Philanthropy
Be prepared to laugh at yourself.
"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."
Coming from a very ordinary background, and having achieved great things as a result of his own education and the educational background of his parents, Zuckerberg was never going to be the spoilt rich kid. He has worked for his money, and understands acutely how much power it gives him. His early donations included an undisclosed sum to Diaspora, an open-source personal web server; and $100 million to the public schools system in Newark. Modest, Zuckerberg wanted to make the latter donation anonymous, but New Jersey's Governor, Chris Christie, and Newark's Mayor, Cory Booker, convinced him to go public.
Although you shouldn't boast about your generosity, there is no need to hide it either.
In 2010, Zuckerberg decided to sign 'The Giving Pledge', a commitment to give at least 50% of his wealth to charity and to give it during his lifetime. Other signatories of the pledge include Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. The reason for spending before you die are numerous, and include the ability to decide which projects you support, to leverage your own professional network and skills to maximise the positive outcomes of the donations, and the reduction in administration costs if you don't have to use a succession of trust vehicles and lawyers to make decisions for you.
If you make money, you have a responsibility to give back to the community which has helped you succeed and do so in as effective a manner as possible.
Since signing the pledge, Zuckerberg has donated 18 million Facebook shares (with a value totalling $990 million) to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in the US, which makes grants to domestic and international charities working in community building, economic security, education, immigration, and widening opportunities; and he also gave $25 million to help combat the spread of the Ebola virus in 2014.
"The question I ask myself like like almost every day is, 'Am I doing the most iportant thing I could be doing?"
Zuckerberg's daughter, Max, was born on 1 December 2015, and a week later Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan (see Personal Life) marked the occasion by publishing an open letter to their child. In the letter, they pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares (valued at the time at around $45 billion) to a new foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The foundation works in health and education, and the money will be spent over the course of Chan and Zuckerberg's lifetimes.
Changes in your personal and professional life can significantly alter your outlook on life.
Technically the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is neither a private foundation nor a charity: it is a limited liability company. This means that it is able to generate a profit, lobby government bodies, and make political donations. This model has drawn some criticism, as the donations Zuckerberg makes to the initiative will be tax deductible. In the words of Michael Miello at The Daily Beast, "If purity is the essence here, there seems no reason that the tax system should support it. Zuckerberg can afford to dabble in politics and society without massive subsidies from the rest of the country."
The published mission of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to "advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy". Zuckerberg and Chan intend to take the long view, targeting their resources at the biggest challenges they expect the next generation to face. The timeframe for their work is clear, as in the open letter they wrote:
Consider disease. Today we spend about 50 times more as a society treating people who are sick than we invest in research so you won't get sick in the first place...
Medicine has only been a real science for less than 100 years, and we've already seen complete cures for some diseases and good progress for others. As technology accelerates, we have a real shot at preventing, curing or managing all or most of the rest in the next 100 years.
Put your money and your influence behind issues you really care about.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is just a few years old, so we cannot yet see its impact on the causes which Chan and Zuckerberg clearly feel so strongly about. Hopefully, we will see the budding of something great, and in a decade or so, real, positive changes will be visible.
The published mission of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to "advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy". Zuckerberg and Chan intend to take the long view, targeting their resources at the biggest challenges they expect the next generation to face. The timeframe for their work is clear, as in the open letter they wrote: