Mark Zuckerberg's Top 10 Rules for Success!

Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook out of Harvard University and is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. He went from building computer programs in middle school and dropping out of Harvard to launching Facebook from his dorm room and becoming one of the most powerful figures in tech with a net worth exceeding $240 billion. Need motivation?

Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation.

And 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: set higher goals.

The more that we work on this, it actually seems like all the things that we think are going to happen happen sooner. And being even more ambitious has been more predictive over the last few years about where things are likely going to be in the industry. So, I mean, like, we keep on Building, setting goals for our teams. Meta AI is like right about 1 billion people monthly active using it across our apps. We keep on setting these goals for what do we think is going to be the most used AI, what do we need to do? And we keep on passing them. And then others in the industry keep on passing their goals too. And they were like, ah, we should have had even higher goals.

Rule number 2 is always keep learning.

I think that there are some things that you need to be able to do yourself. I think that that's a 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 going to 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, to teach your kids in an era where so much is going to change over the time that they're even in school. Language, I think you can make similar arguments. I think there's a lot of— it's probably going to 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 can 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 3 is utilize AI.

I think we've just reached a point where the AI is more effective at a lot of things that that different businesses do. So I mean, it's like, okay, if you're starting a company, there's normally like some core idea or something that you're trying to do. And then there's like all these other things that you need to do to make a company work. And like, okay, if you want to reach customers, you've had to, you know, like basically go find ways to do marketing. And then, okay, you want to make sure your marketing works well. So you need to like find ways to measure your marketing and all this. And I do think a bunch of that stuff, we're just getting to the point where the AI can do it better than sort of the average people who are doing that, which makes it so that more companies can get started more easily. I mean, this is also a big theme for Stripe, right? It's like, okay, companies also needed to spend all this time doing all this different stuff with financial services and payments.

Now they don't have to.

So I think what that allows is just way more people in the world to focus on what their core idea is and kind of execute that and have a core talent-dense team of people who are focused on that idea. And more of the stuff that's not the core part of building your company is is going to be able to be offloaded. So, you know, in the future, you know, if you were working with a creative agency to make creative, you'll probably keep doing that. If you aren't, then, then, you know, and you're just kind of hacking something together and throwing it into Meta's ad system, well, now we're going to be able to come up with like 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best. You know, it used to be that on the targeting side, The way that our business kind of got started on the ad side was because people put all this profile information into Facebook early on, it used to be like a great place for a business to say, okay, I think my product is, I think women between 18 and 28 in this city are really gonna love this thing. And Facebook early on, it was like the best place to go reach them because, okay, we kind of knew who the people were and had all this, people had input all this demographic information. At this point, we basically encourage advertisers not to restrict what the AI can do. We're like, all right, look, if you think that women in this age range are going to be more receptive, then yeah, give us that hint as an input to the system. But unless you really have a reason why you don't want to sell to other people, don't constrain who we're going to reach to just that, because the AI is actually probably going to be able to find who is going to be interested in your product. Better than you can. And that just means that, okay, you just focus on building the best product. More stuff that's awesome is going to happen in the world.

Rule number 4 is learn through 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 this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like, 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.

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I'll see you there.

Rule number 5 is use technology to connect.

I think whenever you're talking about building digital types of connection, one of the first questions that you get is, is that going to replace the physical connection? And my answer to that, especially in the case of something like this, is that no, because people already don't have as much connection as they would like to have. It's not like this is replacing some sort of better physical connection that they would've otherwise had. It's that the average person would like to have 10 friends and they have 2, right? Or 3. And there's just more demand to socialize than what people are able to do given the current construct. And giving people the ability to be present with people who are in other places physically just seems like it will unlock more. It's not gonna make it so, and if I have glasses, it's not gonna make it that I spend less time with my wife. It's gonna make it so that I spend more time with, you know, my sister who lives across the country. And I think that that's good. I think people need that. As for the rest, I think we could probably spend, a multi-hour podcast just going into all of the different kind of socioeconomic, political dynamics that are going on. But none of the trends that I've seen does it seem like the primary thing that's going on is that because people are interacting online, they're now not interacting with their— with people physically. It's certainly— I think you I do interact with people online who I also like to interact with physically, but, and I think that that's kind of like a combination, like more combined, richer relationship that you have overall. But I think that there's a lot going on with the loss of kind of social capital and connections that really predates a lot of the modern technology.

Rule number 6 is rethink how your product works.

I do think that everyone needs to kind of rethink a lot of the different ways that their products work, And over time, I think that there are going to be a lot of opportunities for just building companies in different ways too. I know there's the version of this where like everyone at your company just gets a ton more leverage. And that's the version that I'm kind of excited about. You know, people are, I think, very fixated on this notion of, oh, AI is going to be able to like replace people's jobs. I kind of— It's the wrong mental model. Yeah. I mean, I guess if we get into some kind of really deep recession and the order of the day is like everything needs to be more efficient, I guess AI can be used to make things more efficient. But yeah, I mean, across what we do, there are all these places where there's stuff that just wasn't cost effective to do before, like provide voice customer support for everyone who uses Meta. It's like, all right. Billions of people use— that would cost so much to do. It would cost us so much. And we don't charge for our product. So our business model doesn't quite support that. But maybe now if you could have a voice AI that could answer 90% of people's questions, maybe now it actually becomes— maybe now it makes sense to go hire the people to go answer the other 10% of questions that the AI can't because you could kind of Again, you're just getting this like 10x leverage and it's just super, super powerful.

Rule number 7 is study success.

There's this culture in Silicon Valley that kind of makes startups seem glamorous and I never really believed that, right? I never had a goal of starting a startup and my goal when I realized that I had a company was to get it to be a good company as quickly as possible, right? And kind of get out of what you'd call the like risky startup phase where you are just like constantly about to die and where you could get to a point where you can actually do some interesting things and make a lot more interesting bets. And so I don't know, I never read a lot of the literature on this. And I mean, maybe if I had, then I wouldn't have made so many mistakes. But so I don't know if like if learning for me is the right way to go on this. But I mean, but it did. I think your model must have come from somewhere, though, even if it was—

even if it was unintentional. Right. Like, were you influenced by Peter Thiel or Sean?

Well, yes, I was influenced by all these people once I met them. I actually— I hadn't really heard of Peter Thiel before.

I'm talking about, like, yeah, right.

Yeah. But I mean, he was massively influential on my thinking, right? I mean, like, a lot of the, the early lessons that I took on how to think about strategy came from Peter and Sean. And I did pay a lot of attention when I was growing up to Microsoft. I thought— I mean, I grew up using Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95.

And I just thought that those were like the most unbelievable things. And—

In a sense, they are.

Yeah, they really were awesome, right? Well, I don't know if you meant that positively, but I did. And I thought building this ecosystem was really neat. And that kind of inspired me, right? In the way that they built a platform, I kind of thought, OK, well, maybe one day the tools that I'm building it can be part of a broader ecosystem as well.

Rule number 8 is express your creativity.

I mean, I think we're always gonna find new things to struggle with. And I mean, it's, you can always get better at communicating with other people and kind of expressing yourself and understanding other people. So having a tool that can help you do that better isn't gonna mean that like, oh, now we perfectly understand every, you know, it's, I mean, and I mean, I think the, Maybe one of the most functional aspects of this, you're already seeing a lot of these AI models really help people with coding, right? Like a generation ago, before I was getting started, a lot of coding was like really low-level system software. And then by the time that I got into it, there's a little bit of that, but you can make websites pretty easily, make apps pretty easily. And I think in 20 years or a lot sooner than that, you're going to basically be in a world where kids will be able to just describe the things that they want and build incredibly complex pieces of software. So it's, in that world, are kids going to be not struggling? I don't think so. I think that they're going to be just expressing their creativity and it'll be this kind of constant iterative feedback loop around like, okay, like, yeah, I, took a few minutes to describe this thing and like, yeah, this whole like amazing virtual world was created that I can now see on my glasses or whatever. But like, these things are not exactly what I want them to be. So now I need to like go back and edit them. It just, I don't know.

I think that there's always more.

Rule number 9 is innovate.

The more that there's interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I'm just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services that I actually think that we'll benefit and will be able to build better quality products by our products making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it. And like, I get that not everyone is gonna want to use everything that we build. I mean, that's obviously the case. I mean, it's like, okay, we have 3 billion people using Facebook, but like, not everyone wants to use one product. And I think making it so that they can use an alternative but can still interact with people on the network will make it so that that product also is more valuable. You can increase the quality of the product by making it so that you can give people access to all the content, even if it wasn't created on that network itself. So I don't know. I mean, it's a bet. I think it takes some confidence, but I don't know. I think it's both good to give people choice. I know there's kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don't think that people like feeling locked into a system. Yeah. So in a way, I actually think people will feel better about using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave. Right. And like, and if we make that super easy to happen and obviously there's a lot of competition and, you know, I mean, it's— we do download your data on all our products and like it's, you know, people can do that today. But like, but it's, you know, the more that that's designed in from scratch, I think it really just gives creators, for example, the sense that, okay, I have a agency. Yeah. Yeah. So in a way that actually makes people feel more confident investing in a system if they know that they have freedom over how they operate. So I don't know, I think maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into. But I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don't think that that's going to be where it goes. So I don't know, I'm pretty optimistic about this. And then if we can build threads on this, then Maybe we can over time, as the standards get more built out, it's possible that we can spread that to more of the stuff that we're doing. We're certainly working on interop with messaging. And I think that that's been an important thing. The first step was kind of getting interop to work between our different messaging systems. Right. So they can talk to each other. Yeah. And then the first decision there was, okay, well, WhatsApp, we have this very strong commitment to encryption. So if we're going to interop, then we're either going to make the others encrypted or we're going to have to decrypt WhatsApp. And it's like, all right, well, we're not going to decrypt WhatsApp, so we're going to go down the path of encrypting everything else, which we're making good progress on. But that basically has just meant completely rewriting Messenger and Instagram Direct from scratch. So you're basically going from a model where all the messages are stored in the cloud. It's like you're completely inverting the architecture where now all the messages are stored locally and just the way that they're— while the plane's in the air. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, that's been sort of this like heroic effort by just like 100 or more people over like a multi-year period. And we're basically getting to the point where it's starting to roll out now. But, you know, now that we're at the point where we can do encryption across those apps, we can also start to support more interop, which I think is gonna be super— With other services like Meta that Meta doesn't own, other messaging apps. Yeah, well, I mean, the plan was always to start with the interop between our services, but then, and then to get to that. Um, but yeah, we're starting to experiment with that too.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is be with the right people.

So I'm always very focused on people, and I think the most important decision you're probably going to make if you're in college is who you surround yourself with, because you become like the people you surround yourself with. And I, I sort of have this hiring heuristic at Meta, which is that I will only hire someone to work for me if I could see myself working for them. Not necessarily that I want them to run the company because I like my job, but like, but, but in an alternate universe, if it was their company and I was looking to go work somewhere, um, would I be happy to work for them? And I think that that's a helpful heuristic to help balance, you know, when you're building something like this, there's a lot of pressure to, you know, you want to build out your teams because there's a lot of stuff that you need to get done. And, you know, everyone always says don't compromise on quality, but there's this question of, okay, how do you know that someone is good enough? And I think my answer is I would want someone to be, to be on my team if I would work for them. But I think that's actually a pretty similar answer to like if you were going to go, if you were choosing friends or a partner or something like that. So when you're kind of in college trying to figure out what your circle is going to be, trying to figure out, you know, you're evaluating different job opportunities, Who are the people, even if they're going to be peers in what you're doing, who are the people who in an alternate universe you would want to work for them because you think you're going to learn a lot from them because they know, because they, they are kind of values aligned on the things that you care about and they're going to like, um, and they're going to push you, but also they know different things and have different experiences that, that are kind of more of what you want to become like over time. So I don't know, I think probably people are too in general objective-focused and maybe not focused enough on the connections and the people who they're basically building relationships with.

There's probably stuff you can say about some insight that you had early on and you thought to yourself, "Ahaha, nobody else knows this except us, but we have this great trick." Do you remember any of them?

Well, Peter Thiel was really focused on network effects, and he had this model that I think is right for making decisions that as the complexity of the company grows, every day you're going to be faced with 100 things that you could potentially go do, and your job is to pick the one thing that actually matters.

Because out of those 100 things, it's really only actually going to be one or two things that actually matter.

And that was pretty informative. Informative to me at the time because I had intuitively, like I had a lot of self-direction intuitively. But as soon as I started getting all these people around me who all had reasonable perspectives on things, it was very hard for me to balance that. And Peter was always very useful for that. We would focus—

He was good at saying, here's the one thing that matters. Like, focus on the one thing that matters.

Well, partially that and partially just the meta lesson of, figure out the one thing that matters and do that.

But do you remember what the one thing that mattered like?

It's everyone connecting everyone as quickly as possible because, I mean, network effects were a massively important part of this. One of the stories—

when you say connecting everyone as quickly as possible, you don't mean specifically getting more signups. You mean getting people to friend one another faster.

Yeah.

Well, how did you do that?

Well, we built a lot of tools to enable people to do what they already wanted to.

Where you can't like push uphill on this stuff, right?

It's, it's we were solving a problem that people had and we just needed to remove as much friction as possible.

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

Resilience, adaptability, a high rate of learning, creativity, certainly familiarity with the tools.

So should kids still be learning how to code? Because I've heard people say, don't need to learn how to code anymore, just math, just biology.