Mark Zuckerberg gives up setting himself annual challenges and instead focuses on Facebook in 2030

'This decade I'm going to take a longer term focus,' Facebook boss promises

(EPA)

Mark Zuckerberg has given up his annual tradition of setting himself challenges.

The Facebook boss says that he will instead focus on his long-term goals, looking forward to 2030.

Each year, Zuckerberg has traditionally set himself a personal challenge with the aim of gaining new skills outside of his work at Facebook.

They have included building a robot assistant for his house, reading more books, running, learning Mandarin and cooking food that he hunted himself.

But he now says that they will be left in the last decade and he will instead be looking forwards with a host of new goals.

"When I started these challenges, my life was almost all about building the Facebook website. (It was mostly a website at the time.) Now there's so much more to learn from," he wrote in a public Facebook post.

"So while I'm glad I did annual challenges over the last decade, it's time to do something different."

He said that he had picked his new goals by thinking about "what I hope the world and my life will look in 2030 so I can make sure I'm focusing on those things".

He grouped the goals under a number of headings: "Generational Change", "A New Private Social Platform", "Decentralizing Opportunity", "The Next Computing Platform", and "New Forms of Governance".

Many of the commitments were vague and related to values rather than practical change. But some signalled new aims for the development of Facebook itself.

They included a commitment to decentralisation, which appears to be in keeping with Facebook's plans to build its own cryptocurrency in an attempt to replace cash. "Over the next decade, we hope to build the commerce and payments tools so that every small business has easy access to the same technology that previously only big companies have had," he wrote, without making explicit reference to the company's troubled cryptocurrency plans.

He also reiterated a suggestion that Facebook will be focusing on privacy, and appeared to suggest that it was one of the company's aims to allow social interaction to become more intimate. "For the next decade, some of the most important social infrastructure will help us reconstruct all kinds of smaller communities to give us that sense of intimacy again," he wrote.