As part of our weekly series “What can we learn from…” I wanted to talk a little about Facebook’s Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Although his company got off to a rocky start due to some lawsuits, today it is thriving, and Zuckerberg is ranked the 21st richest man in the world with a net worth of $27.2 billion. Let’s see what we can learn from him.
Use your talents. From a young age Zuckerberg was good at working with computers. It was once said of him: “[While] some kids played computer games. Mark created them.” Zuckerberg said of his youth: “I had a bunch of friends who were artists. They’d come over, draw stuff, and I’d build a game out of it.” He pursued a career in doing what he was talented at.
Don’t stop learning. Aside from learning Mandarin Chinese for his trip to China in 2010, Zuckerberg knew that being smart doesn’t necessarily equal talent. So he accepted help from a software developer and attended graduate courses while still in school.
Get to the destination – using whatever path. Even though he had been accepted into Harvard, during his sophomore year he made the controversial decision to leave college to focus on his website. He knew where he wanted to go, and didn’t feel that Harvard was the way to get there. He said: “I remember really vividly, you know, having pizza with my friends a day or two after—I opened up the first version of Facebook at the time I thought, ‘You know, someone needs to build a service like this for the world.’ But I just never thought that we’d be the ones to help do it. And I think a lot of what it comes down to is we just cared more.”
This energetic young man (he’s only 30!) took an unconventional path to success, but we can still learn from him. Aside from giving people something they really wanted, he used his talents, learned from the best, and took whatever path he deemed appropriate to get to the top of the world.
To learn more about Mark Zuckerberg:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
- http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/