Ingredients for Ungodly Success: Zuckerberg’s Laser Focus

I’ve been excited about seeing the new Facebook movie. As we sat through a solid 25 minute marathon of coming attractions, I alternated between fascination at the new movies I hadn’t ever heard about, and happy that most of the time when I watch a film I can flit right past these annoying cinematic finger foods. It was fun being in a theater again though, and I must say that the movie was rich with irony and well acted.

Especially notable was Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, who he resembles and who he portrays as an ADHD-addled young adult who races from idea to idea and who never stops focusing like a laser beam on his project. Clearly that’s the making of greatness–obsession that ends with sleeping on a laptop keyboard night after night, long after everyone’s gone home.

My only beef with the movie is veracity…Pop singer Justin Timberlake plays Shawn Fanning (known here as Shawn Parker) and we are lead to believe that he had a great influence on the young Zuckerberg. Yet no where can I find any truth that Fanning in real life is an actual owner of the megasite. Since the producers used real names including the actual Facebook logo, wouldn’t this have to ring close to what really happened? I don’t think so, but the main point of the film was to portray Zuckerberg, and his preposterous success. On this point, he succeeds.

Martin Varsavsky wrote a column in Huffpost declaring that the movie’s portrayal of the young genius was spot on. That he was that obsessed with Facebook, and was lacking in peripheral vision–he only saw Facebook and lived only to work on it. In fact the only judgement error Varsavsky said he made was claiming that he’d only be worth 10 billion, while in fact his 25% stake is valued at least twice as high.