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Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

101 points by Netherland4TW 3y ago

TheFullStack 3y ago
"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering" - funny, my ex wife said the same!
dheera 3y ago
[flagged]
joewadcan 3y ago
https://archive.is/Ulpz2 https://archive.is/Ulpz2
dbcooper 3y ago
[flagged]
- vlan0 3y ago
  Have you stopped to think why this bothers you?
  - dbcooper 3y ago
    Why not just have everyone speak in pidgin then ...
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    They have high expectations
Aloha 3y ago
There is some truth in this - We do a poor job of preparing youth for making choices in adulthood, and understanding the consequences of those choices. I think we need to do better at offering youth (during adolescence) what could functionally be 'adulthood with training wheels'
homefree 3y ago
It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it. He argues resilience is created through suffering (which plays into the idea that if you want to know who will be a good founder, ask about their childhood). It makes me curious though about the direction of the causality - how much is resilience actually about temperament and genetics vs. the environmental experience of suffering. Why do some people become resilient from suffering and others become unable to succeed in life. Maybe suffering just reveals the types of people that are already resilient? My hypothesis is there's some baseline and people have different predispositions based on their personality, but that resilience can also be improved by learning how to handle difficult situations better (and what kinds of thought patterns you allow yourself to have) - a kind of emotional observation/regulation/understanding. The opposite of what current identity politics/seeing yourself as a perpetual victim of 'trauma' plays into (imo this makes people a lot less resilient). It's possible that's something you can only really develop through suffering (maybe this is Jensen's point), but it might also be able to be something that can be learned even without suffering - though people may have less reason to truly internalize it until it's tested.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Traumatic early childhood experiences (suffering) can cause profoundly negative, irreversible effects on a child's brain development that will have issues persist well into adulthood and beyond - I don't think his take is scientific. edit: not sure why downvoted, here's a source if you don't believe me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yep, I'm with you. I think this "suffering is necessary" point Huang is making is his weakest point. Maybe a more nuanced version of it that I think would be a stronger point is that there is a "sweet spot" of life challenges - not too much, but also not too little - that increase the odds of positive outcomes for people. But as you say, people who experience extreme suffering are much more likely to experience a lifetime of profound difficulty than to become a great auteur, entrepreneur, or leader.
vlan0 3y ago
>“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” This is important. We are limitless potential. To embody that, is to understand that life is uncertain. It's great to set goals. But don't take them too seriously. Or you will get lost in the concept.
- not2b 3y ago
  [flagged]
- dont_dox_me_bro 3y ago
  I really wonder what he means by low expectations as a billionaire? I'm guessing it's drastically different than the 70 year olds I know working retail jobs so they don't die from poverty.
  - cpach 3y ago
    He didn’t really say that he expects to starve or anything like that, did he? I assumed that the framing of the article was something like this: doing business, technological development and working inside corporations. Not food security or life in general.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    My read is that he's just making the same point as the stoics (and I'm sure many others, I'm just most familiar with it from stoicism), to not expect or fall into the trap of feeling entitled to good things. In stoicism, this is the point beneath the oft-caricatured practice of contemplating that death could come at any moment. If you don't expect or feel entitled to even just living from moment to moment, then it's (in theory) easier to see that each additional moment of life is a gift, and each good thing that does happen to you, all the more so. Personally, I struggle to actually achieve serenity and positivity from this in practice, though I do find it compelling in theory.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      It really depends who's saying it to you at the time. It's true that being able to cope instead of fall apart is a useful power for you. It's also true that anyone with any form of authority over you would love nothing better than for you to never demand anything.
brushfoot 3y ago
Reminds me obliquely of what Jack Cowin told an MBA class, as quoted in Rafael Badziag's _The Billion Dollar Secret_: "You guys have a big disadvantage over what I had. When I finished university, I got a job offer of $6,000 a year, and you're going to get a job offer of $150,000. You're going to develop a lifestyle. You're going to join the golf club, you're going to have private school for your kids. You're going to buy a big mortagage. You are going to become a prisoner of that lifestyle. When I made the decision I was going to go into business, I had everything to gain, not much to lose."
- hinkley 3y ago
  When I was young everyone told me to start saving early because compound interest. Every dollar you don’t spend today will be $30 when you retire! That is the least interesting reason to start saving early. In fact it’s such a bad reason it probably puts people off the concept. Few enough people actually listen to it that it makes you wonder. Every dollar you don’t spend at 25 is a dollar off of your expectation of standard of living. Which is a dollar you don’t need at retirement. And saving early means stock market usage early, and stock market losses early. The sooner you learn not to lose your shirt on the stock market the better. And that’s when you have a few thousand to lose on the market instead of later, when it’s tens of thousands. Those are the reasons you start early, and start small.
- schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  This is just the myth they build for themselves though. In reality, you have far more to lose when you start out with nothing because if you fail Daddy's not going to pay for you to go back to school and do your plan B. You have no safety net. Empirically, this bears out as well. Successful entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly from the upper-middle/upper classes.
  - brushfoot 3y ago
    I like it because it was useful to me in quitting a well-paying job and venturing out on my own. Which was terrifying! Especially when, two weeks after I quit, a competitor announced they were giving away the feature I built my business around for free. It's been a wild ride.
cowboyscott 3y ago
This reminds me of the speech Bill Murray’s character gives at the start of Rushmore [0]: > You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you. 0: https://youtu.be/m5RbdReBMLE?si=ZfY166PU1ti5_QCg https://youtu.be/m5RbdReBMLE?si=ZfY166PU1ti5_QCg
- wslh 3y ago
  Rushmore, I think one of the greatest movies ever (and i don't like other Anderson's movies [1]). Going back to the topic I think Jensen is right 99.9999 % of the time. An exception could be Bill Gates and I don't think that is because him was born in a priviledged family but because he has an unique drive [2]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41611.Hard_Drive https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41611.Hard_Drive
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Man, I dunno, I tend to agree that Rushmore is his best (at the least, it has had the most influence on me), but I think it's a very close thing between it and The Royal Tannenbaums. (But after that there is certainly a large gap to the next best.)
    - wslh 3y ago
      I agree that could be a stretch but Rushmore does not only depict a nerd but one that is creative and iconoclast. Many times we have a bond with a movie for personal reasons that are not shared with the rest. I shared my ranking where there are movies which are classical top and others personal takes. That is the reason to create these (non algorithmic/AI) lists: share and help others to move from the average^average.
StefanBatory 3y ago
It's painful article but it's true. We have to remember that none of us deserves anything not that we have any right for anything; nothing is given and we have to work hard for that.
- dont_dox_me_bro 3y ago
  Do you think he would feel the same if the government split apart Nvidia and forced them to either sell the software (CUDA) or hardware as separate companies? After all, it's not like he has the right to run his company at the detriment of society. Opening up CUDA would be a massive net gain to humanity, or at least allowing more open source software to run on Nvidia hardware. This is just an extremely tone deaf article from a billionaire. This is a really terrible message to put out, especially where once upon a time America truly tried to make a "great society" through new deal programs and civil rights advancement; but nowadays the political climate is trash, largely thanks to the elite class rat fucking it into submission.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I mean, I have no idea what he would say or how he would truly feel about that happening. But the philosophy he is espousing here is not incompatible with that. If he truly and successfully adheres to it (a big if!), the right response would be to feel that he had no expectation that the government would never step in to split up his company, and instead feel only appreciation that he was able to build and run it in the form he wanted, and to enjoy its profits, for as long as he did. It's a very hard philosophy to actually adhere to! It's pretty natural for humans to feel entitled to the good things they already have, even when they know they shouldn't.
  - StefanBatory 3y ago
    His response would be that government most likely has no right to break the company in the first place, as it's immoral/not theirs to touch. I can't tell if that'd be correct or not, though
- watwut 3y ago
  The other reality is that if you expect nothing, you will get nothing. If you expect low salary, you will get low salary no matter how hard you work or what skills you have. Working hard on itself does not bring rewards. Asking for what you want and negotiating brings rewards.
donflamenco 3y ago
I would recommend the full video on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk Another fascinating bit is when he describes the flat management structure NVDA has. He, as CEO, has 58 direct reports and no scheduled one on ones. Feedback is given constantly (up and down.).
- sanderjd 3y ago
  No 1:1s sounds miserable. I don't want to give or receive feedback "constantly", I have other things to do constantly. I want to have a set periodic time where I know I will not be interrupted by my manager "sharing feedback", and will not be interrupting them with my feedback. I suspect that in practice, relatively little feedback is being shared either up or down within such a structure, as people are busy working and never hit their set time reminding them to think through what feedback they have.
  - sahila 3y ago
    1:1s are okay when you're an IC and have it with your manager. The problem is the flipside is when your manager has many ICs, then it doesn't scale properly. Imagine Jensen having 58 reoccurring 1-1s! In fact I see this with my coworkers, especially PMs, who have their schedules full of 1-1s daily. No doubt there's useful work that gets done in them _sometimes_, but I have doubts its efficiency over the long term with cross functionals. But even just focusing on 1-1s between managers/reports, I'd prefer nixing them in favor of a flatter structure, and using office hours/one-offs when needed.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yes, but this is (IMO) just one of the important reasons that one manager should not have 58 direct reports. Now, maybe this is fine for someone who manages other executives, where the primary touch points can be, like quarterly budget and strategy reports or something (I honestly have no idea what people like this do day to day, so I'm totally guessing on this...). But out near the "leaves" of an org, managers exist to support their reports who are doing work day to day, and they can't do that if they have too many reports to spare any time for 1:1s with them. I think PMs having a bunch of 1:1s, likely comprised mostly of status updates that could be done asynchronously, is a different problem, that we likely agree about. But managers should have few enough reports that they're able to support them. If their reports want to cancel their 1:1s because they don't have anything to discuss, that's fine, but being unable to get on the schedule regularly is a problem, IMO.
nimbius 3y ago
Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the least qualified to address the public in any form. The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undefinable in the context of actual hard work or labor. Everything hes made in life came from the hard work and excess capital of people like Stanford students.
- Ninjinka 3y ago
  He's a Taiwanese immigrant who graduated early and built his own company. I think he contributed some hard work himself.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.
    - m3kw9 3y ago
      So being unlucky makes one more qualified?
      - Draiken 3y ago
        No? The point is: he's no more qualified than anyone else. Whatever he's saying is simply not reproducible and most certainly not what made him a billionaire. Otherwise we could all just replicate whatever any billionaire does and inevitably become one. That's not how it works though, is it? It's easy to say it was hard work that got you there after you're the 1e-20% that made it.
        tester756 3y ago
Draiken 3y ago
I can almost see an executive justifying bad practices as "providing pain and suffering for your growth". I understand the idea behind it, but it's survivorship bias in a pedestal. What about all the other kids that suffered the same or even more, but weren't lucky enough to become billionaires? These wannabe inspirational quotes from lucky individuals don't make sense to me.
refactor_master 3y ago
Are there any solid numbers on this, or is it the old “durhh young people lazy” again? Surely every word uttered by a billionaire would be wrought with survivorship bias. You’re more likely to succeed in life if you have a “low resilience pampered degree” than not. I haven’t seen evidence that all the “resilient hard workers” out there automatically turn billionaires given enough time, huffing and puffing.
- cpach 3y ago
  He didn’t say they where lazy.
simpletone 3y ago
> Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people—it’s formed out of people who suffered. Or 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them' -- Shakespeare There are many paths to greatness. The article mentions a lot of hurdles and racism that he had to overcome. But those are specific to him. I'm sure there are plenty 'great' people who haven't suffered. > One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. I don't think people with low expectations start companies. Certainly those with low expectations don't rise and achieve greatness. In essence, he is saying people should be resilient and try to persevere through hard times. The rest are just fluff to fill time. But even with resilience and perseverance, you aren't guaranteed success. It also takes a bit of luck. Being at the right place at the right time. There isn't a magic formula to be successful. And there are only X number of billionaires the economy can suppport...
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > I don't think people with low expectations start companies. Certainly those with low expectations don't rise and achieve greatness. I think this is a common misinterpretation of "expectations", to the point that it honestly just isn't a very clear way to make the point he's making. Here's a restatement of your quote that I would agree with: > I don't think people with limited aspirations start companies. Certainly those with limited aspirations don't rise and achieve greatness. But aspiration is not the same as expectation. It is perfectly plausible - and indeed, I agree with Huang, increases the likelihood of success - to shoot for the stars while expecting to miss.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    expecting to see what happens
neonate 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20240313171530/https://fortune.com/2024/03/13/nvidia-founder-ceo-jensen_huang-stanford-students-genz-grads-low-expectations-successful/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240313171530/https://fortune.co...
- itsmemattchung 3y ago
  thank you since the original article garden walled.
briantakita 3y ago
Attention needs to be paid to foundational primitives that support a more elaborate architecture. An elaborate architecture built on low quality primitives lacks integrity. This integrity issues will need to be addressed one way or another. Better to have a feedback loop to improve these primitives. Hardship is feedback to address these fundamental primitives to create integrity with the big picture. If someone builds a foundation on froth, don't be surprised when the foundation collapses. Entitlement does not provide value.
ajross 3y ago
Not really relevant to Huang's speech per se, but the article engages in IMHO one of the most infuriatingly wrong misconceptions in education journalism: > [Stanford] is one of the most selective in the United States [...] and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, [...] Stanford students, and students of elite institutions more generally, are simply not taking on more debt than "typical" college students (for various values of "typical", from large state schools down to community colleges). Most debt loads are regulated and capped, it's extremely hard to get a personal loan beyond that. And to the extent that's not true, it's actually the wealthier students, and ones attending smaller niche schools outside the normal finanancial aid world, that bear the highest loads. A quick google turned up this list, which roughly matches my understanding: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student-debt https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student... Sort by highest debt load per student, and note (1) how many of the schools at the top of the list are ones you've never heard of, (2) that literally none of the top-10/elite/whatever schools appear on the first page of the list, and (3) how heavily modal the graph is anyway: basically graduating students take on about $38-40k of debt in the US, no matter where they go. Please be very suspicious of this kind of class warfare screed. It's just wrong, and it finds its way into the public conciousness by throwaway lines like the one I quoted.
- indoordin0saur 3y ago
  I know many people who have attended ivy league schools and $100k+ debt is not unusual among them.
  - ajross 3y ago
    Not statistically it isn't. I invite you to cite data. Again, you can't get a bank to write you loans of that size without collateral of some kind. Banks will write loans for the subsidized amount (currently capped at $31k per student federally), plus some from other guarantee sources like state programs, and throw in a little on the expectation of future salary. The only people getting $100k loan balances as undergraduates are people whose parents are co-signing (or who otherwise have something that looks like collateral to a bank). Note that's not true of post-graduate schools. In particular banks are willing to tolerate a much higher debt load for med school students. But the discussion here is about "Does Stanford require more debt than other schools". And it does not.
stephc_int13 3y ago
He is right, and I think that what the grumpy farts are saying is not entirely false, each generation is worse than the last, except when the cycle resets. We’re now much closer to the end of this cycle than to its beginning.
op00to 3y ago
Is that why he’s a billionaire? Did he decide to set a low standard for himself of becoming a billionaire? Less flippantly, there is no way that someone who is a billionaire has low standards. If they did, wouldn’t they have stopped working at 1 million, 10 million, or perhaps 100 million dollars?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Like many comments here, I believe this is conflating "low expectations" with "low aspirations".
- brcmthrowaway 3y ago
  he's a billionaire because he got lucky
chx 3y ago
This is old, old, old: crescit sub pondere virtus. Few people born with a silver spoon in their mouth become great examples of motivation, drive.
treespace8 3y ago
The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me. My Dad had a successful business after a rough childhood, failing high school. He worked hard and built a successful business. He also really did wish ample doses of pain and suffering on me. And he got his wish. He always thought it was good that I was bullied, that I also failed school, and that everything in life was generally hard for me. He told me this so much that I also believed it, well into my 20s. That is was good I was a failure and suffering. It took a decade to build my life to a point similar to my classmates that did not suffer the way I did. And I'm not ahead of them even now. I really wish my Dad would have gotten therapy instead of internalizing his anger, and believing that is what made him successful. It would have saved me a lot of time.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  Heh. I had some of that "character building", and I credit that I don't seem to have as fragile a temperament as some to it. It worked for the Germans and Huns and Mongols. Too bad we can't run the counterfactual and see if we would be the same across different timelines.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    Since we only view this at the population level, there is a big question: Is "character building" improving those who need it to be stronger, or just filtering them out of society?
- philomath_mn 3y ago
  Right -- I think there are ways to cultivate resilience in children without inflicting the bad kind of pain and suffering. Severe disappointment, frustration, and discomfort as the result of their own decisions? Sure. Actual abuse? Not so much.
- alumic 3y ago
  This maps almost 1:1 onto my experience, except for the fact that my father achieved some measure of success having never gone into business. I almost didn't graduate high school and made a mess of my time at university, dropping out entirely my senior year (drugs and alcohol fueled by deep self-loathing made this an easy choice at the time). Like you, I wish my dad had realized what he was doing in raising his children the way he did. His circumstances were deeply cruel. My relationship with him now continues to be marred by my understanding that he doled out the same punishment to his children and justified it by telling himself he was making us tougher. In the end, it also took me nearly a decade to reach some level of parity with my peers. If that resilience is what got me here, then fair enough. But the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
neilv 3y ago
Thinking of this as startup founder... > “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” People with family money need much-much less resilience than those without family money. Compare... serial founder who always has not only ready-made seed investment (plus all the connections that come from parents helping line up your ducks to go to a rich-kids school) to fail repeatedly with a safety net and do-over each time... ... with the scrappy kid who's barely clawed their way into those echelons, has put everything into their startup push, and if it fails, they might be out homeless on the street. (See the moral at end of "Gattaca".) One of these things is not like the other, in terms of need for resilience. (Granted, a rare person might get far enough that being a hardened fighter a la (to choose one kind) Sam Altman might be a quality that then makes stratospheric success possible. But AFAICT you haven't needed that to be successful enough with VC growth startups: you just need to have money flowing through you repeatedly until some desired condition is achieved, hopefully without all the stress costs of grueling, existential adversity.)
- matwood 3y ago
  This. And I'm sure many here can relate, but when I left home there was no home for me to ever go back to. Even just knowing that I had a childhood room available to crash in would have allowed me to take larger risks in my 20s.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Thanks for saying that. FWIW, you and people with whom your comment resonates are not alone. Situations like that are sadly more common than we'd think. When I see someone extolling the virtues of adversity, I guess I'm wondering: Just how much adversity are we talking about here? I wouldn't wish too much of it upon anyone.
throwtroawat 3y ago
Oh man, I saw this stark contrast during the last YC batch. A friend who supported himself through college on construction jobs, then went through a major surgery (think brain/heart/cancer) left his FAANG job for the startup. His cofounders? A married couple with prime Bay Area real estate purchased by their family abroad, constantly bragged about Stanford (masters, mind you)and CCP connections. Long story short, apparently the cofounder couple lied about their visa situation, both to the investors and to their cofounder. (They had a green card when they said otherwise). This was so they could lie about quitting their job at Google, which they never did. My friend left when he found out, as he was the technical one anyway, and last I heard bootstrapped something with decent revenue. In any case, the situation reminds me how important it is to fully vet your cofounders. Also, crazy that people can be effectively rewarded for being so scummy.
- brcmthrowaway 3y ago
  FAANG are sinecure jobs at this point
blueyes 3y ago
Too great resources on the value of hardship: Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/B08LDX3TZ2/ https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Rec... A Boy Named Sue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4
voisin 3y ago
Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times. Bad times make strong men. Strong men make good times. The cycle continues, on the family level as well as the society level.
- qpingo 3y ago
  [dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Text-only, no Javascript, works where archive.is is blocked: x=https://fortune.com/2024/03/13/nvidia-founder-ceo-jensen_huang-stanford-students-genz-grads-low-expectations-successful/amp/ busybox wget -U "" -qO/dev/stdout $x \ |{ echo "<meta charset=utf-8 />";grep -o "<p.\*</p>";} > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
1letterunixname 3y ago
From a business perspective, the more painful and difficult some good or service is to offer, the better. Upon finding something very painful that is easy for you/your team to offer, it could be a viable, defensible business model by automating and schleping for customers efficiently when offering value for money. (Just don't be a risky, low margin, labor intensive, short lifecycle, unscalable business like a restaurant unless you're really, really, ..., really good in some niche like a place that has people line up around the block at 8:30 am for BBQ several days a week.)
1letterunixname 3y ago
Also, scrappy teams with marginal investment tend to produce better results than elitist, over-funded teams that go on hiring and travel binges like they won the (VC) lottery.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Observation: the people who are the most productive and capable tend to come from the most damaged backgrounds but are the survivor biased few who didn't resent or envy other people, rested on external locus of control, are humble, and aren't content with mediocrity, inefficiency, or the way things are today. Motorsports, surfing (the ocean kind), pilots, military/special forces, business owners, and start up founders have nonzero Venn diagram overlap.

101 points by Netherland4TW 3y ago

TheFullStack 3y ago

"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering" - funny, my ex wife said the same!

dheera 3y ago

[flagged]

joewadcan 3y ago

https://archive.is/Ulpz2 https://archive.is/Ulpz2

dbcooper 3y ago

[flagged]

vlan0 3y ago
Have you stopped to think why this bothers you?
- dbcooper 3y ago
  Why not just have everyone speak in pidgin then ...
- dotnet00 3y ago
  They have high expectations

Aloha 3y ago

There is some truth in this - We do a poor job of preparing youth for making choices in adulthood, and understanding the consequences of those choices. I think we need to do better at offering youth (during adolescence) what could functionally be 'adulthood with training wheels'

homefree 3y ago

It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it. He argues resilience is created through suffering (which plays into the idea that if you want to know who will be a good founder, ask about their childhood). It makes me curious though about the direction of the causality - how much is resilience actually about temperament and genetics vs. the environmental experience of suffering. Why do some people become resilient from suffering and others become unable to succeed in life. Maybe suffering just reveals the types of people that are already resilient? My hypothesis is there's some baseline and people have different predispositions based on their personality, but that resilience can also be improved by learning how to handle difficult situations better (and what kinds of thought patterns you allow yourself to have) - a kind of emotional observation/regulation/understanding. The opposite of what current identity politics/seeing yourself as a perpetual victim of 'trauma' plays into (imo this makes people a lot less resilient). It's possible that's something you can only really develop through suffering (maybe this is Jensen's point), but it might also be able to be something that can be learned even without suffering - though people may have less reason to truly internalize it until it's tested.

JohnMakin 3y ago
Traumatic early childhood experiences (suffering) can cause profoundly negative, irreversible effects on a child's brain development that will have issues persist well into adulthood and beyond - I don't think his take is scientific. edit: not sure why downvoted, here's a source if you don't believe me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep, I'm with you. I think this "suffering is necessary" point Huang is making is his weakest point. Maybe a more nuanced version of it that I think would be a stronger point is that there is a "sweet spot" of life challenges - not too much, but also not too little - that increase the odds of positive outcomes for people. But as you say, people who experience extreme suffering are much more likely to experience a lifetime of profound difficulty than to become a great auteur, entrepreneur, or leader.

vlan0 3y ago

>“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” This is important. We are limitless potential. To embody that, is to understand that life is uncertain. It's great to set goals. But don't take them too seriously. Or you will get lost in the concept.

not2b 3y ago
[flagged]
dont_dox_me_bro 3y ago
I really wonder what he means by low expectations as a billionaire? I'm guessing it's drastically different than the 70 year olds I know working retail jobs so they don't die from poverty.
- cpach 3y ago
  He didn’t really say that he expects to starve or anything like that, did he? I assumed that the framing of the article was something like this: doing business, technological development and working inside corporations. Not food security or life in general.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  My read is that he's just making the same point as the stoics (and I'm sure many others, I'm just most familiar with it from stoicism), to not expect or fall into the trap of feeling entitled to good things. In stoicism, this is the point beneath the oft-caricatured practice of contemplating that death could come at any moment. If you don't expect or feel entitled to even just living from moment to moment, then it's (in theory) easier to see that each additional moment of life is a gift, and each good thing that does happen to you, all the more so. Personally, I struggle to actually achieve serenity and positivity from this in practice, though I do find it compelling in theory.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    It really depends who's saying it to you at the time. It's true that being able to cope instead of fall apart is a useful power for you. It's also true that anyone with any form of authority over you would love nothing better than for you to never demand anything.

brushfoot 3y ago

Reminds me obliquely of what Jack Cowin told an MBA class, as quoted in Rafael Badziag's _The Billion Dollar Secret_: "You guys have a big disadvantage over what I had. When I finished university, I got a job offer of $6,000 a year, and you're going to get a job offer of $150,000. You're going to develop a lifestyle. You're going to join the golf club, you're going to have private school for your kids. You're going to buy a big mortagage. You are going to become a prisoner of that lifestyle. When I made the decision I was going to go into business, I had everything to gain, not much to lose."

hinkley 3y ago
When I was young everyone told me to start saving early because compound interest. Every dollar you don’t spend today will be $30 when you retire! That is the least interesting reason to start saving early. In fact it’s such a bad reason it probably puts people off the concept. Few enough people actually listen to it that it makes you wonder. Every dollar you don’t spend at 25 is a dollar off of your expectation of standard of living. Which is a dollar you don’t need at retirement. And saving early means stock market usage early, and stock market losses early. The sooner you learn not to lose your shirt on the stock market the better. And that’s when you have a few thousand to lose on the market instead of later, when it’s tens of thousands. Those are the reasons you start early, and start small.
schnitzelstoat 3y ago
This is just the myth they build for themselves though. In reality, you have far more to lose when you start out with nothing because if you fail Daddy's not going to pay for you to go back to school and do your plan B. You have no safety net. Empirically, this bears out as well. Successful entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly from the upper-middle/upper classes.
- brushfoot 3y ago
  I like it because it was useful to me in quitting a well-paying job and venturing out on my own. Which was terrifying! Especially when, two weeks after I quit, a competitor announced they were giving away the feature I built my business around for free. It's been a wild ride.

cowboyscott 3y ago

This reminds me of the speech Bill Murray’s character gives at the start of Rushmore [0]: > You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you. 0: https://youtu.be/m5RbdReBMLE?si=ZfY166PU1ti5_QCg https://youtu.be/m5RbdReBMLE?si=ZfY166PU1ti5_QCg

wslh 3y ago
Rushmore, I think one of the greatest movies ever (and i don't like other Anderson's movies [1]). Going back to the topic I think Jensen is right 99.9999 % of the time. An exception could be Bill Gates and I don't think that is because him was born in a priviledged family but because he has an unique drive [2]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41611.Hard_Drive https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41611.Hard_Drive
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Man, I dunno, I tend to agree that Rushmore is his best (at the least, it has had the most influence on me), but I think it's a very close thing between it and The Royal Tannenbaums. (But after that there is certainly a large gap to the next best.)
  - wslh 3y ago
    I agree that could be a stretch but Rushmore does not only depict a nerd but one that is creative and iconoclast. Many times we have a bond with a movie for personal reasons that are not shared with the rest. I shared my ranking where there are movies which are classical top and others personal takes. That is the reason to create these (non algorithmic/AI) lists: share and help others to move from the average^average.

StefanBatory 3y ago

It's painful article but it's true. We have to remember that none of us deserves anything not that we have any right for anything; nothing is given and we have to work hard for that.

dont_dox_me_bro 3y ago
Do you think he would feel the same if the government split apart Nvidia and forced them to either sell the software (CUDA) or hardware as separate companies? After all, it's not like he has the right to run his company at the detriment of society. Opening up CUDA would be a massive net gain to humanity, or at least allowing more open source software to run on Nvidia hardware. This is just an extremely tone deaf article from a billionaire. This is a really terrible message to put out, especially where once upon a time America truly tried to make a "great society" through new deal programs and civil rights advancement; but nowadays the political climate is trash, largely thanks to the elite class rat fucking it into submission.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I mean, I have no idea what he would say or how he would truly feel about that happening. But the philosophy he is espousing here is not incompatible with that. If he truly and successfully adheres to it (a big if!), the right response would be to feel that he had no expectation that the government would never step in to split up his company, and instead feel only appreciation that he was able to build and run it in the form he wanted, and to enjoy its profits, for as long as he did. It's a very hard philosophy to actually adhere to! It's pretty natural for humans to feel entitled to the good things they already have, even when they know they shouldn't.
- StefanBatory 3y ago
  His response would be that government most likely has no right to break the company in the first place, as it's immoral/not theirs to touch. I can't tell if that'd be correct or not, though
watwut 3y ago
The other reality is that if you expect nothing, you will get nothing. If you expect low salary, you will get low salary no matter how hard you work or what skills you have. Working hard on itself does not bring rewards. Asking for what you want and negotiating brings rewards.

donflamenco 3y ago

I would recommend the full video on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk Another fascinating bit is when he describes the flat management structure NVDA has. He, as CEO, has 58 direct reports and no scheduled one on ones. Feedback is given constantly (up and down.).

sanderjd 3y ago
No 1:1s sounds miserable. I don't want to give or receive feedback "constantly", I have other things to do constantly. I want to have a set periodic time where I know I will not be interrupted by my manager "sharing feedback", and will not be interrupting them with my feedback. I suspect that in practice, relatively little feedback is being shared either up or down within such a structure, as people are busy working and never hit their set time reminding them to think through what feedback they have.
- sahila 3y ago
  1:1s are okay when you're an IC and have it with your manager. The problem is the flipside is when your manager has many ICs, then it doesn't scale properly. Imagine Jensen having 58 reoccurring 1-1s! In fact I see this with my coworkers, especially PMs, who have their schedules full of 1-1s daily. No doubt there's useful work that gets done in them _sometimes_, but I have doubts its efficiency over the long term with cross functionals. But even just focusing on 1-1s between managers/reports, I'd prefer nixing them in favor of a flatter structure, and using office hours/one-offs when needed.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yes, but this is (IMO) just one of the important reasons that one manager should not have 58 direct reports. Now, maybe this is fine for someone who manages other executives, where the primary touch points can be, like quarterly budget and strategy reports or something (I honestly have no idea what people like this do day to day, so I'm totally guessing on this...). But out near the "leaves" of an org, managers exist to support their reports who are doing work day to day, and they can't do that if they have too many reports to spare any time for 1:1s with them. I think PMs having a bunch of 1:1s, likely comprised mostly of status updates that could be done asynchronously, is a different problem, that we likely agree about. But managers should have few enough reports that they're able to support them. If their reports want to cancel their 1:1s because they don't have anything to discuss, that's fine, but being unable to get on the schedule regularly is a problem, IMO.

nimbius 3y ago

Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the least qualified to address the public in any form. The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undefinable in the context of actual hard work or labor. Everything hes made in life came from the hard work and excess capital of people like Stanford students.

Ninjinka 3y ago
He's a Taiwanese immigrant who graduated early and built his own company. I think he contributed some hard work himself.
- Draiken 3y ago
  That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    So being unlucky makes one more qualified?
    - Draiken 3y ago
      No? The point is: he's no more qualified than anyone else. Whatever he's saying is simply not reproducible and most certainly not what made him a billionaire. Otherwise we could all just replicate whatever any billionaire does and inevitably become one. That's not how it works though, is it? It's easy to say it was hard work that got you there after you're the 1e-20% that made it.
      - tester756 3y ago

Draiken 3y ago

I can almost see an executive justifying bad practices as "providing pain and suffering for your growth". I understand the idea behind it, but it's survivorship bias in a pedestal. What about all the other kids that suffered the same or even more, but weren't lucky enough to become billionaires? These wannabe inspirational quotes from lucky individuals don't make sense to me.

refactor_master 3y ago

Are there any solid numbers on this, or is it the old “durhh young people lazy” again? Surely every word uttered by a billionaire would be wrought with survivorship bias. You’re more likely to succeed in life if you have a “low resilience pampered degree” than not. I haven’t seen evidence that all the “resilient hard workers” out there automatically turn billionaires given enough time, huffing and puffing.

cpach 3y ago
He didn’t say they where lazy.

simpletone 3y ago

> Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people—it’s formed out of people who suffered. Or 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them' -- Shakespeare There are many paths to greatness. The article mentions a lot of hurdles and racism that he had to overcome. But those are specific to him. I'm sure there are plenty 'great' people who haven't suffered. > One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. I don't think people with low expectations start companies. Certainly those with low expectations don't rise and achieve greatness. In essence, he is saying people should be resilient and try to persevere through hard times. The rest are just fluff to fill time. But even with resilience and perseverance, you aren't guaranteed success. It also takes a bit of luck. Being at the right place at the right time. There isn't a magic formula to be successful. And there are only X number of billionaires the economy can suppport...

sanderjd 3y ago
> I don't think people with low expectations start companies. Certainly those with low expectations don't rise and achieve greatness. I think this is a common misinterpretation of "expectations", to the point that it honestly just isn't a very clear way to make the point he's making. Here's a restatement of your quote that I would agree with: > I don't think people with limited aspirations start companies. Certainly those with limited aspirations don't rise and achieve greatness. But aspiration is not the same as expectation. It is perfectly plausible - and indeed, I agree with Huang, increases the likelihood of success - to shoot for the stars while expecting to miss.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  expecting to see what happens

neonate 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20240313171530/https://fortune.com/2024/03/13/nvidia-founder-ceo-jensen_huang-stanford-students-genz-grads-low-expectations-successful/ http://web.archive.org/web/20240313171530/https://fortune.co...

itsmemattchung 3y ago
thank you since the original article garden walled.

briantakita 3y ago

Attention needs to be paid to foundational primitives that support a more elaborate architecture. An elaborate architecture built on low quality primitives lacks integrity. This integrity issues will need to be addressed one way or another. Better to have a feedback loop to improve these primitives. Hardship is feedback to address these fundamental primitives to create integrity with the big picture. If someone builds a foundation on froth, don't be surprised when the foundation collapses. Entitlement does not provide value.

ajross 3y ago

Not really relevant to Huang's speech per se, but the article engages in IMHO one of the most infuriatingly wrong misconceptions in education journalism: > [Stanford] is one of the most selective in the United States [...] and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, [...] Stanford students, and students of elite institutions more generally, are simply not taking on more debt than "typical" college students (for various values of "typical", from large state schools down to community colleges). Most debt loads are regulated and capped, it's extremely hard to get a personal loan beyond that. And to the extent that's not true, it's actually the wealthier students, and ones attending smaller niche schools outside the normal finanancial aid world, that bear the highest loads. A quick google turned up this list, which roughly matches my understanding: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student-debt https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student... Sort by highest debt load per student, and note (1) how many of the schools at the top of the list are ones you've never heard of, (2) that literally none of the top-10/elite/whatever schools appear on the first page of the list, and (3) how heavily modal the graph is anyway: basically graduating students take on about $38-40k of debt in the US, no matter where they go. Please be very suspicious of this kind of class warfare screed. It's just wrong, and it finds its way into the public conciousness by throwaway lines like the one I quoted.

indoordin0saur 3y ago
I know many people who have attended ivy league schools and $100k+ debt is not unusual among them.
- ajross 3y ago
  Not statistically it isn't. I invite you to cite data. Again, you can't get a bank to write you loans of that size without collateral of some kind. Banks will write loans for the subsidized amount (currently capped at $31k per student federally), plus some from other guarantee sources like state programs, and throw in a little on the expectation of future salary. The only people getting $100k loan balances as undergraduates are people whose parents are co-signing (or who otherwise have something that looks like collateral to a bank). Note that's not true of post-graduate schools. In particular banks are willing to tolerate a much higher debt load for med school students. But the discussion here is about "Does Stanford require more debt than other schools". And it does not.

stephc_int13 3y ago

He is right, and I think that what the grumpy farts are saying is not entirely false, each generation is worse than the last, except when the cycle resets. We’re now much closer to the end of this cycle than to its beginning.

op00to 3y ago

Is that why he’s a billionaire? Did he decide to set a low standard for himself of becoming a billionaire? Less flippantly, there is no way that someone who is a billionaire has low standards. If they did, wouldn’t they have stopped working at 1 million, 10 million, or perhaps 100 million dollars?

sanderjd 3y ago
Like many comments here, I believe this is conflating "low expectations" with "low aspirations".
brcmthrowaway 3y ago
he's a billionaire because he got lucky

chx 3y ago

This is old, old, old: crescit sub pondere virtus. Few people born with a silver spoon in their mouth become great examples of motivation, drive.

treespace8 3y ago

The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me. My Dad had a successful business after a rough childhood, failing high school. He worked hard and built a successful business. He also really did wish ample doses of pain and suffering on me. And he got his wish. He always thought it was good that I was bullied, that I also failed school, and that everything in life was generally hard for me. He told me this so much that I also believed it, well into my 20s. That is was good I was a failure and suffering. It took a decade to build my life to a point similar to my classmates that did not suffer the way I did. And I'm not ahead of them even now. I really wish my Dad would have gotten therapy instead of internalizing his anger, and believing that is what made him successful. It would have saved me a lot of time.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Heh. I had some of that "character building", and I credit that I don't seem to have as fragile a temperament as some to it. It worked for the Germans and Huns and Mongols. Too bad we can't run the counterfactual and see if we would be the same across different timelines.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Since we only view this at the population level, there is a big question: Is "character building" improving those who need it to be stronger, or just filtering them out of society?
philomath_mn 3y ago
Right -- I think there are ways to cultivate resilience in children without inflicting the bad kind of pain and suffering. Severe disappointment, frustration, and discomfort as the result of their own decisions? Sure. Actual abuse? Not so much.
alumic 3y ago
This maps almost 1:1 onto my experience, except for the fact that my father achieved some measure of success having never gone into business. I almost didn't graduate high school and made a mess of my time at university, dropping out entirely my senior year (drugs and alcohol fueled by deep self-loathing made this an easy choice at the time). Like you, I wish my dad had realized what he was doing in raising his children the way he did. His circumstances were deeply cruel. My relationship with him now continues to be marred by my understanding that he doled out the same punishment to his children and justified it by telling himself he was making us tougher. In the end, it also took me nearly a decade to reach some level of parity with my peers. If that resilience is what got me here, then fair enough. But the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

neilv 3y ago

Thinking of this as startup founder... > “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” People with family money need much-much less resilience than those without family money. Compare... serial founder who always has not only ready-made seed investment (plus all the connections that come from parents helping line up your ducks to go to a rich-kids school) to fail repeatedly with a safety net and do-over each time... ... with the scrappy kid who's barely clawed their way into those echelons, has put everything into their startup push, and if it fails, they might be out homeless on the street. (See the moral at end of "Gattaca".) One of these things is not like the other, in terms of need for resilience. (Granted, a rare person might get far enough that being a hardened fighter a la (to choose one kind) Sam Altman might be a quality that then makes stratospheric success possible. But AFAICT you haven't needed that to be successful enough with VC growth startups: you just need to have money flowing through you repeatedly until some desired condition is achieved, hopefully without all the stress costs of grueling, existential adversity.)

matwood 3y ago
This. And I'm sure many here can relate, but when I left home there was no home for me to ever go back to. Even just knowing that I had a childhood room available to crash in would have allowed me to take larger risks in my 20s.
- neilv 3y ago
  Thanks for saying that. FWIW, you and people with whom your comment resonates are not alone. Situations like that are sadly more common than we'd think. When I see someone extolling the virtues of adversity, I guess I'm wondering: Just how much adversity are we talking about here? I wouldn't wish too much of it upon anyone.

throwtroawat 3y ago

Oh man, I saw this stark contrast during the last YC batch. A friend who supported himself through college on construction jobs, then went through a major surgery (think brain/heart/cancer) left his FAANG job for the startup. His cofounders? A married couple with prime Bay Area real estate purchased by their family abroad, constantly bragged about Stanford (masters, mind you)and CCP connections. Long story short, apparently the cofounder couple lied about their visa situation, both to the investors and to their cofounder. (They had a green card when they said otherwise). This was so they could lie about quitting their job at Google, which they never did. My friend left when he found out, as he was the technical one anyway, and last I heard bootstrapped something with decent revenue. In any case, the situation reminds me how important it is to fully vet your cofounders. Also, crazy that people can be effectively rewarded for being so scummy.

brcmthrowaway 3y ago
FAANG are sinecure jobs at this point

blueyes 3y ago

Too great resources on the value of hardship: Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/B08LDX3TZ2/ https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Rec... A Boy Named Sue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4

voisin 3y ago

Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times. Bad times make strong men. Strong men make good times. The cycle continues, on the family level as well as the society level.

qpingo 3y ago
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1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Text-only, no Javascript, works where archive.is is blocked: x=https://fortune.com/2024/03/13/nvidia-founder-ceo-jensen_huang-stanford-students-genz-grads-low-expectations-successful/amp/ busybox wget -U "" -qO/dev/stdout $x \ |{ echo "<meta charset=utf-8 />";grep -o "<p.\*</p>";} > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm

1letterunixname 3y ago

From a business perspective, the more painful and difficult some good or service is to offer, the better. Upon finding something very painful that is easy for you/your team to offer, it could be a viable, defensible business model by automating and schleping for customers efficiently when offering value for money. (Just don't be a risky, low margin, labor intensive, short lifecycle, unscalable business like a restaurant unless you're really, really, ..., really good in some niche like a place that has people line up around the block at 8:30 am for BBQ several days a week.)

1letterunixname 3y ago

Also, scrappy teams with marginal investment tend to produce better results than elitist, over-funded teams that go on hiring and travel binges like they won the (VC) lottery.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Observation: the people who are the most productive and capable tend to come from the most damaged backgrounds but are the survivor biased few who didn't resent or envy other people, rested on external locus of control, are humble, and aren't content with mediocrity, inefficiency, or the way things are today. Motorsports, surfing (the ocean kind), pilots, military/special forces, business owners, and start up founders have nonzero Venn diagram overlap.