Adonis Diaries

Mark Zuckerberg kept a notebook :

His plans for world domination in handwritten journals.

by wiredscience

In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals.

He destroyed them. But a few revealing pages survived and WIRED’s Steven Levy found them. He writes: –

“The first time I met Zuckerberg, he was living in a one-­bedroom apartment a short walk from the Facebook offices … Always with him was one of his notebooks. Those who visited his apartment, with its mattress on the floor and barely used kitchen, might spot a stack of completed journals … He sketched out product ideas, diagrammed coding approaches, and slipped in bits of his philosophy …”
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“Zuckerberg was no longer doing much coding; he was focused mostly on the big picture.

The notebooks allowed him to work out his vision in detail.

When Facebook engineers and designers rolled in to the office, they would sometimes find a few photocopied pages from the notebooks at their workstations. The pages might contain a design for a front end or a list of signals for a ranking algorithm.

He was still finding his way as a communicator, and the pages often opened up a conversation between the recipients and their boss.

They also imbued Zucker­berg’s thoughts with a kind of inevitability. The printed page can’t be deleted or altered, or forwarded in infinitely duplicable digital form. Whiteboards appeared in abundance in every Facebook office, and employees couldn’t survive without excellent dry-eraser skills.

But a Zuck notebook carried the sanctity of a papal decree.”
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“The notebooks have now mostly disappeared, destroyed by Zuckerberg himself. He says he did it for privacy reasons.

This is in keeping with sentiments he expressed to me about the pain of having many of his early IMs and emails exposed in the aftermath of legal proceedings.

“Would you want every joke that you made to someone being printed and taken out of context later?” he asks …

But I discovered that those early writings aren’t totally lost …

I got ahold of a 17-page chunk from what might be the most significant of his journals in terms of Facebook’s evolution. He named it ‘Book of Change.‘”

Click the link in our bio to read Steve Levy’s full story.
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