Person of the Year

Time magazine has named Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, 2010 Person of the Year. Anyone who has seen the movie Social Network which is based upon the Zuckerberg/Facebook story knows that this is an extraordinary validation. For anyone who is a student struggling for motivation to keep going with new ideas, Zuckerberg is the answer.  Zuckerberg is 26 years old and he was only 19, a student, when he created Facebook.

No matter what perspective one chooses to accept with regard to how the idea of Facebook was conceived, one thing that is consistent and true is that Zuckerberg took the seed of the idea and worked like a demon until it became a reality. In the early stages of development it would have been impossible to foresee what Facebook would become and so the energy and drive devoted to the project was given in anticipation of creation without profit.

Zuckerberg's inherent need to see his idea to fruition wasn’t driven by money. It was driven by the same motivation that has driven all great ideas for all time; the need to see the idea realized. To know if a hypothesis has merit. To create the beginnings of something that is potentially, but not necessarily, bigger. The difference between Zuckerberg and any other person with a good idea is that he acted.

Time names Zuckerberg with these words, “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.”

Any student reading this blog could be the next Time Person of the Year, but only if they choose to act upon their theories. That is the fundamental difference between those that change the world and those that dream of changing the world.