Oh Xanadu!

I watched a film from a few years back today - Sanctum.  The characters of the story were all avid spelunkers and were discovering new veins to a cave only partially explored.  Although they were all fairly rugged characters all but one of them died in the cave.  Near the end of the movie, the last two characters were facing their darkest moments in the cave.  Viewers didn't know whether or not the two would make it out alive.  As they moved along the cave wall in the dark, they quoted the poem Xanadu by Coleridge to give them comfort.  The poem speaks of a paradise, of a place of unparalleled beauty.

The phone I had before the smart phones came out allowed pictures to be placed as a background or beside phone numbers.  I placed one of the most marvelous underwater pictures I have ever seen in my phone and called it Xanadu.  It was my paradise.  I had the phone for one year.  I am two phones removed from that one now, and the picture was not available to me on my new phones.  But under X in my phone directory I still have Xanadu listed because I forever cherish the one year I got to see paradise daily.

Tonight is dedicated to the most amazing, most beautiful place I could humanly imagine.  It has no parallel.  I can identify with the last two lines because for one year I delighted in the taste of honey dew and drank in the milk of paradise.

Xanadu
Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.





  So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.





But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!




The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

  A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Sharing a dark sky

I looked out at the sky tonight.  It was black and shared a darkness.  So, I visited a place within the recesses of my mind, a special, blended place, and saw again breath of life, faith, and hope.  I wanted the darkness of this night to see that it can shroud a certain part of my life, but it cannot extinguish this most sacred place.  Someone who gives me life lives there.

Landscapes tell their history

The Grand Canyon is a beautiful place today.  But it has a history that goes way back to the time when the Earth had only one land mass.  Of course, everything has a history.  The land that was the canyon was underwater at one time.  The Pacific Ocean used to cover the land that is now the canyon area.  Shells give that away.  As Pangea broke apart the tectonic activity was prolific.  The ocean receded, and the grinding of the Pacific plate against the North American plate caused huge mountains, taller than the Himalayans today.  But time and nature's forces wore down the mountains.  Ice ages  took their toll as well.  So did earthquakes because there was a huge lake bigger than any of the great lakes located close by in lower Utah and Nevada that had one side of it lowered by an earthquake.  The water emptied out of the lake and poured down through the canyon to carve it out deeper.  After that huge lake dried up, temperatures increased so much that a desert ensued.  Now, we see it as it is.  The history ahead of the canyon will be about like it has been in the past.

The beauty of the lives around us have their histories all right.  I had a text from a friend earlier this evening.  This person lives in pain but refuses to let the pain get in the way of ambitions to be realized.  This person's history is littered with events that cause different landscapes to appear.  But for the moment life is beautiful.  I have another friend whose story reads like a book written as a result of many interruptions.  Each interruption produced a different landscape until what shows today is a beautiful place to look at.  Another friend of mine has had a number of upheavals with children, the desert of experience with his late wife, the pinnacle experience in education between wives, and tremendous climate change with a second wife.  But, to talk to him is to talk to someone beautiful.  I need their experiences.  It helps me to put my own life in perspective, and not to be discouraged, for it has its own share of changing landscapes.

The unenlightened herd

The Barnett Shale is a geological formation that is currently producing a great amount of oil and gas in the north Texas area.  A number of large oil companies are sinking a lot of money into the area because the return is very good.  One of the features of the formation that yields the oil is that it is dense, that is, it doesn't have much porosity.  So, the companies have to fracture the formation.

For  the last 5 years, coinciding with the advent of the drilling of the Barnett Shale play, several earthquakes have happened in the area where earthquakes had not happened on any regular basis before.  Of course, the people correlate the drilling with the earthquakes. 

The University of Texas just released a scientific study on whether the affects of drilling and fracturing the Barnett Shale caused the earthquakes.  The cause-effect study was very clear.  There was not a correlation between facturing and the local earthquakes.  The people of the area decided that the study was not accurate since it didn't uphold their opinions.  They could have accepted the study and kept looking for a cause.  Knowing the cause of the earthquakes may save them from the big one one of these days.  But, no.  The herd didn't want to look elsewhere, and thus find a true explanation that would help them in their progress.

That's the way of it.  It applies in every area of life.  Long-held beliefs underpinning the herd mentality, even in light of evidence to the contrary, rule the day and allow great injustices to continue and not be curtailed.  It is so indicative of the mistrust of the average person toward scientific studies.  For all the so-called education Americans receive, one could hope that a trust for things educated, such as scientific studies, would help lead the people forward and become more advanced.  Alas.  The herd would rather follow the adage, "If the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the ditch."  Too bad.  Society could be a whole lot farther down the road.  But, that's just the way of the herd.

Language - precise? Ha!

Cuneiform was a language used long ago.  The language was like English, it was used across a great extent of the commercial world, called a lingua franca.  It was the first written script that the modern world knows about.  It was spoken for a really long time in this commercial center of the world, probably around 2000 years.  People knew of it or knew it well enough to trade with it apparently because people from both east and west came to the fertile crescent area of the Earth.

That old script of runes was used to record business transactions at first, but as time passed, it was used for everything writing is used for, such as laws and stories.  Very few people can read this script, so we have to take the word of these erudite individuals as to what the signs mean, but there has been little controversy, for the most part, over the translations of tablets using these symbols.  As with any ancient tongue, some controversy does arise, however, because some words seem to have a plethora of meanings and context determines what is being said. That's a little problematic, though, because sometimes contexts are figurative, so they support more than one meaning of a word.  These are called interpretations, of course.

There's  a very interesting word from cuneiform that has the potential to change the way we think about our origins.  The idea is not new, but it is gaining more and more support.  It was perpetuated in the 1980s by a movie about Mars.  At the end of the movie, Earth travelers found a disguised edifice on Mars that housed the account of the destruction of Mars and the migration of its inhabitants to the Earth.  Stargate the movie and series capitalized also on the idea that humans were started as a result of efforts of ETs from another galaxy.  The story in cuneiform echoes this theme because it has to do with the origins of humanity on Earth and uses the term anunaki. Mostly the translators have assigned the word's meaning as a group of gods.  So, all the council of the gods like Ea and Enlil are considered the Anunaki.  But, there is a part of the story that doesn't fit this assignment of meaning.  The Anunaki said they came from another galaxy to be here.  Now if this is true, then we need to evaluate again the creation myths that come from this time period.  For one, there's not really a creation.   For two, there's not really a council of deities, but a people from another planet.  The Hopi Native American stories support the same hypothesis.

A word like Anunaki makes one aware of the pitfalls of reducing any language into some precise set of rules for spelling (for there are 3 spellings of annunnaki), syntax or meanings.  But, it's ok.  Those who consider themselves a part of the established gatekeepers of the English language are about to meet their demise.  Of course, they will depart with their usual venting of spleens, and vocally at that.  Language has its moments when it is exact, but it sure has its moments that cause discomfort for those who want it to always be exact.  Language was rich in its cuneiform form.  It's rich now.  It will be rich when its current written form goes by the wayside in favor of holographic transmission of complete environments.  Whatever form language takes, it will have a precise side, but it will mainly deal in interpretations into perpetuity.  Can't wait to see the holographic form of Anunaki!  Maybe the movies E.T. and Paul have merit.  What cute Anunaki if that's true.

No, not a dictate from the genes

The formation of sounds in English by infants is predictable and developmental.  So, it was of particular note to me that someone told me that learning sounds was genetic.  I am not certain what the person meant exactly since I was told by a third party bearing news of someone who was told first-hand, but I took it to mean that people are controlled by their genes as to whether they can form the sounds of all the available sounds in the language they are born into.  This flies in the face of current observation and theory.

An infant learns sounds naturally, no matter what language,  The human speaking apparatus of tongue, palate, mouth cavity, nasal passage, lips, pharynx, and larynx have been toyed with for many, many thousand years.  It's no mystery on how sounds are made, how many sounds have been made, which sounds are easiest to make, which are hardest, and which come in early in an infant's development, which are later.  So imagine my astonishment when I was told that a child had to be taken speech therapy at age 4 for defective sounds and that it was genetic because there was not a hearing or vision problem that impeded the sounds, no malformation of any of the speaking apparatus parts, no environmental intrusion causing sound to be warped, and normal parents who had no history of phonetic malformation when young.

The child had particular problems pronouncing the so-called hidden sounds because they cannot be readily seen like the gutteral sounds at the back of the mouth cavity at the top of the throat.  But an anomaly occurred.  Nasals, such as m and n, were not malformed whereas l and r were.  This for sure discounts the genetic theory.  All of these sounds have a constant flow of air and voice, like vowels do, but the air stream is redirected inside the mouth where no one can see how exactly they are redirected with the exception of m which one can see (the lips are closed in order to direct the air flow through the nose rather than through the mouth).

I think the culprit for the young boy's trouble is not in the genes, but in missing the stage from about 3-9 months of age when the infant studies the faces of the caregivers to produce just the right sounds of the language they have been born into.  Not being in a position to see and study would delay or allow one to miss altogether how to form the needed sounds to develop and later compete with others in acceptable communication.

It's a little bit like Freud's theory of missing the crawling stage and having problems with socialization in teen and young adult years.  The young boy is 6, so he still has another couple of years to work on seeing and hearing how the formation of sounds happens, but it will increasingly be an issue for him since his need to communicate with others his age begins to help him establish his role and place in his world.  A smart language therapist will give him some dialect substitute sounds to compensate for the stage he missed.  It's quite acceptable to hear people pronounce here as heah. No one makes a big deal about that.  Or the acceptable Boston brogue which drops r's at the ends of words or near the ends of words as in pahk for park, and caw for  car.  Dropping the l altogether in all but the initial position in a word is quite acceptable as well.  No doubt the young man will learn the compensations and become a full-fledged, successful member of society.  But if this development is genetic, then the therapist who made the statement ought to make a full-blown case study of this encounter and publish it because it would be rare, to say the least.

No comprende, senor

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

 Zuckerberg defines social value here as more open and connected.  Good for him.  In his letter, he speaks of wanting to affect government in this way.  Kudos, because then the idea of democracy by the people would be more realized than the republican form of representation we have now.  I look forward to that day.  He also wants to the corporate world more connected and open so that they can take that quantum leap into advancing the same cause faster than it would normally advance by being more open and connected.  This would be nice.  It is logical that this could happen, and I hope it does because I am all for advancement of society.

But when it comes to the system that wants to control what our children think these days, there is a total nonsequitur between Zuckerberg's statement and the way the system is run.  First, the system is a basic quid pro quo system.  The people who run the system will give in return for all kinds of favors.  Thus, they can't afford for it to be too open and certainly not connected or they would be found out.  Promotion comes mainly from within the system in order to perpetuate the quid pro quo aspect it is built upon.  Those within the system have to conform at some point or they will be worked out of the system even if they have the talent to offer many new directions to it.  The youth see this model for 12 of their formative years in life.  Guess what model most of them will perpetuate!

Second, the system is built around so-called success for students.  It's an artificial success because the grading system is unbelievably faulty.  Parents think grades are based on a 100 point system when it is really a 50 point system.  The Bell curve is a mathematical reality for the students who attend, but the grading system alters the Bell curve so that students will look good for the community.  On a 50 point system (the upper 50 points from 50-100) the middle grade for which half of the students fall below and half above is a sham.  Administrators make extreme efforts to create the aritificial idea that 90% of the students should be in the upper half of the curve rather than 49%.  That means that almost half of students passing or graduating really ought not to be passing or graduating.  

Third, the system educating our youth has rhetorically given lip service to the integration of content areas.  But, the rhetoric is empty.  For upwards of 30 years, they have talked about integration of the subject areas.  Curriculum has even been made with this integration in mind.  But, nearly all children still take English, Math, Social Studies, and Science as separate subjects.  Connectedness is not a trademark of the antiquated configuration for children to learn in this system.  Real world value of the content areas doesn't exist in these compartmental instructional pods.

So, when Zuckerberg asks his employees to FOCUS on real world values, the children of the system in place now can't even think along the same lines as he does.  Real world means artificial, canned answers rather than real, flexible, sovlable problems that arise in a working environment.

I admire Zuckerberg for being able to take his company to the next level from the world in which he began his efforts and for having a vision to take his company to even higher levels with his aspirations for his workers.  And, he does have those kind of employees.  I just don't know where he found them.  He is speaking an obscure language like Pame (Mayan) to us English speakers.  Our children are basically outsiders to one of the best American companies ever formed.

It's the Zuckerbergs, however, that will lead the way into the next phase of civilization.  I wish he had one of the largest pools to draw from for his employee selections.  It's not true, however.  Most of them can click on Like and write a few words for their status.  But work for him, they could not do. They haven't seen "open and connected" in any experience in their 12 years of mind control from the model the system runs by to the curriculum they study.

More is actually more, not less

Almost 2500 years ago a phenomenon in the world happened in Athens, Greece.  The people of Athens decided that they wanted all the men in the town to participate in their own governance.   It was called, in English, a democracy, or a government by its populace.  It didn't last long in historical terms.  Rome decimated it a couple of hundred years later.  It would be 2000 years before that idea would resurface in the United States.  Attempts were made along the way like the government formed by the two tribes of the Angles and Saxons in England when they stopped feuding, and in 1215 when the Magna Carta was signed.  Whenever attempts were made in the world, people after that were better off.

Two popular books in 20th century America have chronicled what a nation is like when information is suppressed.  In both Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, books with the world's knowledge are no longer wanted or needed and have been burned.  Oppression of many people in these two books is apparent.  The point of the books is that whenever information is not freely available to people, they suffer at the hands of someone who is not a benefactor.

The Spanish Inquisition is a time in Medieval Europe noted for its extreme persecution of knowledge/information.  It is not a pretty period in history.  China, too, devolved into chaos at two times in their history between two strong empires in which knowledge had flourished.  So, the idea that information needs to be accessible to as many people as possible should be something the people of the world understand very well.  A great principle from history is that people's judgment is only as good as their information.

So, why is it still an anomaly when Zuckerberg declares that he wants his employees to have access to as much information as possible?  Below is Zuckerberg's guideline for his employees and new investors.  It's an anomaly.  

Be Open  

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

A question is begged here.  Why is it, then, since history points out that good happens with information and bad happens in its absence, that oppression of information is still the order of the day?  All one has to do is to look to the system in place that keeps the nation's children from ages 6-18.  That system says to its children, "Here is what you need to know this year, and next year, and next, etc... This is how you do what you need to know.  Don't step out of established territory.  Sit down, shut up, look busy, turn in work, and we'll reward you for it."  It's the greatest straight-jacket approach around. No graduate school in the country is run this way.  And why not?  Because they know that a person has to try out information in experiments or in the field, gathering facts and coming to reasonable conclusions.  Heaven forbid that that method should be for graduate students only.  Kids 6 years old understand the beauty of the scientific method.  They know that this method is how knowledge is gathered. They would love to experiment and do field work to see how to distill and apply principles in all their subjects.  And how much would children learn if they knew how to discover and apply school content, then apply the principles to the interests they love so much?  Go Zuckerberg!  Access to information would lead to so much more in your industry and everywhere else you look just like your letter states. However, children also know that the current system doesn't really want them to discover and apply, performing at a level above mediocrity.  It is a system that encourages average (even their grading system uses this method) and following the path of least resistance.

  

The kids today are the children of the information age.  Denying access to information is to kill them, disadvantage them, force them onto an uneven playing field.  How many computers are in a classroom today? One for every ten kids?  And what happens if a student brings her/his own computer to class?  Can (s)he use it?  Of course not.  It would put the other children at a disadvantage  EXACTLY! So, conventional wisdom is to handicap all instead of applauding someone who might get a quantum leap ahead and perform well.  That person might think for herself/himself.  NO, No, no what a stir that would cause.  The current method of keeping a whole lot of people from flourishing is to deny them knowledge/information.  It's really the Spanish Inquisition with a palatable name so as not to make its taste too bitter.

Mark Zuckerberg, where are you finding people to work in your company?  They have to be few and far between!

Outcome guaranteed

In a classroom in graduate school the professor was showing her graduate students the difference between the way young people learn a second language and the way adults learn a second language.  The class had already read a great number of theoretical articles and a book on various methods for learning a second language.  Now came the field experiments.  

A group of 8 nine-year-olds filed into the room and took their seats in front of the graduate students.  Then 8 adults came into the room and took their seats in front of the room.  The class had previously voted on what method they thought would be the best, so teachers for the two groups had come prepared to teach their student groups according to the voted-on method.  The two groups began to learn some language parcels simultaneously while the graduate students observed, taking notes on how much and in what ways the individuals in the two groups learned. 

There were two very clear differences in the way the two groups approached learning that day (and it happens to be the case for learning language in general between children 10 and younger and children older than 10 into adulthood).  The young people's group tried guessing about 15 times more often than the adults who were bent on getting the right form before they would speak out.  The older group covered less material because they wanted to master the language forms before pressing on while the younger group covered a great deal of territory, sometimes even randomly repeating the forms they had touched on earlier.  When the two observations were pointed out to the adult group, and that group was asked to change their learning style to match that of the younger group, they couldn't make the adaptation.

Zuckerberg's third principle for his workers is to be bold.  He elaborates below:

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that's changing so quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks. We have another saying: "The riskiest thing is to take no risks." We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

If anything is true in the great American daycare system for children 6-18, it is that there is a methodical progression of ideas.  "Grind it out" would be a saying true of the children who are products of this system.  While it is true in some instances that learning (that includes performing aloud what has been learned) on a macro- scale may need to conform to a progression at some points, it would not naturally hold that learning on a micro- scale should be so methodical.  Learning is random at that level most of the time.

Math classes are typical, but any class would do.  If one were to observe a lesson by a teacher methodically teaching a concept that was next in some micro-curricular progression, (s)he would see a teacher explaining, calling on students to feed back the concept, giving some examples, then asking students to practice what they have learned. After that the teacher calls on students to give answers from their practice work.  In this last phase of asking children to give answers from their practice problems , one would see a great deal of silence and hesitation.  Teachers say it is like pulling teeth to get children to shout out their answers.  Many times the children wouldn't answer even when called upon by name.  According to Mark Zuckerberg, such children are guaranteed to fail.  Hmmm...

 This method works well for the teacher who learned how to teach after becoming an adult, but who has forgotten how learning happens for the young. The adults who manage the system as a whole ask the teachers to teach methodically at all levels and measure them according to the adult learning stick.  Teachers only look for right answers rather than random, many times wrong, answers so that they will measure up on the stick.

So where does Zuckerberg go to get employees who are taking risks, learning randomly, boldly calling out learning forms or math answers even if they are not called upon?  These children work for the other companies he refers to in his principle.  I'm still looking for the pool Zuckerberg is drawing from.  The Wright brothers, Fords, Bells, and Edisons are all dead and still stand out as anomalies in history.

The beat of a different drummer

In 1920s America, one-room school houses dotted the countryside everywhere across the country.  In those houses, older students were taught, then the younger while the older students did their classwork.  When instruction was finished to the younger, the older students then helped the younger students with their classwork.  In 1950s America, the cities had undergone a great migration from the rural areas.  In those school rooms, the teachers taught the students, allowed for classwork to be done, checked the work, gave more work to the students who performed to satisfactory standards while those who needed more work were grouped with the teacher for extra and remedial work.  In 1980s America, about 20 years after mandatory education had become law, school rooms followed a regimen in which the teacher gave group instruction, allowed time to do classwork, checked the classwork, gave homework, and while many worked on homework using class time, those who didn't do well when the class work was checked gathered to an area of the room to get more personal instruction.

The 20s, 50s, 80s, and any other decade to the present day has a lulling familiarity to it - configure the day or period so that students are presented a concept and given time - checked time, independent time, and reiterated time to understand a concept.  If an idea is drummed into the environment enough times, then most (meaning a majority percentage) in earshot of the drum beat would understand the idea.

How very different is the method used if you are an employee of Facebook.  Zuckerberg calls this the Hacker Way and he explains that method in his letter to his new investors.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.
...
Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words "Done is better than perfect" painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

What's that again? Done is better than perfect? Zuckerberg obviously never heard clearly the drum beat method of the schools through the last two centuries.  But, you understand his Move Fast principle if you understand his method of the Hacker Way.  The second principle he wants his employees to abide by at FB is to Move Fast.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: "Move fast and break things." The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough.

This is so foreign to someone who sits in the school houses around the nation, no matter what the decade, that (s)he probably missed its importance.  Break things, not sit and listen to a repetitive drum beat passively.  Move fast, not sit for repetitive lessons a week or two at a time moving through concepts at the pace of continents moving apart from each other 3 centimeters a year.

So who will work for Zuckerberg?  Not very many from the primary pool producing young people supposedly ready for the work force after satisfying drum beat requirements.

Shallow pool

As the commercial begins, a crowd is gathering in an auditorium to watch someone perform.  A piano sits center-stage.  The crowd grows; then, the camera focuses on a husband and wife.  They ask where their son is, making the viewer aware that the son is small since he still needs adult supervision.  As the couple look around the auditorium from their seats, the light dims and the pianist begins playing.  Panic-striken, the husband and wife realize their son is seated at the piano, his hands pressing the keys to a simple song.  They try to figure out exactly what to do about this when from the side of the stage strides the musician that everyone has come to see.  He doesn't chastise the 10-year-old, call for security, or even stop the boy from playing.  Instead, he joins the boy on the bench, whispers to him to continue playing, and adds a very sophisticated rhythm to the simple notes being played.  The master turned what could have been a fiasco into something touching, showing his true talent in adding sophistication to an otherwise simple tune.  He had the human touch along with his masterful expertise.

It sounds simple.  Focus on the most pressing problem.  Don't waste time in fixing it.  Don't act poorly as you are solving the problem.  The outcome will be touching, astounding.  Zuckerberg put it in the following words.

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Is this something that kids 6-18 can learn to do?  First they are the problem, someone helps them with great finesse.  Then, they learn what causes problems.   And, finally they learn to address problems, feebly at first, but with increasing finesse as they become older.  The word mastery means exactly that by age 18, not proficient, or minimally skilled, or regular, or average.  It means seeing a little boy who ventured onto a stage, unknowingly attracted to a piano that invited him to play (he didn't know it was showtime), and walk onto the stage to add zest and life to what the boy has to offer, so that the crowd gives a standing ovation by the end of the song.

Sure someone 18 can do that.  But not by being dumped into a group with 25-30 others their same age for 12 straight years.  Nor by being given less than 15 minutes a day of personal time with someone who teaches basic principles over and over to the mean of the group, or worse yet, to the lowest common denominator of the group.  Not even by allowing "involvement" by participating in group projects.  And certainly not by dulling the mind with mindless repetition, usually with homework, but with the normal "first run" of a concept sometimes.  There is no impact using this method.  And focus is out of the question for content redundantly presented.

So who works for Zuckerberg?  I at least know the pool of people he didn't draw from, and that is a very large pool.

Disparate worlds

Last week Facebook went public.  I guess that was inevitable since it was one of the world's largest corporations.  However, Zuckerberg took the time to write his new investors that the original mission of the company was not to become a company.  He wrote a lengthy letter to his investors to let them know that his mission is the same as when he started Facebook even before it became a privately held company.  The very last portion of his letter is below.

He is right for his own company and he is right in the way the world is beginning to turn around, which is different from the way the world has revolved in the past.  There is a whole generation coming up that will be at odds with itself because they will have to enter a professional daycare institution that is diametrically opposed to the principles below.  

Children from 6-18 will want what Zuckerberg has written about here.  But, they could never work for FB because they will have been trained by a system that will dilute their efforts into mediocrity and deceive their thinking about success, saying that it has made them ready for their future.  It's a sad day when they realize that they have been duped.

Simply reading his five principles will allow a person to see how far the current training is from what the most financially successful young person on the planet says he wants his employees to be known for.   Zuckerberg is pledging that the people who invest and work with him can be reputed for the following 5 principles.

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: "Move fast and break things." The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that's changing so quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks. We have another saying: "The riskiest thing is to take no risks." We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.
Mark Zuckerberg