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Jensen Huang: I Wish Upon You Plenty of Pain and Suffering

By Jensen Huang · Mindset & Career · 2 min read

People say choose your career based on your passion. They connect passion with happiness. But when you're building something great, you're not always enjoying it. Jensen doesn't love every day of his job. But he loves NVIDIA every single second.

Key Points

The best jobs are not the ones that bring you happiness all the time — you have to suffer and struggle
I wish upon you greatness — which by my way of saying it, I wish upon you plenty of pain and suffering
Grow a tolerance for failure — if you don't experiment, you'll never innovate

I wish upon you greatness. Which by my way of saying it — I wish upon you plenty of pain and suffering.

Passion Is Not Happiness

Huang: There's a phrase — choose your career based on your passion. People connect passion with happiness. Nothing wrong with that, but there's something missing.

When you want to build something great, it's not easy. When you're doing something that's not easy, you're not always enjoying it. I don't love every day of my job. I don't think every day brings me joy. Every year I'm not happy about the company. But I love the company every single second.

I don't love every day of my job. But I love the company every single second.

Pain and Suffering

Huang: What people misunderstand is that somehow the best jobs bring you happiness all the time. I don't think that's right. You have to suffer. You have to struggle. You have to endeavor. You have to do those hard things and work through it — in order to really appreciate what you've done.

There are no such things that are great that were easy to do. Therefore — I wish upon you greatness. Which by my way of saying it — I wish upon you plenty of pain and suffering.

There are no things that are great that were easy to do. I wish upon you plenty of pain and suffering.

Grow a Tolerance for Failure

Huang: If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to grow a tolerance for failure. I don't mean sleep in until noon and flunk out of all your classes. What I'm saying is — try things even though it's impossible to calculate precisely that it would lead to success.

Follow your instincts. Your intuition. If it wasn't because of following our own instincts, why would we have invented things the world's never had before?

Innovation requires experimentation. Experimentation requires exploration. Exploration will result in failure. Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you would never experiment. And if you don't ever experiment, you would never innovate.

Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you would never experiment. If you don't experiment, you never innovate.