Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg sets himself a “personal challenge” every year, from wearing a tie every day in 2009 and learning to speak Mandarin in 2010 to only eating meat in 2011 if he killed the animal himself.
Now Zuckerberg is turning to Facebook’s 1.35 billion users for ideas for his challenge in 2015.
“I’m crowdsourcing ideas for my next year’s personal challenge. For background, every year I take on a challenge to broaden my perspective and learn something about the world beyond my work at Facebook,” he explained in a public post on the social network.
“I have an idea of what my next challenge might be, but I’m open to more ideas before the new year officially begins.”
Other challenges undertaken by Zuckerberg in recent years include “meeting one new person who doesn’t work at Facebook every day” and “writing a thank you note each day to someone who made the world better” according to his post.
Within four hours of the post being published, more than 26,000 people had submitted comments, with several suggestions receiving replies from Zuckerberg giving his opinion.
Run one mile every day, rain or shine? “Interesting idea!”. Learn an instrument? “Great idea. I learned how to play guitar a while back but I could definitely improve.” Learn how to dance? “This would certainly be a challenge for me.” Read a new book every month chosen by someone else? “I really like this idea.”
A request for Facebook do more to celebrate Muslim holidays elicited the response that “We should definitely do more to celebrate Muslim holidays on Facebook”, but Zuckerberg stressed that his annual challenge is personal, rather than Facebook-related.
At the time of writing, suggestions that Zuckerberg read the Bible cover to cover, “make a baby”, record a hip-hop album or “delete users who send Candy Crush invites” have yet to receive replies from the CEO.
