MARK ZUCKERBERG’S TOWN HALL MEETING IN LAGOS, NIGERIA
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was in Nigeria recently to meet with tech entrepreneurs as well as to promote his Facebook brand in Sub-Sahara Africa.
During his visit, he shared his views on starting up a new business without having all the necessary knowledge or expertise required and how he was able to start and cope when he didn’t know much about the coding industry.
I will be sharing with The Total Entrepreneurs Mark’s answer to one of the questions posed on him in regards to the success of Facebook.
Question: Name one thing that was a game changer for you that you did differently while building Facebook.
Mark’s Response: You never know as much as you need to in the beginning no matter what. This was especially true for me because when I started out, I was 19 years old and I didn’t know anything about business. There were a lot of stuffs I didn’t know. The only way we were going to succeed was if I focus on not what I thought I knew but on making sure I learn everything else as quickly as possible.
The secret here is that learning is a process where you try things and you fail. You shouldn’t be afraid of failure. You should fail and learn from it and make sure you are doing what you can to learn as quickly as possible. I do think that’s why Facebook has been able to evolve so much. Facebook started off as a service for students and it has made a lot of transitions and you only do this by focusing on learning as much as you can.
A lot of times people think these things are straight lines but the best entrepreneurs and the best organisations I have seen are obsessively focused on learning as much as they can everyday.
As entrepreneurs, engineers and developers, you do have the success you are having by making mistakes along the way and rebounding from them and that takes certain persistence and mindsets that you are going to get it done. I think if you just stay focused on that you will succeed.
We should note that the key to success is acquiring more knowledge in any field we desire. So long as you keep learning, you will grow in knowledge and will eventually succeed.