I can’t say this more succinctly than Seth Godin, so I’ll just copy it here:
“Mark Zuckerberg” has become a codeword for the truly gifted exception, the wunderkind freak of nature for whom traditional rules don’t apply.
Well, sure, Mark Zuckerberg can drop out of Harvard, but you’re not Mark Zuckerberg…
Here’s the thing: Even Mark isn’t Mark Zuckerberg.
This notion that there’s a one in a billion alignment of DNA and experience that magically creates an exception is just total nonsense. Mark is successful because of a million small choices, not because he, and he alone, has some magical properties.
Mostly, the best way to be the next Mark Zuckerberg is to make difficult choices.
He’s right. You know how I know? Because now we have proof:
But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. “Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck’s gonna write code,” says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix—adding a link to a picture, or something—and he went to work. Five minutes passed. Twenty minutes. An hour. “It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who’s an engineer like five minutes.”
Zuckerberg is the classic example of being at the right place at the right time with the right idea, and the balls to take advantage of it. If he didn’t do facebook, I would almost guarantee he’d be running something successful, at some point in his life. Would it be (potentially) the biggest company in the entire world? Would he have done it by 28? Almost certainly not. There are a ton of people in this world who are a smart and talented as Zuckerberg. Only a fraction of those people have the balls to make difficult choices. Only a fraction of those people strike the right idea at the right time to become fabulously successful.
The problem is, you’ll never know what the right idea is for any given point in time. Which means the only shot you’ve got of being fabulously successful is to keep trying.
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