“People with very high expectations have very low resilience – and unfortunately, resilience matters in success.” – Jensen Huang – Nvidia CEO
These words, spoken by Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, represent a counterintuitive truth about achievement that challenges conventional wisdom about ambition and success. Delivered during a talk at Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, the statement encapsulates a philosophy that has guided Huang’s leadership of one of the world’s most valuable technology companies and shaped his approach to building organisational culture.
The quote emerges from a broader reflection on the relationship between expectations, resilience and character. Huang elaborated: “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for… I hope suffering happens to you.” This seemingly harsh sentiment carries profound meaning when understood within the context of his personal journey and his conviction that greatness emerges not from intelligence or privilege, but from the capacity to endure adversity.
Jensen Huang: From Immigrant Struggle to Technology Leadership
To understand the weight of Huang’s words, one must appreciate the trajectory that shaped his worldview. Huang is a first-generation immigrant who arrived in the United States as a child, sent by his parents to live with an uncle to pursue education. This was not a choice born of privilege but of parental sacrifice and hope. His early American experience was marked by humble labour-his first job involved cleaning toilets at a Denny’s restaurant, an experience he has repeatedly referenced as formative to his character.
This background stands in sharp contrast to the Stanford students he addressed. Many had grown up with material security, educational advantages and the reinforcement that excellence was their natural trajectory. Huang recognised this disparity not with resentment but with clarity: these students, precisely because of their advantages, had been insulated from the setbacks and disappointments that build resilience.
Huang’s philosophy reflects a deliberate distinction between high standards and high expectations. High standards represent the commitment to excellence, the refusal to accept mediocrity in one’s work or that of one’s team. High expectations, by contrast, represent the assumption that success will naturally follow effort-that the world owes you achievement because of your credentials or background. Huang maintains the former whilst deliberately cultivating the latter’s absence.
This distinction proved crucial in building NVIDIA. Rather than assembling teams of the most credentialed individuals, Huang sought people who had experienced struggle, who understood that extraordinary effort did not guarantee extraordinary results, and who possessed the psychological flexibility to navigate failure. He has famously stated that “greatness comes from character, not from people who are smart. Greatness comes from people who have suffered.”
The Theoretical Foundations: Resilience and Character Development
Huang’s observations align with several streams of contemporary psychological and philosophical thought, though he arrives at them through lived experience rather than academic study.
The Stockdale Paradox, named after Admiral James Stockdale, a US Navy officer held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven years, provides a theoretical framework for understanding Huang’s philosophy. Stockdale observed that prisoners who survived with their sanity intact were those who combined two seemingly contradictory capacities: radical acceptance of their present circumstances and unwavering faith that they would ultimately prevail. Those who relied solely on optimism-who expected release without accepting the brutal reality of their situation-deteriorated psychologically and often did not survive. This paradox suggests that resilience emerges from the integration of clear-eyed realism about present conditions with commitment to long-term objectives.
Huang’s framework mirrors this insight. By maintaining low expectations about how circumstances will unfold, he creates psychological space to respond flexibly to setbacks. By maintaining high standards about the quality of effort and character, he ensures that this flexibility does not devolve into complacency. The result is an organisation capable of pursuing audacious goals-NVIDIA’s dominance in artificial intelligence and graphics processing-whilst remaining psychologically prepared for the inevitable obstacles and failures along the way.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher, articulated a related conviction about the relationship between suffering and human development. In his work, Nietzsche argued that adversity and struggle were not obstacles to greatness but prerequisites for it. He wrote: “To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities… I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not-that one endures.” Nietzsche’s philosophy rejected the modern tendency to minimise suffering and maximise comfort, arguing instead that character and capability are forged through confrontation with difficulty.
Huang’s invocation of suffering echoes this Nietzschean insight, though he frames it in organisational rather than purely philosophical terms. Within NVIDIA, Huang has deliberately cultivated a culture where ambitious challenges are embraced precisely because they generate difficulty. He speaks of “pain and suffering” within the company “with great glee,” not as punishment but as the necessary friction through which character and excellence are refined.
Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, embodied a similar philosophy. His famous motto, “By endurance, we conquer,” reflected his conviction that survival and achievement in extreme circumstances depended not on comfort or privilege but on the capacity to persist through hardship. Shackleton’s leadership of the Endurance expedition-during which his ship became trapped in pack ice and his crew faced starvation and death-demonstrated that resilience could be cultivated through shared adversity and clear-eyed acknowledgment of reality.
These thinkers, separated by centuries and disciplines, converge on a common insight: resilience is not an innate trait distributed unequally among individuals, but a capacity developed through the experience of adversity managed with psychological flexibility and commitment to purpose.
The Paradox of Privilege and Fragility
Huang’s observation about Stanford graduates carries particular relevance in contemporary society. The students he addressed represented the apex of educational achievement and material advantage. Yet Huang suggested that these very advantages created vulnerability. When success has come easily, when expectations have been consistently met or exceeded, individuals develop what might be termed “fragility of assumption”-the unconscious belief that the world operates according to merit and that effort reliably produces results.
This fragility becomes apparent when such individuals encounter genuine setbacks. A rejection, a failed project, a competitive loss-experiences that build resilience in those accustomed to adversity-can become psychologically destabilising for those who have been insulated from them. Huang’s concern was not that Stanford students lacked intelligence or ambition, but that they lacked the psychological infrastructure to navigate the inevitable failures that precede significant achievement.
His solution was not to lower standards or diminish ambition, but to reframe the relationship between effort and outcome. By cultivating low expectations-by internalising that success is not owed but must be earned through persistence despite setbacks-individuals paradoxically become more capable of achieving ambitious goals. The psychological energy previously devoted to managing disappointment at unmet expectations becomes available for problem-solving, adaptation and sustained effort.
Application in Organisational Leadership
Huang’s philosophy has profound implications for how organisations are built and led. Rather than assembling teams of the most credentialed individuals, he has sought people who combine high capability with experience of adversity. This approach has several consequences:
Psychological flexibility: Team members accustomed to setbacks are more likely to view failures as information rather than indictments. They are more capable of pivoting strategy, learning from mistakes and maintaining effort through difficulty.
Reduced entitlement: Individuals who have experienced scarcity or struggle are less likely to assume that their position or compensation is guaranteed. This creates a culture of continuous contribution rather than one where individuals rest on past achievements.
Shared purpose over individual advancement: When team members do not expect the organisation to guarantee their success, they are more likely to align their efforts with collective objectives rather than individual advancement.
Embrace of difficulty: Huang has deliberately cultivated a culture where the hardest problems are pursued precisely because they are hard. This stands in contrast to organisations that seek to minimise friction and difficulty. NVIDIA’s pursuit of increasingly complex chip design and artificial intelligence challenges reflects this philosophy-the organisation does not shy away from problems that generate “pain and suffering” because such problems are where excellence is forged.
The Broader Philosophical Insight
Huang’s observation ultimately reflects a conviction about human nature and development that transcends business strategy. It suggests that the modern tendency to maximise comfort, minimise disappointment and protect individuals from failure may be counterproductive to the development of capable, resilient human beings.
This does not mean that suffering should be sought for its own sake or that organisations should be deliberately cruel or exploitative. Rather, it suggests that the avoidance of all difficulty, the guarantee of success and the removal of consequences create psychological conditions antithetical to the development of character and capability.
The paradox Huang articulates is this: those most likely to achieve extraordinary things are often those who do not expect achievement to come easily. They have internalised that effort does not guarantee results, that setbacks are inevitable and that persistence through difficulty is the price of excellence. This psychological stance, forged through experience of adversity, becomes the foundation upon which significant achievement is built.
In a society increasingly characterised by anxiety among high-achieving young people, by fragility in the face of setback and by the expectation that institutions should guarantee success, Huang’s words carry prophetic weight. They suggest that the path to genuine resilience and achievement may require not the elimination of difficulty but its embrace-not as punishment but as the necessary condition through which character and capability are refined.
References
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isPR8TYWkLU
2. https://robertglazer.substack.com/p/friday-forward-nvidia-jensen-huang
3. https://www.littlealmanack.com/p/jensen-huang-life-advice
