The Story of a Legend

The Story of a Legend

Come what may, life goes on, upwards and only upwards….

What happens on reaching rock bottom? When you think that there is no way out, when you
are drowning in a sea of miseries, agonised with calamities, helplessly looking to stay afloat,
that moment defines your entire life, whereby you can hold the setback by its neck and
propel yourself to achieve the greatest milestone of your life for the world to be awestruck by.

And this is what has precisely defined the life of a remarkable wizard: Mark Zuckerberg.
In January 2004, a computer science student at Harvard University was at a low point in his life.

He had recently been temporarily suspended from his college for hacking into its
databases and denounced as a misogynist in the student newspapers for running a website
called Facemash which let users compare female students on their attractiveness.

Having got admission to the most esteemed University in the world, the man had become a social pariah there. Yet for the computer science student christened Mark Zuckerberg, who was only twenty years of age then, the only course of life that existed was upward, overpowered by the zeal to excel and exceed.

Zuckerberg did not care much for being at Harvard, being an autodidact since his earliest
beginnings. Born to a family of doctors, he learned to code by himself, and went on taking
new strides with extreme intellect and valour. In high school, he built a program that allowed all the computers between his house and his father’s dental office to communicate with each other.

By the end of his high school, he had built a music player called the Synapse Media
Player which used machine learning to learn the user’s listening habits, and then give him
recommendations based on the same. In college he gained fame from the very beginning for
developing CourseMatch, which allowed the students of Harvard to make class selection
decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups.

It was this Zuckerberg who sat detached from what was generally considered the lowest
point of his life, contemplating his biggest idea yet. Having understood the popularity of
Facemash and CourseMatch was based on the need for social connectivity, Zuckerberg was
contemplating the creation of a website which would alter forever the way humans
communicated with each other by shifting the bulk of this communication to the digital space.

It would cut across all lines of race, gender, class, caste, nationalities, etc. and create truly
the global village which Marshall McLuhan dreamt of. And therein came Facebook.
The success story of Facebook need not be recounted for we provide testament to it
everyday when we open up our phones and use WhatsApp and Instagram, now both owned
by Facebook.

What is to be learnt here is the struggle : Zuckerberg had not learnt
programming from any interested teacher, instead he educated himself from the vast amount of resources available online and in books.

When he was coming up with the idea of Facebook, Zuckerberg was an ostracized man, suspended from the most esteemed University in the world with a black mark on his character, and being denounced by everyone on campus as being a pervert.

Even when Facebook got running, immediately three other students of Harvard sued Zuckerberg for having apparently copied their idea.

Zuckerberg’s life is hence marked by immense struggle. But even at the lowest ebb of his
life, Mark managed to get ahold of probably the greatest entrepreneurial innovation of the
twenty first century and is now the billionaire we know because of it.

How did he keep this mindset ? Because of his education. This is not, of course, education merely in the sense of rote learning and getting good grades. This is education in its truest sense, which is the ability to face life confidently because you know that the knowledge you possess will weather you through any situation that life throws at you.

Such an education is the need of the hour. Coming from a middle-class background like
most of us, left with absolutely nothing, Zuckerberg’s knowledge gave him the confidence
that regardless of what may come, he will find ways to be financially stable. Such a true
education, which couples wisdom with an unfailing confidence in oneself, is sure to let any
person succeed in life, and forge ahead regardless of any troubles