Sacrifices and friends

Mark Zuckerberg recently donated a lot of money to schools in Newark, NJ. In this video clip, the superstar mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, shows Zuckerberg around one of the schools. Booker’s impromptu speech is good. Sacrifice and hard work are essential to success of any kind – and we should all eat right and exercise for 30 minutes a day (that’s my advice). My question is about the nature of the sacrifice. Booker mentions giving up time with friends. I’m not sure that would have been on the top of my list. Granted, I’m not a superstar mayor or a billionaire computer genius. I think it is true our culture demands that we sacrifice relationships – friends and families alike – in order to achieve. It’s an expectation but is it a good one? A healthy one? Should we be conditioning our kids to chose between their friends and their dreams? I’d argue that the lack of appreciation for humanity, the disconnection of the great and the good from the rest of us is a primary contributing factor to the Great Recession. It is precisely that we are willing to sacrifice our friends (let alone colleagues, employees, shareholders) for the sake of success (most often defined as power and money) that so many are suffering.What you give up to do what you do is a question of character. Sacrificing some play time is fine but let’s be careful here. Let’s not let the virtue of sacrifice be the corruption of relationship. Finally, because I love irony, I am left wondering if anyone else appreciates that Booker is making the case against Facebook. His speech encourages giving up TV and time with friends. If anyone else were giving that talk, I’d bet that they’d mention giving up wasting time on Facebook. Zuckerberg’s a pretty quick guy, I wonder what he was thinking.