‘Go outside and play’ Zuckerberg tells daughter

In 2015, when Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s first daughter, Max, was born, they wrote her a letter in which they promised to create “a world better than ours today”. They announced the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, and pledged $45 billion worth of Facebook shares to help it achieve this.

This week, their letter to their second daughter, August, was much shorter. “Childhood is magical,” they told her. “Don’t spend it worrying too much about the future.” They advised her: “Go outside and play… take time to smell all the flowers.”

Although both letters are full of love, they strike a very different tone. “August might feel a bit slighted by her distinctly lighter welcome,” wrote Jenny Anderson in Quartz. “But let’s face it: Her prescription for life sounds a whole lot more fun.”

For the author Steven Johnson, it might even be more important. In his most recent book, Wonderland, he argues that history is not just about wars, elections, and sweeping industrial change. It is also about play.

“Because play is often about breaking rules and experimenting… it turns out to be the seedbed for many innovations,” he says.

Take The Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanisms, written by the engineer al-Jazari in 1206. Its detailed designs foreshadow inventions like the internal combustion engine, which revolutionised the world 600 years later.

But al-Jazari’s book is filled with “objects of amusement and mimicry,” explains Johnson. They include robotic musicians, and a giant clock shaped like an elephant.

He argues that history is filled with such examples. The artificial intelligence robots we see today began as amusing “automatons” displayed in London during the 18th century. Elsewhere in the city, women’s desire for soft fabrics was inspiring global trade networks, and men’s taste for coffee was shaping everything from journalism to the insurance industry.

Even Facebook, Zuckerberg’s own world-changing invention, was born out of an online game.

Game on

Johnson is right, say more playful souls. The best ideas don’t come from serious study and lofty intellectualism. They come from being curious, letting your imagination wander, and mucking around without worrying about making mistakes. The advice given to August is not just useful to children — we should all take life a little less seriously.

We live in a serious world, respond others. Frivolity is a nice luxury, but we achieve most of our goals through a mix of hard work and determination. Zuckerberg and Chan’s letter to Max in 2015 acknowledged this: “We have a moral responsibility to all children in the next generation,” they told her. Those children’s lives will not be improved by play alone.