i'm here to tell you that finding your purpose isn't enough the challenge for our generation
is to create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose
an entrepreneurial culture thrives when it is easy to try lots of new ideas facebook wasn't the first
thing i built i also built chat systems and games study tools and music players and i'm not alone jk
rowling got rejected 12 times before she finally wrote and published harry potter even beyonce had
to make hundreds of songs to get halo the greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail
one of my favorite stories is when jfk went to go visit the nasa space center and he
saw a janitor holding a broom and he asked him what he was doing and the janitor replied
mr president i'm helping put a man on the moon
purpose is that feeling that you are a part of something bigger than yourself that you are
needed and that you have something better ahead to work for purpose is what creates true happiness
every generation has its defining works more than 300 000 people work to put that man on the
moon including that janitor millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio
and millions of more people built the hoover dam and other great projects
and now it's our generation's turn to do great things now i know maybe you're thinking i don't
know how to build a damn i don't know how to get a million people involved in anything
well let me tell you a secret no one does when they begin ideas don't come out fully formed
they only become clear as you work on them you just have to get started
if i had to know everything about connecting people before i got started
i never would have built facebook i remember that night i launched facebook from that little dorm in
kirkland house i went to knocks with my friend kx and i remember telling him clearly that i
was excited to help connect the harvard community but one day someone would connect the whole world
the thing is it never even occurred to me that that someone might be us we were just college
kids we didn't know anything about that there were all these great big technology companies
with all these resources and i just assumed one of them would do it but this idea was so
clear to us that all people want to connect so we just kept working on it day after day after day
and i know that a lot of you are going to have your own stories just like this
a change in the world that seems so clear that you are sure someone else is going to do it
but they're not you will but it's not enough to have that purpose yourself you also have to create
a sense of purpose for others anyone working on a big vision is going to get called crazy
even if you end up right anyone taking on a complex problem is going to get blamed for not
fully understanding it even though it's impossible to know everything up front anyone taking
initiative will always get criticized for moving too fast because there's always someone who wants
to slow you down when i was getting started i um and i wanted i care deeply about giving everyone
a voice right and giving people the tools to share everything that they cared about and
uh bringing a community together and you know it started small and in one university
and i didn't think it was going to be a company at the time as a matter of fact i was pretty
convinced that at some point someone would build something like this for the world but uh you know
i thought that i would be some other company that you know already had thousands of engineers and
was used to building stuff for hundreds of millions of people around the world and you
know what ended up happening was um you know that no one built it right so we just kind of kept on
going right i mean people said it each step along the way um you know what you're doing all right
maybe college students like it but no one else is going to like it and you know there's not going to
be any money in doing this so all right so you only really do it if you care right if you're
passionate about doing it and then it started growing and people said it would be a fad and
it would never be a good business but you know you keep going because you care not because you're
trying to create a business um and you know then there's the shift to mobile where people thought
that you know it wouldn't be a sustainable business and um you know through each of these
things you the the entrepreneurs who i think build things that last for a long time keep
going because they care fundamentally about the change that they're trying to create in the world
um and they're not in it just to build a company i built the first version of facebook because
my hope was never to build a company i wanted to have an impact and as all these people started
joining us i just assumed that that's what they wanted to do too so i never took the time
to explain what it was that i hoped we'd build a couple years in some big companies wanted to buy
us i didn't want to sell i wanted to see if we could connect more people and we were building
the first version of news feed at the time and i thought if we could just launch this it
could change how we all learn about the world nearly everyone else wanted to sell without a
sense of higher purpose this was their startup dream come true and it tore our company apart
after one particularly tense argument one of my close advisors told me if i didn't
agree to sell the company right now i would regret that decision for the rest of my life
relationships were so afraid that within a year or so every single person on our management team
was gone that was my hardest time leading facebook i believed in what we were doing but i felt alone
and worse it was my fault i wondered if i was just wrong an imposter a 22 year old kid who
had no idea how things actually worked now years later i understand that that is how things work
when there's no sense of higher purpose so it's up to all of us to create it so we can all keep
moving forward together so many things go wrong when you're starting a company and often i think
people ask you know what mistakes should you avoid making and you know my answer to that question is
don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you're gonna make tons of mistakes right and the
important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up there
are things every single year of facebook's existence that could have killed us or made
it so that it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable
but you just kind of bounce back and you learn and um nothing is impossible you just have to kind of
keep running through the walls it's just kind of hard you need to be pretty headstrong about
it right they're going to be all these challenges that come up and i think the main thing that you
need to do is just not give up right and um and kind of know what you want to do and you know
the best entrepreneurs that who i've met don't really start companies because their goal is
to build a company they do it because they want to make a change in the world and help
people and i think if you if you kind of stay true to that and um and if you just focus on
kind of powering through no matter what the the challenges are that will inevitably come up in
your path then um you'll find that there are lots of tools that are available and a lot of people
who will help you build what you're building we understand that the great arc of human history
bends towards people coming together in ever greater numbers from tribes to cities to nations
to achieve things that we could not on our own we get that our greatest opportunities are now global
we can be the generation that ends poverty that ends disease a student in a dorm connecting one
community at a time and keeping at it until one day we can connect the whole world change starts
local even global change starts small with people like us in our generation the struggle of whether
we connect more whether we achieve our greatest opportunities comes down to this your ability
to build communities and create a world where every single person has a sense of purpose
i'm reminded of a prayer meeshabera that i say whenever i face a big challenge that i sing to
my daughter thinking of her future when i tuck her in at night and it goes may the source of strength
who's blessed the ones before us help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing
you