town San Fran­cisco, and take the train.

6.44pm: just before arriv­ing in my sta­tion, I remem­ber I have an appoint­ment with my hair­dresser, which means I have to walk in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion than usual.

6.48pm: I find myself walk­ing towards my house, oppo­site direc­tion from my hair­dresser.

You may have had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. You walk towards where you parked your car. Except that the car is not there. Then you real­ize that, on that pre­cise day, you couldn’t park your car in the usual place. And now you have to walk to a dif­fer­ent cor­ner of the park­ing lot. What corner?

Now you may feel dis­ori­ented, not only about where your car may be, but about why we are talk­ing about this…

Well, this story is a good exam­ple of how our brains work. When we do any­thing a num­ber of times, the rel­e­vant neu­ronal net­works get more and more strongly con­nected. “Cells that fire together wire together”. We develop auto­matic habits, from which it is not easy to escape. We get used to just get­ting out of the metro sta­tion and walk­ing home. We know where we always park our cars.

You may also try an enlight­en­ing exper­i­ment on our habits.

Let me now make a brief detour. Over the last few weeks, I have had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions where the same con­cept has appeared: resiliency. Resiliency can be defined as “the abil­ity to recover from a fail­ure”. Resiliency is a crit­i­cal Men­tal Mus­cle to train.

I  learned the word 6–7 years ago, at an Ashoka event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, orga­nized by social entre­pre­neur Alberto Croce. Richard Barth, CEO of KIPP Foun­da­tion, used it last week when we were dis­cussing sev­eral Brain Fit­ness pri­or­i­ties for teach­ers and stu­dents. My friends at the Insti­tute of Heart­Math pro­posed using “devel­op­ing resiliency”, instead of “beat­ing Stress”, when we were brain­storm­ing options to part­ner with pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions and bring proven anx­i­ety reduc­tion pro­grams to edu­ca­tors and health care pro­fes­sion­als. Mark Katz, when we met with a num­ber of school super­in­ten­dents, empathized how impor­tant for all stu­dents to develop the exec­u­tive func­tion of resiliency, and how that would help them over­come obsta­cles such as ADD? ADHD and other aca­d­e­mic problems.

In the Neu­ro­science of Lead­er­ship post, we saw too that resiliency is a crit­i­cal atti­tude, and skill. To not spend too much focus and men­tal energy on try­ing to double-guess hid­den mean­ings, and the past. To focus, instead, on what we can do next. On what is on our scope of influ­ence. On, as we dis­cussed before, being pos­i­tive .

Let’s sum­ma­rize. First, we have seen that some behav­iors become habits and thereby mind­less habits. They become us. What we call our per­son­al­i­ties. Then, we have seen how impor­tant resiliency is.

So, what pre­vents us all from devel­op­ing the habit of resiliency and let­ting be part of our behav­ior, habits and personality?

Brain and Mind Fit­ness are impor­tant. We can improve mem­ory, atten­tion, stress man­age­ment, decision-making…Now, in a holis­tic way, Brain and Mind Fit­ness includes the exec­u­tive func­tion, or habit, or atti­tude, of resiliency. If you know of Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams that allow peo­ple to develop it, please let us know. We are work­ing on that too.

Maybe a first step is to re-read the clas­sic <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://en.wikipedia.org’]);“s_Search_for_Meaning”>Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning.

One day after 9/11, I would like to depart a bit from the sci­en­tific focus of this blog, and add some per­sonal reflec­tions on the “men­tal mus­cles” of Being Pos­i­tive and Appre­ci­a­tion, which is what we prob­a­bly need to sur­vive in times when we read of a new bomb­ing every day, still 5 years after the ter­ror­ist attack.

I remem­ber a few years ago when, over brunch, my good friend Rohit pro­posed that

Hap­pi­ness = Real­ity – Expec­ta­tions. (Play with it, and it grows. It is very powerful)

A few months later after this dis­cov­ery, at a pub­lic con­cert, while some friends were hav­ing a lively debate on this equa­tion, a nearby stranger pro­posed a nice refinement:

Hap­pi­ness = (Appre­ci­a­tion, of what we have, and can do) x ( Real­ity – Expectations)

Which is nicely phrased in the sen­tence I have read in a num­ber of places

We need Seren­ity to accept
the things that can­not be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and Wis­dom to dis­tin­guish
the one from the other.

Mahatma Gandhi encour­aged us to “Be the change you want to see in the world”.

The fact is that there is much good around us, and much more good of us can do. We don’t always see it this way, but it is a fact (if you doubt this, why don’t you do the Bas­ket­ball exper­i­ment in a pre­vi­ous post). We prob­a­bly would ben­e­fit from hav­ing eas­ier access to a CNN of Pos­i­tive News, of Kind Ges­tures, Unex­pected Gen­eros­ity, Magic Coin­ci­dences, Beau­ti­ful Growth.

Some con­stant sources of inspi­ra­tion, encour­age­ment, and Appreciation:

- Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, and their con­vic­tion that “Every­one is a changemaker”

- The Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entre­pre­neurs, that sup­ports amaz­ing and inspir­ing agents of change worldwide.

- Just read a review of socio­bi­ol­o­gist E.O. Wilson’s last book The Cre­ation: A Meet­ing of Sci­ence and Reli­gion, where he tries to bridge both worlds and focus them on com­mon ground.

No mat­ter our reli­gion, or lack thereof, we can ben­e­fit from what the book Daniel Goleman’s Destruc­tive Emo­tions: How Can We over­come Them pro­poses as “A Gym for Emo­tional Skills”. Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Anto­nio Dama­sio opened new ground in his sem­i­nal Descartes Error book on the role of emo­tions in our decision-making.

How can one train this mus­cle of Appre­ci­a­tion? well, no clin­i­cal stud­ies here, but my wife and I like to do, less often that we should, an exer­cise pro­posed by Jef­frey Brant­ley in Five Good Min­utes: 100 Morn­ing Prac­tices To Help You Stay Calm & Focused All Day Long:

First, travel back, in your mind’s eye, to a time when you felt a healthy exhaus­tion, and let you relive that moment as vividly as you can.

Then, remem­ber, re-experience, a lov­ing exchange that really touched you. Pause. See the moment. Smell it. Hear what hap­pened around you.

Next, visu­al­ize the most car­ing ges­ture you have ever received, as full of details as pos­si­ble. Who gave you that gift of car­ing. How you felt.

Now, travel to the most mag­nif­i­cent place you have seen. Enjoy the views. Pause. Lis­ten. Smile. Appreciate.

Good night