书城英文图书人生处处充满选择
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第18章 关于成功(5)

超过三成的Facebook用户在注册时登记过电话号码,所以对我们这个应用是很重要的。所以在设计产品的时候就要做这种取舍。我觉得这样做好像不对,一直在想什么会更有用?要么将用户信息对所有人开放,但这却让人们觉得在这样的网络中分享自己的所感所想不太安全,还是只将更多的用户信息和状态展示给少部分与该用户有关的人。我要做很多类似的决定,而且这些决定是要靠直觉判断的。

我们一直努力以最学术的态度去谨慎地思考不同方式所能产生的不同结果。但多数时候,你得先确定你的目标,你要的是什么。对我们来说,是寻求长期的整个社区及用户群体的利益最大化,注意是长期的,而不是短期的。然后就是为更好地达到这一目标而努力。

延伸阅读

马克·扎克伯格,1984年出生,在美国纽约州白原市长大。哈佛大学计算机和心理学专业辍学生。美国社交网站Facebook的创办人,被人们冠以“第二盖茨”的美誉。他是2008年全球最年轻的巨富,也是历来全球最年轻的自行创业亿万富豪。

trade-off n.交易; 权衡

profile n.侧面;外形,轮廓;vt.描……的轮廓; 给……画侧面图

objectives n.目标

Failure Is an Option, but Fear Is Not

失败是一个选项,但恐惧不是

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it,s a failure, you will fail above everyone else,s success.

如果你设定了一个几乎无法企及的目标,即使最终失败了,但你的失败依然比他人的成功高明。

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.

And you know that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn,t in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking “samples”-frogs and snakes and bugs, and bringing them back, looking at them under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.

And my love of science fiction actually seemed to mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late, 60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.

And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren,t video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author,s description put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was, the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.

And an interesting thing happened-Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday. That seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.

So, I decided I was going to become an exotic scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn,t let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool in a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn,t see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.

Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I,ve spent about 3,000 hours underwater, And 500 hours of that were in submersibles. And I,ve learned that deep ocean environment, and even the shallow ocean, is so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature,s imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.

But, when I chose a career, as an adult, it was film making. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories, with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, film making was the way to put pictures and stories together. And that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss. And with The Abyss, I was putting together my love of underwater and diving, with film making. So, you know, merging the two passions.

Something interesting came out of The Abyss, which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn,t make any money, barely broke even, I should say, I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic.

You know, it,s Arthur Clarke,s law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, “Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art.” So, with Terminator 2, which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did. And we created magic again. And we had the same result with an audience. Although we did make a little more money on that one.

So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience, came to, this is going to be a whole new world, this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leap-frog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while.