Shaquille Zuckerberg

I've also been looking at this website. Their "About" article[1] describes an interesting idea for a forum.

As I understand it - You earn tokens by listening to music on Celody. You can then create posts and when you do you stake some of your tokens. Other users can up or down vote your post by staking their own tokens. The amount of tokens staked up or down, and some kind of algorithm, determine whether the tokens you staked are returned to you or forfeit.

The idea is that if your argument convinces people you should be rewarded and if not, well, not. Perhaps if this runs for a while you will find that people with a lot of tokens tend to be persuasive or insightful or maybe just uncontroversial. Their "About" page specifically says that controversial views will be "slashed" (i.e. have their stakes taken).

1 - https://stakedy.com/long/how-staking-on-stakedy-works.html

> I don't buy it. In fact, I think almost the opposite is true: given a fresh start and Zuckerberg is as likely to become a billionaire as O'Neil is to become a top NBA player.

I'd add that NBA players are renowned for being prone to going broke after their pro stint. Wikipedia points to a source stating that an estimated 60% of NBA players are bankrupt within 5 years of retirement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professio...

Shaq managed to not only not go bankrupt but also significantly grow his NBA wealth.

I agree that there is something uncanny about this site. I can't tell if I am looking at something genius, like someone describing something real but beyond the limits of my own imagination. Or if I am looking at the work of someone who has gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Agreed, that’s the way I see it. I’m not at all convinced that Zuckerberg would have been as successful if he hadn’t chanced upon the Facebook idea, (which history clearly shows wasn’t even 100% his). He hasn’t demonstrated any success independent of this initial idea.

I would say more like he's one in a million. That would mean that about 8000 people around the world are about as good or better than him.

Obviously, this is not a number that I or anyone else can fully provide evidence for. And it's a number with a huge uncertainty range. maybe he's one in one hundred thousand or one in ten million, or even one in a billion. He made it to the top 10 richest men in the world after all.

But 0.01% is one in ten thousand, and he's well above that. One in ten thousand means that you have someone of similar caliber in many small cities, and you have hundreds or thousands like him in cities such as NYC, or Beijing or Tokyo. And I don't think this is the case.

What makes Zuckerberg (and Bezos, and Musk) special, is not only their talents, but their capacity for hard work, their laser focus, and extremely importantly, the ability to delegate appropriately.

Let's start with talent: Zuck is immensely gifted. We all know he was able to code v 1.0 of Facebook by himself. At the age of maybe 19 or so. But he was not just a nerd who knew programming and only that. He has studied and got good at Greek and Latin. How has enough intellectual span to master dead languages and network protocols at the same time? As a teenager.

Hard work. Laser focus. I'll skip that. We know that Musk has bouts of sleeping in the office when the scheisse hits the fan. Most likely people who know Zuck can share similar stories.

But the delegation is the thing I want to dwell a bit on.

When you are immensely talented, delegating things is challenging. In many cases, the people who you delegate things to are not as good as you. It might take you one afternoon to do task X, and take them a whole week. But delegate you must, because there are too many tasks, and too few hours in a day.

Some people find that difficult. And they tend to under-delegate. Some people over-delegate, and that is bad too. Finding the "just-right" Goldilocks zone is extraordinarily difficult.

As a historic example I'll use the commanders of the British Grand Fleet in WW1. John Jellicoe, the commander in chief, and David Beatty, the commander of the 1st Battlecruiser squadron, or roughly speaking, the second in command. Jellicoe was a guy with an unparalleled technical expertise, at a time when the technological landscape in battleship affairs was changing every 5 years. He had problems delegating. He overworked himself. Beatty was delegating too much, to the point that he was accused (not without merit) of negligence. Together they managed to somehow not win a victory at Jutland in mid 1916, when they were outnumbering the German High Seas Fleet by at least 50%. Had they won, the war would have finished practically then and there, sparing Europe 2 years and a few million deaths of an incomprehensibly brutal war.

A war later, and a continent away, the commanders of the US Navy were Ernest King and Chester Nimitz. Both supremely technically competent, both aggressive (King especially, aggressive like a tiger). The difference: their ability to delegate. That's why the US Navy steamrolled the IJ Navy in WW2, while the British Grand Fleet only managed to contain the German High Seas Fleet in WW1.

Now, when you delegate, finding the appropriate person is difficult enough. But demoting people is by far more difficult. Nimitz correctly identified that the admiral in charge of the Guadalcanal campaign was in over his head, and sacked him. And replaced him with an admiral that was aggressive like an Attila the Hun.

Zuck identified that Saverin was not performing. And he sacked him. Such a decision is not easy, I'm sure he agonized many sleepless nights over it. But he did it.

Bezos can see with his own eyes that his Blue Origin thing is lagging many years behind SpaceX. But he's not willing or able to do a shakeup. He's not willing or able to learn everything there is to know about rockets, and go sleep in the office for a few weeks until things get better.

Delegation is a very rare talent. And you can't learn that in school. You have to learn it in life as you go. But life is brutal, and mistakes cost dearly. Zuck was able to learn and make very few mistakes, and what mistakes he did, he was able to fix.