Jen-Hsun Huang has a simple message for young people who want to achieve “greatness”: No pain, no gain.
That was essentially the message the Nvidia executive delivered to students at his alma mater, Stanford University, where he spoke last week. Stanford Institute for Economic Policy.
“Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And character is not formed by smart people, it is formed by people who suffer,” Huang said at the event in response to a question about how students can maximize their opportunities. is succeeding.
When it comes to success, Huang knows more than most. In 1993, he co-founded computer chip company Nvidia and served as CEO for more than three decades. The company’s success made Huang a billionaire. Now, with Nvidia chips in high demand for building AI software, the company has become one of the world’s most valuable companies, valued at more than $2 trillion.
Huang himself is one of the richest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of $77.6 billionAccording to Bloomberg.
For Huang, there is one special trait that makes anyone more likely to succeed: resilience. At last week’s event, he spoke to Stanford University students about how he personally developed the resilience needed to build and run one of the world’s most valuable companies.
“People with high expectations have very low adaptability.”
“One of my strengths is that I have very low expectations,” Huang said, noting that most Stanford graduates “have very high expectations” because of their elite education.
He went on to say that often “people with high expectations have low adaptability” because they are not used to failure and are not prepared for it.
“Unfortunately, resilience is critical to success,” he said. “I don’t know how to teach you unless I want pain to happen to you.”
Psychologists tend to believe that building resilience is a key factor in determining future success.research shows Resilient people are more likely to have the strength and confidence to cope with challenges and recover from failure.
Huang did struggle in the early days of the company. Nvidia nearly went bankrupt in 1996 as it struggled to compete with other chip makers. This forced Huang to lay off more than half of his staff.
The experience taught Huang “a better understanding of the market and consumer needs,” and he In an interview with Fortune magazine in 2001which meant abandoning the company’s previous technology and betting on a new type of chip that ended up being a major success.
“To this day, I still feel very comfortable using the word ‘pain and suffering’ within the company,” Huang told Stanford University students. “I mean that in a happy way, because you want to refine the identity of the company. You want them to achieve great things.”
Build a “tolerance for failure” so you can innovate and succeed
Low expectations can help you prepare for the inevitable challenges ahead, Huang says, because it’s easy to be caught off guard by obstacles when you only expect smooth sailing. That’s why Huang said that despite Nvidia’s huge success, he still worries that the company may ultimately fail.
He believes that any good leader must constantly think about how close a company is to collapse: “If you don’t internalize that sensitivity, you’re going to collapse.” he said in october.
Likewise, Huang said in a report that being mindful of your own likelihood of failure can help build a “tolerance for failure,” ultimately freeing you from the fear of failure that may be holding you back from success. Earlier speech to Stanford University studentsin 2011.
“Unless you can tolerate failure, you will never experiment, and if you don’t experiment, you will never innovate,” he said at the time. “If you don’t innovate, you won’t succeed.”
With that in mind, Huang told a group of new undergraduates last week that he expects them to go through their own character-building struggles: “For all of you Stanford students, I want you to have enough pain and suffering.”
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