A Letter from Zuckerberg to His Daughter

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This post was last edited by PU3618988 on 2016-3-14 at 16:34. Dear Max, your birth has brought us great hope; your mother and I simply can’t find the right words to express it. You have a wonderful new life; we hope you live a healthy, happy, and fulfilling life. Your arrival has become a reason for us to reflect on what kind of world is the one we hope you will live in. Like all parents in the world, we hope the world in which you grow up will be better than the world we have today. Although the news always reports on where there are problems, in many ways the world is moving in a positive direction. Health standards are improving, the poor population is decreasing, knowledge is accumulating, and people are becoming more connected to one another. Technological advancements in various fields mean that life in the future will be **better than it is today**. We will do our part to make this happen, not only because we love you, but also because we have a moral responsibility to all future generations of children. There are mainly two things we hope to achieve for your generation: enhancing human potential and promoting equality. Enhancing human potential is about making life more excellent. Can your knowledge and experience be 100 times greater than ours today? Can our generation cure diseases, enable you to lead healthier lives and enjoy longer lifespans? Can we connect the world, allowing you to access every idea, every person, and every opportunity? Can we harness more clean energy, enabling you to invent things that are beyond our imagination today while protecting the environment? Can we foster entrepreneurship, allowing you to create businesses of all types, solve problems, and thus achieve peace, prosperity, and development? Promoting equality means ensuring that everyone has access to these opportunities—regardless of ethnicity, family background, or origin. Our society must do this – it is not just a matter of fairness or charity; it relates to the greatness of human progress. If you don’t have a healthy childhood, it’s difficult to reach your full potential. If you have to worry about food or rent, or if you are afraid of abuse and threats to your safety, it is difficult to reach your full potential. If you are afraid that you won’t be able to get into college and end up in prison because of your skin color, if you are deported due to issues related to the legality of your status, or if you might become a victim of violence because of your religious beliefs or gender identity, then it will be difficult for you to realize your full potential. We need the system to recognize that all these problems do not exist in isolation. The new type of school that your mother is establishing will implement this philosophy. By working together with schools, health centers, parent-teacher associations, and local authorities, we can ensure that all children have what they need in terms of clothing and food, and receive careful care from an early age; once we are connected with one another, we can begin to address such issues of inequality. Only then will we work together to ensure equality for everyone. There is still much that our generation can do to ensure that your generation lives in a better world. Today, I and your mother promise to devote the rest of our lives to contributing our part to overcoming these challenges. For the next few years, I will continue to serve as Facebook’s CEO, but these issues cannot wait until you grow up or until we get older to be addressed. By starting early, we hope to see some compounding benefits throughout our lives. When you became the new successor to the Zuckerberg family, we also launched the \"Mark Zuckerberg Charity Initiative\" to work with others to unlock people’s potential and create equal opportunities for future generations. At the beginning, we will focus on personalized medicine*, disease treatment, connecting people, and building strong communities. To fulfill this mission, we will donate 99% of our shares in Facebook in the future—worth approximately $45 billion at present. We know that these contributions are insignificant compared to the resources and talent invested by those who are already working to solve these problems. But we want to do our part and work together with many such people. When we become parents and embark on a new chapter in life, we want to express our deepest gratitude to those who made this possible. Max, we love you, and we consider it our responsibility to leave a better world for you and all children. We hope your life is also filled with love, hope, and joy – just as you have given to us. We can’t wait to see what you’ll bring to this world. Excerpt from Beijing Youth Daily