i hope when the author refers to zuck's "rejection", he/she isn't referring to the narrative popularized by The Social Network movie that he started facemash/facebook purely motivated by getting rejected by girls (or 'mainstream society'). from what i've heard and read from the news, it doesn't seem like zuck was a 'reject' at all. he grew up in an upper-middle-class community, went to a prestigious boarding school, then Harvard, all while having great opportunities to develop his amazing hacking talent. it seems like he grew up surrounded by geeks and other uber-smart people, so i hardly think that the origins of facebook were from a sense of 'rejection' (although that makes for a more sensational blog post).

There is a chinese proverb that also says something along these lines: "In order to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand."