This reminds me of the speech Bill Murray’s character gives at the start of Rushmore [0]:<p>> 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.<p>0: <a href="https://youtu.be/m5RbdReBMLE?si=ZfY166PU1ti5_QCg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/m5RbdReBMLE?si=ZfY166PU1ti5_QCg</a>
The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
>“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”<p>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.
I would recommend the full video on Youtube. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk</a><p>Another fascinating bit is when he describes the flat management structure NVDA has.<p>He, as CEO, has 58 direct reports and no scheduled one on ones. Feedback is given constantly (up and down.).
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.<p>I think we need to do better at offering youth (during adolescence) what could functionally be 'adulthood with training wheels'
It's painful article but it's true.<p>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.
It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it.<p>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).<p>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?<p>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).<p>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.
I can almost see an executive justifying bad practices as "providing pain and suffering for your growth".<p>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?<p>These wannabe inspirational quotes from lucky individuals don't make sense to me.
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.<p>(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.)
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.<p>We’re now much closer to the end of this cycle than to its beginning.
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.
Too great resources on the value of hardship:<p>Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/B08LDX3TZ2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Rec...</a><p>A Boy Named Sue
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4</a>
Reminds me obliquely of what Jack Cowin told an MBA class, as quoted in Rafael Badziag's _The Billion Dollar Secret_:<p>"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."
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.
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:<p>> <i>[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, [...]</i><p>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 <i>wealthier</i> students, and ones attending smaller niche schools outside the normal finanancial aid world, that bear the highest loads.<p>A quick google turned up this list, which roughly matches my understanding:<p><a href="https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student-debt" rel="nofollow">https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...</a><p>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.<p>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.
Oh man, I saw this stark contrast during the last YC batch.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>My friend left when he found out, as he was the technical one anyway, and last I heard bootstrapped something with decent revenue.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Thinking of this as startup founder...<p>> <i>“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.”</i><p>People with family money need much-much less resilience than those without family money.<p>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...<p>... 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".)<p>One of these things is not like the other, in terms of need for resilience.<p>(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.)
Is that why he’s a billionaire? Did he decide to set a low standard for himself of becoming a billionaire?<p>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?
> Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people—it’s formed out of people who suffered.<p>Or 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them' -- Shakespeare<p>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.<p>> One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.<p>I don't think people with low expectations start companies. Certainly those with low expectations don't rise and achieve greatness.<p>In essence, he is saying people should be resilient and try to persevere through hard times. The rest are just fluff to fill time.<p>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...
Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the <i>least</i> qualified to address the public in any form.<p>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 <i>tried.</i> his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undefinable in the context of actual hard work or labor.<p>Everything hes made in life came from the hard work and excess capital of people like Stanford students.
Are there <i>any</i> 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.<p>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.
Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times. Bad times make strong men. Strong men make good times.<p>The cycle continues, on the family level as well as the society level.