Good Suffering (#431)
Leadership lessons on standards and expectations from NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang
A few weeks ago, I watched a Stanford University interview with Jensen Huang. While Huang might not be a household name, you have likely heard of the company he founded: NVIDIA, the chip manufacturer that's powering the AI boom. NVIDIA’s surge in production has driven the company’s value above $2 trillion and has given Huang a net worth of over $70 billion.
Huang was not born into wealth. He is a first-generation immigrant, sent by his parents to live with his uncle in the United States to further his education. Huang often shares that his first job was at a Denny’s, where he cleaned toilets. Humbled by this experience, Huang adopted a lifelong philosophy that no task is beneath him. That mindset proved key to his success in building NVIDIA into a market moving giant.
Given his unique background, it should come as no surprise that Huang has an atypical perspective about goal setting and ambition, especially among entrepreneurs.
When sharing the secrets to his success in the Stanford interview, Huang noted that he had very high standards but low expectations. He elaborated: “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success. One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”
Huang struggled to gain a foothold in America. Rather than expecting things to play out in his favor, he internalized that he would need to struggle to succeed and build significant resilience along the way. In his view, people who are used to having things work in their favor—and always expect greatness as a result—are bound to be crushed by inevitable setbacks.
Because of this, Huang implied that he wasn’t likely to hire many of the Stanford students who attended his talk. He shared that while he understood why they had high expectations based on their backgrounds and their educations, they had also likely not experienced enough adversity or disappointment in their lives. And while he admitted he didn’t know how to teach struggle to the students, he sincerely hoped that they would experience pain and suffering because, in his words, “greatness comes from character, not from people who are smart. Greatness comes from people who have suffered.”
Huang applies this same principle at NVIDIA, encouraging his team to embrace occasional pain and suffering in their work by taking on the hardest challenges, rather than shying away from struggle.
Having high expectations without building the resilience needed to weather adversity is not a formula for success, but rather a recipe for disaster. When I look at our society today and see so many highly educated young people who are both anxious and fragile, I find Huang’s words prophetic. Life has a way of humbling those for whom everything has come easily. Facing struggles and obstacles when you’re young helps you build the resilience needed to withstand the inevitable ups and downs of life.
Huang’s recipe for success further pairs low expectations with high standards. Great leaders always encourage the people they lead to hold themselves to a high standard and inspire them to give their all. However, they also remind their teams that extraordinary effort doesn’t guarantee extraordinary results.
When we tell people they can be and do anything, without warning them of the inevitable bumps in the road, we aren’t being realistic with them or helping them understand what’s required. Instead, we often end up lowering the bar for them because it’s easier than holding people accountable. Setting high standards is about establishing what level of performance and effort is acceptable for oneself, a team, or an entire organization.
Greatness is achieved through hard work, perseverance and a relentless commitment to excellence, not through entitlement to great expectations. This is true whether you’re designing cutting-edge chip technology or cleaning toilets. Today’s leaders would be wise to more readily embrace the paradox of high standards and low expectations, recognizing that giving everything you have doesn’t always mean you should expect everything in return.
Quote of The Week
"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars." - Khalil Gibran
Have a great weekend!
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I love this post. Quite timely given the “protest happy” environment we find ourselves in
It's funny to me how Huang isn't as well known.