Mark Zuckerberg and Tom Sawyer

We’ve heard the famous Tom Sawyer and his fence story. Of how Tom presented a punishment (painting the fence) as something attractive, so much so that his friends begged to paint the fence…and in some cases, even paid for a piece of the punishment, er, action.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, did something similar in 2007. When he was still at Harvard, he was spending so much time with his company that he hardly attended any classes. So when this art test was due, Zuckerberg had no idea of the course contents (Yeah, I know: most of us had no idea of our course contents at college even without forming companies, so does that make us smarter than Zuckerberg?!). Anyways, dropping out of college is not that uncommon, but to flunk out doesn’t sound so good, does it? So he posted all the images he should have studied on a web page and sent a mail to his classmates offering a “study guide”. Bingo! They posted the information about each image. Plus, they even filtered the most important parts. Which Zuckerberg used to pass the test.

Now that sounds like the modern day version of Tom Sawyer. Or as Rachel from Friends said, “Kind of like a fairy tale for the digital age”.

Comments

  1. Geetha KumarDecember 1, 2010 at 6:38 PM

    The parallel is so amazing! And to think this was fiction being lived out in real life!

    ReplyDelete

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