Sunday, January 30, 2011

With Passion Comes Success

In five days Facebook would be seven years old. But that's not it. Facebook would also be a top social website with more than six hundred million active users and no that is not a typo.  It is currently valued over fifty billion dollars and believe it or not that is not a typo also.  Amazon on the other hand has dropped down to seventy-five billion dollars.  Facebook has achieved greatness and has nearly replaced MySpace in seven years.  All I can say is, “What the heck!” What is it that makes Facebook so successful and powerful? What is it that makes users come back almost more than two to three times a day? What is it that makes it able to still acquire new users by the thousands daily?  I can say it is not the page layout and I am sure it is not because users are not able to change or design their page.
I am not an expert on Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg or other founders of Facebook, but I can say that Mark’s dedication and strong adherence to his passion and dream are main factors in making Facebook one of the largest social networks today.  Mr. Zuckerberg created Facebook with the help of some roommates and friends in his Harvard dorm after realizing the shortly successful “facemash.”  From there on it took off jumping from campuses to campuses and now available worldwide.   Mr. Zuckerberg was offered one billion dollars for his start-up after a year of officially establishing Facebook.  How many of you would have sold your start-up if someone offered you one billion dollars after a year?  For some I bet it does not even have to be half a billion dollars.  Honestly, I probably would have sold it and retired.  But Mr. Zuckerberg had a larger vision, a more grand vision that overpowers his want of money.  Money was not something he cared much for.  He wanted to connect the world and increase information transparency and held onto his dream.
You can see that the most successful people are those who chase after their passion and dream.  They don’t let money deter them from their path or obstacles bring them down easily.  One example of this is Dr. Myron Wentz whose parents passed away from degenerative diseases when he was only seventeen years old.  Dr. Wentz set out with the passion to find cure for these degenerative diseases and developed the highest quality nutritional supplement, later to be known as USANA Health Sciences world wide.  You can find many more examples out there. 
Contradicting, money is a huge part of life.  It is almost as valuable as air because nearly everything revolves around it.  It is what pushes our economy along and creates job for students.  Unfortunately it has misled many and created greed.
Whether Facebook will continue successfully or not depends upon Mark Zuckerberg’s adherence to his passion and dream.  Once the focus shifts towards maximizing profit by cluttering ads all over the place and selling user information to outsiders, Facebook users will switch over to something else.