Mark Zuckerberg's Top 10 Rules for Success

Ideas don't come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.

Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and CEO of Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

And one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history.

Mark Zuckerberg, he's the youngest billionaire, right? On your index? On the index, yes. He is not only the, the youngest on your index, but also that he gives away his money at such a young age. Extremely rare.

He went from building Facebook in his college dorm room at Harvard to create a platform used by billions of people worldwide.

Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a gift for computer programming. He transformed a dorm room project into the internet's biggest global village. The site now has over 900 million users.

And building a net worth of over $220 billion.

Zuckerberg is just as visionary as Steve Jobs. He's going to prove just as influential as Bill Gates.

And here's our take on his top 10 rules of success. Need motivation?

Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation.

If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: Don't delegate.

I basically don't believe in delegation. You know, I think that there's sort of this theory that a lot of people have, which is like, all right, the job of a leader is like you hire people and you delegate things to them. My theory is there is so much going on across the company that I can't possibly get involved in all of it. So all these people are going to have like a ton of stuff that they're going to do. But fundamentally, if there is a decision that I want to be involved with, I'm going to be involved in it. I don't believe in delegating. And I think that that's generally a good way for founders to operate. I think it's like, if you're running the company and you're on the hook for everything, and there's like something that's important, at whatever level of detail in the organization, I don't get like the logic of saying like, I'm not gonna be involved in that. Now, I mean, you wanna have humility and know that like if you're diving into some decision, you may not have the most context immediately, but I generally think that you wanna be able to just have the cultural expectation that things are not gonna be so hierarchical and like you're just gonna dive into whatever you want.

Rule number 2, keep up with the trends.

I think the pace of change is always a concerning thing, right? It's— there is a lot of uncertainty about how things will go in the future. And we're all going to get really amazing new tools to do both our hobbies and our jobs. And they'll make it so we can do better work and have better lives. but at least on the professional side, it's gonna be our responsibility to keep up with that or else it's gonna be difficult for us to compete with other people who are doing a good job of kind of keeping up with the new trends.

So I get it.

I mean, I think, you know, especially in the, you know, line of work of being a creator, I mean, it's a very sort of competitive space. I don't think that like creators necessarily think about it as competitive, but it is, right? It's like, it's, you know, and, And so I get it. I think that this is gonna make it so that like the quality of work that people produce and how interesting it is and how much they can communicate and like really efficiently is just gonna kind of go through the roof. But when you're staring down a set of changes, like you know that there's some big change coming and you don't know what it is, that's always a time of anxiety. So I get it.

Rule number 3 is be creative.

I think like to me creativity is very important and like having a sense of here's like what you wanna make in the world and like having an idea of how you, I mean, it's some of the themes that we just talked about, like how do you decompose that? What are the steps to do that? What are the tools that are gonna be most helpful in doing that?

I think is part of the job of a creator or a builder is to be a kind of master of the tools that are available to them, right? If you're not, then you're not gonna kind of be at the edge of your work.

You know, it's a competitive world. So yeah, I kind of think, I don't know, I think the, All of the AI progress I think has been very fascinating because people have sort of conflated intelligence with an intent or a desire to do something.

And I think part of what we've seen so far from the AI systems is that you can actually separate those two things, right?

The AI system has no impulse or desire to create something.

It just, it's kind of, it sits there, it waits for, You know, you give it directions and then it can go off and do a bunch of work.

And so I think the human piece at the end is gonna be, well, what do we wanna do to each make the world better? And I think some of that will be around like a personal kind of creative manifestation of what you wanna build. But I do think some of it, and I think in our industry, we probably underplay this a bit, is just like caring about other people and, you know, taking care of people and spreading kindness. And like, so I think that that stuff is really important too. And I think AI will help with that as well.

Rule number 4, look for excellence.

There's one theory on kind of hiring or investing in people, which is like being able to be excellent at one thing is sort of shows that someone has the discipline to be able to become excellent at something, right? So whether you're like an Olympian athlete or, you know, good at any one area, or like, I think that that level of achievement, it sort of requires a basic level of dedication, an ability to basically learn new things and master things. And I think in general, people who can do that, you know, it's kind of like the thinking on going to school, right? It's like, okay, Maybe you learn some stuff in your courses, but really, in theory, you're supposed to learn how to think and learn new things.

Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Rule number 5: Maintain curiosity.

I mean, I just think maintaining curiosity about things is, is important. I, I do think we can overstate to what extent the next 10 years is gonna be sort of different from the last 10 or 15. I mean, a ton of stuff changed over the last 10 or 15 years too. It's not like this is the only time in history where there's some technology that's gonna make it so there's new opportunities and things change. The internet coming into maturity and everyone having smartphones has already rewired things dramatically. And I mean, maybe the next period will be a somewhat bigger change or maybe it won't. I think it'll feel different to different people, But I don't think this is like going from zero to one. It's not like, okay, everything has just kind of been normal and now it's about to change. It's like the technology evolves over time and like the opportunities that we have evolve and improve. And I think that that's like the people who do well, I think, are people who are generally curious about it and dig in and try to use it to live better lives rather than the people who, who basically, you know, try to fight it in some way.

Rule number 6, get ahead of your competition.

We really should try to play a role in shaping the next computing platform. And now we're not a company that has like built operating systems and computing platforms. So my general assumption is if we show up the same year as Apple or Google with Android or, you know, even Microsoft with Windows, you know, if they kind of built the same kind of AR glasses the same year, I kind of assume the tie goes to them because they have a much bigger kind of base of stuff built out. So my view is that we have to be better and earlier. And maybe that will mean that we need to invest a little bit, or a lot, in advance of when the market is ready for prime time. But I mean, look, we're doing it. I think our VR products, I think, are better and 10 times cheaper than Apple's. Our AR stuff, the glasses, I mean, the things that I'm wearing now, it's like going really well. We're selling many millions of units and just gonna keep on expanding into more styles, more functionality. We'll kind of add the holograms in. So yeah, no, I feel good about that.

Rule number 7, always keep learning.

I think that there's some things that you need to be able to do yourself. I think that that's a lot of the basic fear that people have around this.

I agree with that.

Is that, while we're building these amazing tools, we get away from the self-confidence and ability of being able to do like this basic stuff yourself. So it's like, all right, you have a calculator, but it's still good to be able to do kind of basic math in your head because there are a lot of things that come up throughout the day that you just want to have a general numeracy around, right? That often they're not expressed in numerical, terms, but just in terms of understanding trends or understanding arguments that people are making, you kind of need to understand the shape of how numbers come together. And so I think one of the big debates is like, should we still teach our kids to program computers? Even though you're gonna have these tools in the future that are just so much more powerful than anything that we have now to produce incredibly complicated pieces of software, I think the answer to that is probably yes, because I think teaching someone how to code is teaching them a way to think rigorously. And that even if they're not doing most of the code production, I think it's important that you kind of have the ability to think in that way. And I think it's gonna just make you generally a better thinker and better person. So yeah, maybe that's like this generation's version of calculators. It's like, so you'll wanna use the calculator, but you'll also wanna, be able to generally do without it. Other ones like language, I don't know, I mean, different people can come out, I mean, I think this is one of the interesting questions about parenting these days is like, is just kind of like what's important to teach your kids in an era where so much is gonna change over the time that they're even in school. Language, I think you can make similar arguments. I think that there's a lot of, it's like, it's probably gonna be less functionally relevant in the future, to learn multiple languages, but it sort of helps you think in different ways. I've found from the languages that I've studied that a lot of it, yeah, you learn about the structure of your own language. You also learn about the culture, right? Because so much of how things are expressed in different places is tied to the nuance and the history of kind of what, how. So I think like that's all valuable and interesting stuff to get into, but then, I don't know, at the same time, we only have so many hours in the day, so people need to prioritize what they're gonna learn. And it may be that, okay, in a world with perfect translation, which by the way, we basically just announced on the Ray-Ban Metas that now you're gonna be able to just like you go to different countries. We're starting out. Yeah, we're starting out with just a few languages, but we'll roll it out to more. And you know, you could be traveling anywhere and you have your glasses and they just translate in real time in your ear. So it's wild. Yeah, so I think people are gonna need to choose what they wanna focus on going forward.

Rule number 8, relentlessly execute.

We have a lot of competitors in pretty much everything we do, from social media to devices to advertising to like all the different areas. But I don't know, I guess one philosophy that I've always had is I actually think your biggest, the thing that determines your destiny is not a competitor, it's how you execute. And I think most, most companies probably focus too much on competitors and maybe even focus too much on ideas. And I think at the end of the day, a lot of what makes great companies great is the ability to just like relentlessly execute and efficiently execute and do that rigorously and just get better and better at it all the time. And that's one of the things that we've really focused on. And so, I don't know, maybe it's like, it's sort of like a very, I don't know, like martial arts view of the world or something that you, you know, it's like when you go into a competition, it's not, you're not fighting another person, you're fighting yourself, right? And you're just trying to be a better version of yourself and make the company better and able to better execute every day.

Rule number 9, get comfortable with discomfort.

Let's talk about the training yourself to be uncomfortable or to become more comfortable with discomfort. Does anything come to mind just in terms of managing your psychology?

For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is I wake up in the morning and you get whatever emails you have of stuff that's going on in the world. So it's world events, it's team events, whatever trends we're seeing across our products. And often in there, there's a fair amount of bad news and new things that I need to absorb. One of the things I've found that just for managing myself, is that if I try to just go straight into the day, it's like almost every morning when I wake up and read through my emails and get the news, it's almost like getting punched with a ton of new context and it's like, okay, I need to internalize this. So I found that basically doing something physical and something that's meditative to take my mind off of it for an hour, so that I can reset and go do work is really important. So that's why things like foiling or surfing have been really important to me because when you're out there in the water, it's pretty hard to focus on anything else. I mean, it's like when you're on the board, you're focused on making sure you stay on the board and don't mess something up. And especially if you're kind of towing or something like that, there's not a whole lot of downtime. I've found that for my own performance is significantly better When I have something like that, that's meditative and physical and allows me to output some energy and then I can come back in and it's almost like I'll have subconsciously settled all of the things that have sort of— all the news that have happened in the world. Now it's like, okay, let's go deal with it. Now, obviously if there's something that's really an emergency, I'm not going to go do a sport or something, I'll go deal with it. And obviously part of life is you don't always get to control your schedule and that's how that goes. But when I compare how I do on the days when I get to have some time to soak that in or to have an outlet versus just jumping right in, I find I'm often stewing in bad news or something and then I'm not as productive. So I think that's sort of my own personal way that I try to manage situations like this. But obviously a key part of this is having an awesome team and it's not primarily about me at this point. It's a big company and we have awesome people. People who are running all these different groups. So I get that what I'm saying, kind of how I've worked out the system for myself, isn't necessarily something that would work for a lot of other people.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is learn through facing challenges.

Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think part of the beauty of building things.

And, um, but you know, this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right?

It's like, I, I, I feel like you, you know, when you go to start a company, you, you know, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be, but values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors and you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges. So, yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.

Recently, you shared in a press conference that one of Facebook's focuses for the next decade is that it is more important to be understood than be liked. Will you just share what you meant by that?

Yeah, I mean, look, it's— let's be real here. I'm not, I'm not like— communicating is not my best thing. All right. You know, I came out here, I've been planning for this, I'm excited about it, and then I messed up the name of our data center within 30 seconds. So I mean, look, when, when I got started with Facebook, I was 19. And, um, and I, there were so many parts about building a company that I didn't know, right? I didn't, I didn't know anything about hiring or managing or building a company. And I certainly didn't really know that much about, you know, how to communicate about what we were doing with the world. I mean, I'm an engineer by training, right? I, I, I love coding.

I like building products.

That's, that's kind of the background. Um, and, uh, You know, my experience, you know, kind of growing up and running the company is, you know, went out, talked about what we did, say some stupid things, get called out for it and get like, kind of go into a, into a shell, right? And, and, and, uh, end up being really cautious about how we communicate. So, you know, it kind of, it worked out okay for a while for the company because we, we built products that a lot of people really like and You know, we weren't winning because we were communicating well. We were winning because the products were working well, I think, in spite of the fact that we were communicating quite poorly about what we were doing. But broadly speaking, for a long time, uh, the basic approach was, okay, let's try to not like do anything that's going to be too offensive, right? And, and we'll kind of explain what we're doing in broad strokes and talk about the mission of what we're doing, which is something that I really believe in helping to build community and bring people closer together. But I think we just shied away for a long time talking about some of the things that— some of the principles that we believe in that, that, that are increasingly controversial in the world. And I just think that we, for one, don't have that luxury anymore. For two, I think that that kind of led for a while to a sentiment towards the company that was Positive, but fairly shallow, because if people do, if you're not kind of out there standing for things that people care about, then it's not possible for people to feel that strongly about what you're doing. But so now, you know, I've just, I've tried to change our approach more recently. You know, I went out and I, in Georgetown last year, I gave this speech around our principles around free expression.

And, you know, that's just one of the areas that I really feel like is under attack right now.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. For 10 more amazing rules from Jeff Bezos, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

I learned a lot. Be on time. You have to start at the bottom. I cleaned the bathrooms. It was, uh, you learn a lot. The ketchup dispenser got stuck open one day. 5 gallons of ketchup all over the floor.