Cover via AmazonFinancial IQ Philippines Quick Hit(s):
Two thumbs up to Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook!!
Instead of indicating that you “like,” will “accept” and “friend” the Hollywood film The Social Network, I urge you to turn off your Facebook and your computer, go to the cinema and watch this surprisingly excellent, well-crafted, funny, witty and immensely entertaining movie about the enigmatic founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg.
Congratulations to actor Jesse Eisenberg who convincingly and hauntingly plays Mark Zuckerberg (both are Jewish in heritage), talented director David Fincher and scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin (who based the story on the book The Accidental Billionaires authored by Ben Mezrich). I bet a hundred pizzas they will win Oscar Awards next year!
By the way, the 26-year-old Zuckerberg is now the world’s youngest billionaire with a net worth of US$6.9 billion. He also announced a $100 million donation to an educational charity on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, just before the release of this unflattering and uncensored though not derogatory film on how he created Facebook and changed the world.
Here are some life lessons I learned from this movie:
• People yearn for true friendships. Our modern frantically-wired world of high-tech instant communications and the biggest social networking site Facebook with over half a billion members show us that all of us human beings, deep down in our hearts, need friends. We humans need to be connected to others or to somehow belong to a group or community.
Ironically, Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is depicted in this film as having only one real friend: investor, business partner and later litigant Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg is intellectually smart but socially inept. He has just been dumped by a girlfriend, so he furiously creates a social networking site called Facematch, then Facebook, partly it seems to become popular with girls, to be more accepted in the Harvard campus where his nerdiness excludes him from the social elite.
• Dream big and think long-term. This saga of computer programming whiz Mark Zuckerberg dreaming big is ideal for all of us to emulate. While his schoolmate and business partner Eduardo Saverin keeps impatiently nagging him to get advertisers and cash in on their fast-growing yet still fledging Facebook, Zuckerberg wisely resists because he is aiming bigger. Zuckerberg and his next business partner Sean Parker (played by singer Justin Timberlake) were proven right — it’s better to catch a huge marlin in the long-term instead of just 14 small trouts now!
• Ideas change the world. It is not true that there’s no more room in the world for another Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison or Bill Gates. Innovation and new ideas continuously bring out new global icons like Zuckerberg because of sheer creativity, with the phenomenon Facebook co-created by him just in 2004 in his Harvard dorm room.
• Invest wisely. Instead of us or overseas Filipino workers investing their earnings in houses, cars or karaoke systems first, invest in your kids’ education or in your own self-improvement for the best future returns. Invest also in income-generating assets. Our politicos should also lessen wasting taxpayers’ money on more waiting sheds, basketball courts or municipal halls, and instead invest wisely in more public schools or health clinics, raise the salaries of all teachers public or private and don’t cut the budget for state schools like University of the Philippines!
• Be “cool.” This writer was struck by Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook’s biggest asset was its being “cool,” thus he didn’t seek pop-up advertising. Even now, with ads, Facebook is still cool because it primarily serves the purpose of social networking. What he meant by “cool” is being perceived by others as credible. Let us maintain and enhance our credibility as individuals, as institutions, even as leaders or government officials. Indeed, be cool.
• Be kind to all, never underestimate anyone. Be kind to every person, especially those without friends in school, in the office or in your neighborhood, the loners or the problematic. Be kind not because he or she might become unexpectedly a future success like the campus nerds Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but because it is the civilized and Christian way to live.
• Was it the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu and/or the classic Godfather film which said “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer?” The film The Social Network shows how Zuckerberg, a socially unpopular Jewish nerd, was able to outsmart the WASP elite twin brothers and Harvard senior students Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, who struggled with their own Harvard Connection social network site project.
• Have passion! Throughout the film, one can see that many great achievers like Zuckerberg were not just after big bucks; nor was it just wanting to have girls to date. He had passion, believed in what he was and what he is still doing. Why would Zuckerberg stay up until the wee hours of the morning, programming code on his laptop while his colleagues were out partying? Why do Cebu Pacific Air taipan John Gokongwei, Jr. at age 84 and with billions of pesos in wealth, or SM founder Henry Sy with the biggest malls or world’s richest investor Warren Buffet still work so hard? Why do the best artists, musicians and writers spend hours painting, sculpting, composing and writing nonstop in what psychologists describe as the “flow” phenomenon wherein one loses the sense of time and space? Isn’t it all ultimately because of sheer passion?
• No matter who we are or become, don’t be an a-hole! Among the intriguing aspects of the Mark Zuckerberg persona portrayed in the film — which isn’t a completely accurate biopic but also not total fiction — is that he is never shown to smile or sincerely tell his associates or his few friends the all-important words, “Thank you.”
Zuckerberg is incredibly smart, driven, hardworking, wily and eventually successful, yet his weaknesses, as shown in this movie at least, his often being too self-centered and lacking a balanced life. His remarkable success and personal pathos should be a reminder to those among us who may have forgotten the correct priorities in life. I strongly believe that to be a better, humane and truly successful person, we need to balance career and any quest for success with love of God, family and friends — real-life friends and not just Facebook friends!
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