Huang Want’s you to feel the pain

Isaac Taylor

Some of the best and brightest the world has to offer gathered to hear what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had to say at the 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit at Stanford. He was asked just how could graduates find success.

“For all of you Stanford students,” he said, “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

He elaborated that he had very low expectations, which helped give him resilience. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

“Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations.”

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience, and unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. To this day I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee.”

He elaborated much like my parents would when facing me as a child with a challenging situation. “I meant that in a happy way because you wanna refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them, and greatness is not intelligence; greatness comes from character, and character isn’t formed out of smart people. It’s formed out of people who suffered.”

Huang had to work his way up to his 2.2 Trillion dollar company, reportedly working minimum wage gigs washing dishes and cleaning toilets before getting an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University before making that a masters degree at Stanford in 1992. He worked briefly doing designs for AMD in the early 90s before co-founding Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. He’s held onto the top spot for 30 years while other silicon valley companies come and go. He’s now the 17th richest person on earth.