Steve Jobs Advised Mark Zuckerberg To Visit An Indian Temple When Facebook Wasn’t Doing Well

This story dates back to the time when Facebook was yet to become the social media phenomenon we know of today. Mark Zuckerberg, very recently, revealed to Narendra Modi how a trip to an Indian temple, on the urging of Late Steve Jobs, might have played a crucial role in Facebook’s massive success.

So, Zuckerberg once spent almost a month travelling to India because Steve Jobs suggested it would help him seek a divine intervention and reconnect with Facebook’s original mission!

Reuters

"Early on in our history when things weren't really going well - we had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook - I went and I met with Steve Jobs and he said that to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company, I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the evolution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be," Zuckerberg explained during a town hall meet with Narendra Modi.

This led to Zuckerberg flying down to Pantnagar, which is about 65 km from Nainital, and then driving to the ashram of Neeb Karori Baba (who’s also known as the incarnation of Lord Hanuman), at Kainchi Dham Ashram in Nainital, to seek his spiritual guidance. Although this learned man died in 1973, he still continues to fascinate several high-profile Americans, including actress Julia Roberts. Apparently, Steve Jobs also got his multi-million dollar idea of creating Apple at this very place.

Flickr

Zuckerberg, whose company currently has a market capitalization of over $254 billion and nearly 1.5 billion Facebook users every month, further added, "so I went and I traveled for almost a month, and seeing the people, seeing how people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing and that is something I've always remembered over the last 10 years as we've built Facebook."

Upon hearing this, PM Narendra Modi couldn’t help but smile and quip, "You went to a temple with a lot of hope, and look how much you've achieved since then."