My personal opinion is that Zuckerberg is damn smart, but as thinkcomp points out below, he shouldn't have a monopoly on the "syndrome" as there are a ton of sm

My personal opinion is that Zuckerberg is damn smart, but as thinkcomp points out below, he shouldn't have a monopoly on the "syndrome" as there are a ton of smart people out there who we haven't heard of. I remember reading articles on HN and elsewhere about a fellow who managed to write drivers for the Kinect within a day or two after launch. To me, stuff like that is ludicrously smart. Edit: From the article(I went back and reread it): "Reading HN for the pass 3 years, you come across smart if not brilliant "hacking" minds. People who build projects in a weekend that would take me months. I got sucked into the belief that unless I had unbelievable programming skills I will not be able to create anything worthwhile. I call it the Zuckerberg Syndrome." After reading it again, I'm not sure what exactly the "syndrome" is here. Is it putting someone like Zuckerberg on a pedestal and thinking, "I can't match that so why try?" I think a lot people are affected by that sort of thinking in many facets of life. It's important to keep in mind that Facebook was NOT built in a day or weekend, for that matter. It took a lot of time.