The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

Luck had clearly played a part in bringing Jensen to this new opportunity. So had his own talent and skills. But as he saw it, the biggest single factor that propelled him from scrubbing toilets to managing entire divisions of a microchip company was his willingness, and ability, to put in more effort, and tolerate more suffering, than anyone else. “People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” he later said. “Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.”17 And character, in his view, can only be the result of overcoming setbacks and adversity. To Jensen, the struggle to persevere in the face of bad, and often overwhelming, odds is simply what work is. It is why, whenever someone asks him for advice on how to achieve success, his answer has been consistent over the years: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”