Zuckerberg’s advice for entrepreneurs: ‘What ends up mattering is the stuff you get right’

Yesterday at a live town hall, Facebook CEO and professional T-shirt model Mark Zuckerberg took questions from around the world, answering a few inquiries about his advice for new entrepreneurs. His response was really quite elegant: “What ends up mattering is the stuff you get right.”

Zuckerberg had mentioned a few times throughout the Q&A that he thinks entrepreneurs focus on the wrong things. “Don’t worry about mistakes too much,” he said. “The real question is how to learn from them.”

He tells his management team, “Even people who are very successful, most of the things you did were wrong.”

Zuckerberg said he was inspired after a reading a book about Albert Einstein. The iconic scientist successfully proved that space and time were unified but was wrong about his theory on black holes. “No one remembers that he got that wrong.”

To that end, Zuckerberg said, he reminds himself not to waste a lot of time rehashing rather than moving forward. “It’s so easy for your time to get eaten up as reactive.” So he focuses on building rather than getting caught up in the criticism of others.

“You need to get a few things right and you can make a big, important change in the world,” he concluded.