Lisa Zhang, Facebook Data Intern: Things I learned

Note the title: Things I learned. She's posting about her internship experience and the lessons she learned. She's not trying to give nuanced, universally applicable advice for how to become famous in every circumstance and industry.

She's talking about "fame" from a specific perspective -- that of a student who might be intimidated by the success of someone like Zuckerberg. She relates the example of Paul Butler and his "fame". It's clear he's not "famous" in the conventional sense, but that he simply created something that people in the industry liked enough to tweet and email around. She realizes that there may not be anything intrinsically different about the people who attract "fame", and that her having cut Zuckerberg in the lunch line makes him just another regular person who lines up for lunch and gets cut in line. The reason Zuck's famous is that he did something that people liked (and now he's arguably conventionally "famous" because peopled liked it at scale).

I found this to be a simple and useful reminder that our heroes are human too, and all of them got where they are by doing stuff.

There's an almost pathological compulsion here to analyze every word and sentence, hoping for some incisive way to show one's cleverness. I think that's missing the point.

I agree with the "they do things" part but wholeheartedly disagree with "There's nothing more to it." There's a LOT more to it. I have a really good friend who ran a social network between 2003-2006 and had millions of users. He is a brilliant coder and worked really really hard to grow the site. He "did things".

He had a vision, built the foundations himself, assembled a capable team, delegated appropriately, and oversaw the operations as needed. But he's not famous today. Why not? Because his social network didn't make it big. It was successful enough to give him a good middle-class lifestyle (better than ramen profitable) but it didn't make him millions. And today nobody knows of his brilliance or leadership skills. You could say he's not famous because he didn't push through harder but then you better hold that criteria for everyone else who is famous too.

"I did some things I'm proud of and a few that I'm not. I failed a lot, but learned a lot too. Hopefully, in 2011, I won't let trivial fears set me back: I'll do more, try more, and say "yes" more. There's just too much to lose otherwise."

Fortis cadere, cedere non potest(The brave may fall, but never yield.)

     1) Famous people are famous because they do things. There's nothing more to it, 
     and nothing less.
     3) When you decide to do things, opportunities come.

" I realized that their ticket to fame is actually really simple: when they had an idea, they followed through.

Simply put, they did things. They executed."

Now we just need to make that stick.