The Key to the Facebook Movie

Paul Graham's classic essay on why nerds are not popular may help explain the improbable rise of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

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In honor of the Facebook movie, The Social Network, which opens at the New York Film Festival this evening and which depicts founder Mark Zuckerberg in all his socially awkward glory, here's Paul Graham's classic essay on why nerds are unpopular. It explains why these same unpopular kids often go on to create great things. Money quote:

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

...In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things. 

If you have a quiet moment this weekend, I heartily recommend the entire essay, which was published as part of lovely book called Hackers and Painters.

Senior contributing writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. @chafkin