Year after year, Mar Zuckerberg challenges himself to do something to change himself for the better including reading more books and learning a new language. This year it seems as the philanthropic founder of Facebook is taking on two challenges, creating an AI butler like JARVIS and running 365 miles.
Zuckerberg usually does these challenges with the community of users on his website. While not a lot of people can create their very own artificial intelligence, surely more than a handful of people can run 365 miles in a year. He announced the physical challenge on his Facebook page hoping that it would have the same success as the "A Year of Books" initiative.
Since it has been announced "A Year of Running" now has its own official Facebook page with over 40,000 members pledging to run the same 365-mile distance throughout the year. "This is a lot of running, but it's not a crazy amount. It's a mile a day, and at a moderate pace it's less than 10 minutes of running per day," Zuckerberg wrote.
On the other hand, his AI invention is more of a personal challenge to him. "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," Zuckerberg wrote on his official Facebook page.
A lot of people are believers that Zuckerberg can actually pull both of these challenges off. For his 2010 challenge, he learned how to speak Mandarin in a year. In 2015, he gave a speech at Tsinghua University, completely in Mandarin. The year before, he did a 30-minute Q$A in Mandarin as well.
He also would not have much problem with resources. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, even though he has pledged 99 percent of his Facebook stock's worth to charity, he would still have more or less $450 million dollars in his pockets given the current valuation of the stock.
