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.
The current crop of ultrabillionaires may lack many things but I don't think backbone is on the list. They are as ruthless as any robber baron or industrialist of old. They can buy, sell, and eliminate people and governments as they see fit. Good luck getting close enough to take actual or metaphorical aim.
The Trump children haven't fallen far from the tree. Don't know about Bezos, Gates, etc. but if their kids (if they have them) were off doing socially redeeming works I'm sure it would be known. Private security is pretty good insulation against consequences, spine or no spine.
I think “backbone” in this context is a stand-in for “integrity” and/or “honor”. I think the fact that they can “buy, sell, and eliminate people and governments as they see fit” is the obvious proof that they don’t possess any real integrity, dignity, or honor for themselves or other people - so, no, they don’t have “backbone”. Power, wealth, sure. But not backbone.
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].
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.)
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.
It's certainly the most raw and personal, to its benefit, but it's too unpolished to be as great as the others.
I wish he had remade it like a decade ago, after honing his style and technical talents, and with a right-sized budget. I'd still go see it if he did a remake now, but I doubt it would maintain enough of its spark at this point :)
Right, one of the many great things about Rushmore is that it is a mix of these. It's amazingly polished for someone's second movie. Like, that aspect of it shocks me every time I watch it. But it also still has a lot of that raw soul that Bottle Rocket does.
Bill gates’ mother was an executive at ibm, many say that has played a role when he was trying to sell dos to ibm. On top of being born in a privileged family, i mean.
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.
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.
Intergenerational trauma echoes, and the kids spend their lives putting themselves back together and finding their blind spots.
I was gobsmacked today by Rod Nordland's revelations on Amanpour that were a degree more intense but strikingly similar to my own childhood, and how I somehow
also share gravitation to extreme sports and dangerous situations.
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.
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?
>“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.
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.
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.
Yes, but (and I may be saying something different than Huang here) demanding things is different than expecting them. The difference is in your response if the outcome is "no". Anger or serenity?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't make time for things they rarely happen unless the people are particularly fired up about them. I don't even know who my current manager is to even reach out to. My coworkers don't unit test until reminded on the PR. I honestly forget to smoke-test until called out on it. So unless your culture is about feedback and everyone truly embodies that and is on board, it's not gonna happen.
Some of these seem a bit far-fetched and out of the norm. Not knowing your manager - do you even know what team you're on?
Engineering culture dictates much more strongly regarding unit and other tests than constant human feedback. It's also easy to add automated lint coverage tests to your PRs, and creating a documented process to check whether smoke-tests, etc.
I know my team and project manager. I was sent the contact of my on-boarding buddy who is on my team. In a matrix organization, it's common to not have any day-to-day contact with your manager. In my current organization, I have no idea who they are. I'm sure if I signed into the HR help portal and looked up by profile it'd say who is my manager, but I've had no interaction with them. Just got an email containing my year-end evaluation, no conversation. Maybe there name was in the email, maybe it was just the app that sent it.
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'
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.
Perhaps it is, but I believe it's important to fight off any feelings of pride or narcissism.
The only variable I can change is myself, and thus I recognise that every single mistake or failure is mine and mine only. I believe that's the healthiest outlook on life that one can have.
Also, I think too I don't have any right to say what I'm worth - my worth is determined by how much my labor creates value for others. If I'm paid peanuts, that speaks badly of me.
The point is that, by default, you're not paid the value you create for others. It's not pride or narcissism to recognize that in a capitalist system everyone is out for themselves. If YOU aren't out for yourself, no one is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only universal truth is that no thruths are universal. And I think “suffering builds character” in this and its other forms is a perfect example. Yes, extreme suffering will cause long term problems. And yet at the same time, we’re all probably familiar with or know someone who experienced “the gifted student wall” where their natural talent was good enough to carry them to success, right up until the point it wasn’t and they suffered a major setback because they’d never built up the skills or resiliency to overcome that obstacle.
Like you said there is probably some sweet spot that we should try to hit. I suppose the hard part is there’s no good way to know how much suffering society should allow or encourage, and probably more importantly no good mechanism by which we can turn off suffering once you’ve “had enough”
Even (maybe especially) extreme suffering can create resilience - I suspect it’s not optimal for happiness, but that’s not what this is about. This is about resilience.
A less resilient person may have a perfectly happy and content life doing things that aren’t as hard, that’s true of most people.
But someone who has something extreme happen to them will have a way higher fucking bar for bad. If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.
> If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.
But respectfully this isn’t really how PTSD works. It seems intuitive to say this, but in reality, stressful situations will often trigger an exaggerated flight or fight response than is warranted due to changes in the brain’s structure, especially the hippocampus. Repeated, prolonged trauma makes the person even less resilient, not more so.
But not everyone develops PTSD precisely because they have innate resilience - at least that's how the theory goes. The resilience doesn't come from the trauma.
While it sounds like this would describe Huang's experience, I don't think that's what he intended to convey.
As others have said, it seems to be about resiliency. You don't develop that unless you have a reason to do so - "pain and suffering", to me, sounds like a synonym for "struggle".
My childhood was pretty much uniformly excellent. I saw my parents struggle a bit, but I was too young for it to really mean much to me at the time, and it didn't directly impact me. My personal struggle didn't really begin until after high school; I ran head-first into undiagnosed ADHD and chronic depression.
Recognizing those issues and overcoming them was the process that defined who I am as an adult. I fully believe it has made me a better and more resilient person. It wasn't until then that I was able to look back and really understand what my parents went through.
It has also informed the way I parent my children. I make it a point to be transparent about what I'm thinking, the struggles I'm facing now, and the ways I'm dealing with them. That's tempered by constantly reinforcing that those things are my stresses, not my kids'... because my kids aren't my therapist :P.
My hope is that by being transparent, my kids don't enter the adult world expecting everything to go according to plan. I'm trying to model not only "correct" behaviors, but how to emotionally deal with and overcome hardship.
I think a lot of this psych science is bullshit - I’m generally skeptical of it given the problems in the replication crisis (and that a lot of modern psychotherapy seems to be making things worse for kids).
Ok, sure, but that doesn't really apply here. This is a well known neurological change that can be seen in brain scans - for instance the hippocampus will shrink/be underdeveloped.
If you are low key insulting your child regularly, they won't de better then kids of parents who treat them well. Kids who think low of themselves usually don't even try.
I think the truth is more subtle than that. I think suffering can act as a filter; some people able to build resilience while others are trapped by it and never improve. But I DO NOT think that suffering is necessary to build resilience, nor that suffering is necessarily the best filter to use. I think it is better to build resilient habits, such that if suffering is encountered one won't be filtered out, but not to seek out suffering in the hope that experiencing it will force resilience.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Yeah, the vast majority of wealthy individuals will insist they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" without realizing the original saying was meant to be satire, while willfully ignoring the hilarious amount of help from family, friends, and, yes, the government as well, they received along the way. They also ignore the biggest factor in success: luck.
This is also why 99% of CEO written self-help books are worker drone manuals --- insisting "you could be like me if you worked real hard too!" helps their bottom-line much more than it helps the person who reads those books.
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.
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:
> [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:
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.
A lot of "top-10/elite/whatever schools" can reduce or cover the tuition for the vast majority of their students mostly because their endowments are enormous. It's dirt cheap for them and is good PR. All Ivy-league schools can effectively offer free education to their students for generations off of the interest they earn on their endowments alone. It's partly what leads to the crazy inequality in offerings, quality, and funding, between higher-ed schools in the US. Addressing the cost of higher-ed is a worthwhile goal, but in my opinion addressing the crazy inequality between schools is much more worthwhile.
Most research university revenue, be it tuition-, donation- or grant-based, isn't really involved in the education of undergraduates anyway. All that extra money Stanford brings in that CSU Chico does not goes to building labs and hiring graduate students. Freshman Computer Science costs the same no matter where you are.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.)
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.
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.
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?
> 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...
> 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.
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.
There's no data on wikipedia about his family. They moved from Taiwan to Thailand and then the US. That doesn't say if they were rich, poor, or who they knew.
I mean, i used to believe self-made man stories until I found out who Bill Gates' mother is. Now I'd rather see some research.
I know plenty of people like that and none of them are billionaires. No one's saying you're going to become a billionaire by sitting on your ass and waiting for it to happen (unless you're born into it of course, which many of them are) but the point of survivorship bias is to note that you have to do all those other things and then you have to get lucky. And once you're lucky the tendency is to attribute your oversized success to all the other things, but that simply isn't the case.
It's funny that all the comments pointing this out are getting heavily downvoted here. I thought we were all (or mostly) into Bayesian reasoning here. Perhaps not, or perhaps many of us are really bad at it.
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.
So...back in 1993, when Jensen Huang was founding Nvidia, how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?
Yes, luck favored him a number of times, to make it to $8e10 net worth. If he was only worth a measly $8e5, would you have some other reason(s) to sneer at him?
I don't understand why everyone assumes I'm talking down on him. I'm merely pointing out how irrelevant that quote is.
> how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?
That's not the right question. The right question is: how many of those even had the opportunity to do this? I'd doubt it's more than a single digit.
He made it. Congrats to him. But we don't know why he made it. No, it wasn't because he "suffered". It wasn't because he worked hard. We quite simply can't know.
If you can't attribute his success to what he is saying, it's not relevant. Now that he made it, he can proclaim it was any of his millions of choices, but by definition it cannot be a few generic choices, because many more made the same choices and never made it.
Luck is a stub for all of the infinite choices and events that conspired for him to be where he is today. It's nice to pretend it's hard work that leads to success (or in this case "pain and suffering"), but it's most definitely not true.
I guess at least some people realize how insulting you are.
"Luck" is often a reason given by losers. It's the argument that shifts blame away from their own poor, often stupid decisions. It's used by losers when it comes to starting and running businesses, just like it's used by losers who failed to buy-in on cryptos or stocks when they were low.
"Oh, your business actually took off? You got lucky!"
"Oh so btc hit 69k? You got lucky."
They talk as if they had any clue whatsoever (because to make the assessment you need to understand the matter at hand), but if that was the case, they'd be amongst the actually objectively successfull people.
So ... yeah, right. I didn't make the right decisions at the right time to make sure [project] works out, after doing lots of research. No, I just got lucky. I didn't put hard work into [my project], I just got lucky.
Fuck. You.
It's not luck. No. It's simply not being a clueless loser. It's "putting hard work into reaching your goal". It's "not giving up". It's "standing your ground against the losers who want you to fail".
If these people you're mentioning, were so smart, they'd be rich.
It's simply easier to down vote than it is to have a conversation. Especially with strong arguments.
The fact is: people want to believe hard work leads to success. It's a nice thought.
Many people center their entire lives around this concept. If someone challenges it, it can make them very angry.
> isn’t just down to hard work or resilience.
I'd argue it's never down to either of those. These are way too common to be relevant in the equation. Imagine if I told you all hard working resilient people were billionaires. I'd be factually incorrect and be rightfully called crazy.
But when folks don't say it out loud and instead only imply, it's suddenly accurate. Makes no sense.
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.
>The point is: he's no more qualified than anyone else.
On the other hand to what you're saying
He had to make fuckton of decisions over his whole time as a CEO and that's where it brought him, so he definitely had at least some idea, vision, direction supported by some traits.
I don't know mate. Maybe you're right, but I still doubt it.
Once you're a CEO with hundreds of thousands of very smart people under you, making the wrong decision is much, much harder. There's some skill to it, but so few people get into that position that simply not making completely dumb decisions can already lead to success. A good company has self-sufficient people that don't need to be micro-managed.
I've said it many times before: give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of talented individuals and I'm pretty sure they'll manage just fine. But we can't know for sure, so... maybe you're right in that sense.
Going back to the original point though, had he pointed out his decisions and vision, that'd be completely different compared to attributing it to "suffering and pain". That's plain silly.
I'm not saying it's pure luck. I'm saying the only relevant part is luck.
If you get billions of smart hard working people, you still only get a few hundred billionaires. The only differentiator is luck.
You're one of the lucky that could migrate, went to the right schools, met the right set of people, were born in the right year and so on.
It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.
>If you get billions of smart hard working people, you still only get a few hundred billionaires. The only differentiator is luck.
There are no billion equal people.
There are other differentiators than just opportunity: environment, background, culture, childhood, experience, vision and maybe traits.
>It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.
That's not a lie, it just doesn't guarantee success. But it increases probability (when you talk in general, not some specific person).
>There are other differentiators than just opportunity: environment, background, culture, childhood, experience, vision and maybe traits.
That's what I mean when I say luck. It's a combination of millions of variables that eventually lead to the successful outcome. The vast majority of those we have no control over.
So I stand by it. Ultimately the difference is luck. You can't pinpoint one of those millions of events and say: this was it. It's always a combination of them all.
>That's not a lie, it just doesn't guarantee success. But it increases probability (when you talk in general, not some specific person).
If inspirational quotes were phrased like that, I agree, that's not a lie. But at least in my bubble I only see folks with fanatical belief that if you work hard you are guaranteed success. I even got personal attacks for my comment from one of those fanatics.
Or even more commonly, like in this case, already successful people attributing their success to "hard work", which is extremely misleading.
The Tyranny of Merit[1] talks about this in a lot more depth.
You dont have to go to Stanford to get a decent job, or even work for Nvidia.
You dont have to go to a top tier school, or even college at all to be a working (and decent) engineer.
Going to Stanford and taking on gobs of debt is absolutely a choice you make, I agree with you about discharging college debt, and whatnot, but some of this is based on choices individuals make.
Due to generous financial aid policies, Stanford ends up being free or cost-to-family less than flagship state schools for all but (depending on definition) the professional class and wealthy...
It's not rich hating, it's that there's a billion poor people who weren't passed a silver spoon, worked hard, but ultimately failed in the one key element: luck. Rich people never understand that most of their success came from luck. In general, it makes them very unqualified to tell other people how to get rich.
And no I'm not saying rich people are too dumb to understand it, I'm saying that they're trying to rationalize survivorship bias, which pretty much everyone on planet earth does, knowingly, or unknowingly.
I'd highly recommend Fooled by Randomness for more on the topic:
I agree that there is a huge component of luck. But that does not invalidate the work, risk, and talent involved. Nobody "succeeds" (in the sense of creating a trillion dollar company) just by "working hard" or "being smart".
The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.
You got some points but hard work does put one in position to get lucky. By participating and choosing to work hard and focus on one thing over the other, you are taking risk and there is a reward to that risk and luck comes into play. So give both worked hard, and one got luckier and more rich it shouldn’t lower his status. If he was born rich, that would help your argument
The point I think he's trying to make is that our economic system, to a greater degree than many of us want to recognize, hands out rewards arbitrarily. Merit alone will not get you there: luck and family connections (which is basically another form of luck) help a great deal more.
I think a reason we find this so disagreeable to think about is that it removes much of the incentive to work hard. If you are not wealthy and you don't work hard, you have a basically 0% chance of achieving wealth. If you do work hard, you have a 5% chance (for example). So, sure, if you want fiscal security then you have to work very hard, but even with hard work success is unlikely, with the factors other than "work hard" largely out of your control.
Then, of course, if you do achieve success it's easy to attribute it solely to your hard work (after all, again, if you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have been successful) - which is supremely annoying to everyone else as it very obviously isn't the case.
His beginnings were humble enough, so I'm not sure what your point is. I don't believe for a second that any of NVDA's success was handed to him or them - they effectively helped create and propagate a market for GPUs at a time when it was at best a niche.
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.
