8 Personality Traits of Mark Zuckerberg

A billionaire at the age of 24 and Chief Executive Officer of the world’s most sought after social networking site Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is undoubtedly a motivation for the coming generation of entrepreneurs. When a conversation about Zuckerberg is initiated, there are various points of views. People discuss his age, his wealth ($63 billion), or even about his dressing choices. The personality of Mark Zuckerberg seems perfect to budding entrepreneurs who wants to achieve everything fast.

Being a person who brought a change in the world of social networking, Mark Zuckerberg is an INTJ (Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judgement) personality type entrepreneur like Elon Musk. He is an introvert by nature and unlike other CEOs, he is seen communicating very less during presentations to investors. Being a typical INTJ he has a vision and he works on the path to achieve his vision and goal. He has a habit of keeping a schedule, maintaining structure and controlling the necessary resources to achieve what he desires. Mark Zuckerberg even keeps a leather notebook which he calls “The Book of Change” which contains all the ideas for the future direction of Facebook. He is least bothered about his appearance and doesn’t care about getting in tune with the latest fashion which makes him a proper INTJ type person.

To give you a deeper vision about Mark Zuckerberg’s personality I have described few incidents of his life which make you clear about the quality, characteristics and personality traits he posses. You will also get to know how these personality traits created problems for him and also, on the other hand, made Mark Zuckerberg successful.

1. Zeal to Make Ideas a Reality

Who isn’t passionate?

Almost everyone is.

But, the question is, what made Mark Zuckerberg’s passion a paradigm?

Like every other entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg’s passion for his work and ambition to bring it to the benefit of people was commendable.

He sensed a vacuum in the society at that time, the lack of connectivity, when led him to the idea of building something that would fill this. Using technology, he expertise in, and bringing forth the idea he held within, were the initial stepping stones towards success.

Techies try to make life easier, with technology! Mark, came up with the idea of connecting people through the internet.

Passion for technology, to be precise, computers were from the early days of life. When Zuckerberg was merely 12-year-old, he developed a messaging program using Atari BASIC and named it Zucknet. He also created various computer games for fun purpose, along with his friends when he was just a kid. While he was in high school he created a version of music software Pandora and named it Synapse. Many companies including AOL and Microsoft offered him jobs even without graduation but, he declined.

When he started working on his Facebook site he didn’t mission it to be such a huge success. Facebook, according to him, was never meant to be a company. The site was just a way to fulfill his vision for bringing people close using his talent in technology.

Even, the mission statement of Facebook is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, conspired with Mark’s passion.

2. Do Business for Higher Purpose

It is said that you must have some purpose to your life if you want to succeed and do good for yourself. From the initial time, Mark Zuckerberg had only one vision in his mind and that was to make a more connected and open world. By keeping his purpose in mind he has been able to focus on creating a product that completes his purpose. Facebook was never meant to be a company. It was meant to fulfill Mark’s purpose of connecting people and bringing them close. And today Facebook isn’t just a social networking site but it unites long-lost friends and family members, it has become a way to report criticism where free speech is banned. His vision for a more open world didn’t end with just Facebook but he is also involved in various issues regarding future generations, human rights, and global social problems.

So, understanding the main objective and not getting distracted at times when you don’t get the desired results is the best approach to reach your aim.

3. Believe in Product and Team

It’s the greatest personality trait of Mark Zuckerberg just like Henry Ford. He believes a great team is all you need to be successful. He knows very well that you cannot build a great company all by yourself. You need to know how to build just the right relations with the people.

According to him, it is important that you find the people whose vision aligns with your vision. Each team member should complement each other’s goals. You should hire people who are smarter than you, experts in their domains and are someone who you can work for.

Mark Zuckerberg is a coder, a developer person and not a business person and he was lucky enough to realize it at a very initial stage. So, he hired Sheryl Sandberg who was assigned the work of business building and was made Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. And Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg duo have proved to be great for the company and this is all because they share the same values, commitments, mutual respect, and trust.

Mark Zuckerberg was never afraid of taking risks when it came to Facebook. He had such a faith in his work that even while raising money for Facebook he canceled on his meetings, ignored some important phone calls, maintained distance from some major investors and all this he did to just build up the hype and demand. In the end, he got 12 investment companies to fund his website.

While most of the people would not miss such golden opportunities, Mark Zuckerberg and his team believed in their product and were ready to risk it all.

4. Mark Zuckerberg is an Aggressive but Encouraging Leader

It is true that Mark Zuckerberg gets aggressive when he doesn’t get the results on time. His teammates define him as a person who demands constant innovation as well as growth. That is the reason that he has made the atmosphere inside his office so free that the people may independently think and innovate. He always pushes his employees to deliver more than what is required of them. He is over assertive and wants to get thing his way. But he knows when to stop and give away as well. He encourages his people to strive and do better. Mark is always open for suggestions and gives his employees the time to put up innovative ideas to him. He might seem to be firm and stubborn but he very well knows and tries his best to not be a control freak.

Related- Secrets of Mark Zuckerberg’s Success

5. Great Philanthropist and Down to Earth

Despite being a billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is an incredibly down-to-earth person. He likes chatting with regular people from all over the world. He even organizes regular “Townhall” style question answers session where he answers and chats with the people from around the world.

Mark Zuckerberg wants the world to be a better place and for this, he has donated $992 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2013, $75 million to the San Francisco General Hospital in 2014 and has pledged to donate $3 billion for the scientific research for the cure and prevention of diseases. He has donated $100 million to save the failing systems in Newark Public Schools in New Jersey and has signed the ‘Giving Pledge’ with a promise to donate 50% of his wealth to charity. He has also pledged to donate 99% of his Facebook shares to the charity on the birth of his daughter.

6. Never say Die

Along the way of becoming the most popular social networking website, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg faced a lot of setbacks. Not only were they faced with lawsuits with former founders and confidentiality issues but it is even banned in various countries. In spite of all this Mark Zuckerberg never faltered due to any of these hurdles and Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed. In fact, Times magazine named him Person of the Year in 2010 and he was placed at the top position of the New Establishment list by the Vanity Fair.

Even when Mark introduced the feature of Newsfeed to Facebook it was not very well accepted by its users mainly for privacy reasons, yet this ignited a massive expansion and is now one of the things that set Facebook apart from other social networking sites.

When Mark told people about making Facebook a public platform, people literally thought that he was being irrational. But his idea of turning Facebook into a platform is one of the major reasons for success and growth of the company.

This all was the result of never say die approach of Mark Zuckerberg. He says that there are thousands of things going on at a particular time but actually there are only one or two things that matters. You need to focus on those things that matter. This personality trait of Mark helped him in staying focused on providing value to his users and customers.

He always took all the criticism in a positive way and treated it as a source to fuel creativity, innovation, and actions that have resulted in his success. Mark Zuckerberg believes that his ability to ignore the noise around him has helped him to use the energy that he would have wasted on worrying about what others thought of him.

7. Move Fast and Break Things

According to Mark Zuckerberg, moving fast is a personality trait that has enabled him and his team to build more things and learn faster. The idea here is that if you are not breaking anything then you probably are not moving at a fast pace. However, when most companies grow, they slow down after some time because either they are too afraid of taking risks or they are afraid of making mistakes. But by moving slowly they tend to leave on opportunities that can prove to be really beneficial for them. Because of his this trait of moving fast, Mark Zuckerberg was able to achieve success in mere 10 years which took 30 years by Bill Gates to achieve.

At Facebook, they have created such a culture that they are equally messing up by moving too quickly and by moving too slowly sometimes. In this way, they know that they are in the middle. The key here is to distinguish between the false positive mistake and the real mistake. For example, introducing the Timeline feature would appear as a false positive mistake as it wasn’t well accepted by the users at first, but it ultimately turned out to be a success. So, Mark believes that they should go for the thing in their mind and leave the rest to the fate.

8. Follows Feedback Approach

Mark Zuckerberg believes that what he is today is because he was adaptable. He listens to the reviews of his users and acts accordingly. Zuckerberg believes in listening to the users both qualitatively and quantitatively. He made a lot of changes in the Facebook based on the experience of the users and their feedback. A lot of innovation happened on the Facebook because of the interaction and feedbacks of the users. And not only innovations were there his adaptability to situations has helped him in various other places as well. When he faced privacy allegations and faced criticism regarding the privacy of the users, he gave into public views and gave users more controls over the things they post, giving them a control over their privacy. He learned that user experience mattered a lot and while making his decisions he adapted to include user experience as well.

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