Nvidia Ceo's Leadership Lessons from Failure, Embarrassment, Suffering | Jensen Huang

Uh, I read that you attribute a lot of your success to your ability to work harder than anyone and withstand more suffering than anyone. So we can list many of the things that entails. I mean, dealing with failure, the cost and engineering problems we've talked about. The human problems, uncertainty, responsibility, exhaustion, embarrassment, the near-death company moments that you've mentioned, But also the pressure. Now, as the CEO of this company that economies and nations strategize around plan their, Financial allocations around, plan their AI infrastructure around, how do you deal with this much pressure? What gives you strength, given how many nations and peoples depend on you? - I'm conscious about the fact that, NVIDIA's success is very important to United States. We generate enormous amounts of tax revenues. We established technology leadership for our nation. Technology leadership is important for national security. National security not just in one aspect of national security, all aspects of national security. When our country's more prosperous, we could do a better job with domestic policies and helping social benefits. Because we're generating so much re-industrialization in the United States, we're creating mountains of jobs. We're helping shift, how we, how we build things back to the United States in so many different plants, chips, computers, and of course, these AI factories. I'm completely aware that, that... And I have the benefit, and this is a real a real gift with mainstream investors, teachers, policemen who have somehow, for whatever reason, invested in NVIDIA or because they watched Jim Cramer bought some stock and now are millionaires. And I am completely aware of that circumstance. I'm aware of the circumstance that NVIDIA, is central to a very large network of ecosystem partners behind us and downstream from us. And so the way I deal with that is exactly what I just did. I reason about what is... what is it that we're doing? What is it causing? What's the impact that has on other people benefit, you know, positively or even, even through great burden, for example, to supply chain? And the question is, therefore, what are you gonna do about it? In almost everything that I feel, I break it down, I reason about, "Okay, "what's the circumstance? What has changed? What's hard? And what am I gonna do about it?" And I break it down, decompose the problem, and the decomposition of these circumstances turns it into manageable things that I can do. And the only thing after that I could do is, "Did you do it? Did you either do it or did you get somebody else to do it? And if you didn't do it, you reasoned that you need to do it, and you didn't do it, and you didn't get anybody else to do it, then stop crying about it." You know? And so- ... so I'm fairly Tough on myself. And, but I also break things down so that, so that I don't panic. I can go to sleep because I've made the list of things that needed to be done, and I've made sure that everything that could put our company in harm's way, could put my partners in harm's way, put our industry in harm's way, I've told somebody. Everything that I feel could put anybody in harm's way, I've told someone. And I've told that someone who could do something about it. And so I've gotten it off my chest or I'm doing something about it. And so after that, Lex, what else can you do? - So given all the insane, intense amount of suffering on the journey of building up NVIDIA, have you hit low points psychologically? - Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure. All the time. All the time. - And there— - All the time. - ... you just break down the problem into pieces? - Yeah. Yeah. - See what you could do about it? - And, and part of, and, you know, Lex, part of it, part of it is forgetting. One of the most important attributes of AI learning, as you know, is, right? Systematic forgetting. You, you need to know when to forget some things. You can't memorize everything. You can't keep everything and, and, you know, you, you want to— you don't want to carry everything. One of the things that I do very quickly is decompose the problem, I reason about the problem, and I share the load with it. When I say I tell everybody, I'm essentially sharing that burden. As quickly as possible. Whatever worries me, tell somebody else. Don't just keep it. You know, don't freak them out. Decompose the problem into smaller parts and get people to, so, and, and inspire them to be able to go do something about it. But part of it is just, just forgetting. You know, like, a lot of it is you gotta be tough on yourself. You know, just come on, stop crying about it. Let's get going. You know? And, and then you get out of bed. And then the other part is, is you, you're attracted to the next shiny light, the next future, you know, the next opportunity, the next, "Okay, that's behind us. Let— what's next?" It's a lot, I think, you know, you watch this with great athletes. They, they just worry about the next point. The last point is behind them. The embarrassment, the, you know— the setback. You know, and, and then, and because I do so much of my job publicly, you know? Lex, you do a fair amount of your job publicly too. And so, so I do a lot of my job publicly. And so you know, I say a lot of things that, that seem sensible at the time or funny at the time, mostly it's just because it's funny to me at the time. And then, you know, you reflect on it, it's less funny, but, but... - Yeah. No, trust me, I know. But you basically allow yourself to be pulled by the light of the future. Forget the past and just keep- - That's right. - ... keep working towards that. I mean, you did say, there's this kind of famous thing you said that if you knew how hard it would be to build NVIDIA it turned out to be, what is it? A million times more hard than you anticipated that you wouldn't do it. - Yeah, right. - Um, but isn't... You know, when I hear that, that's probably true about everything worth doing, right? - Exactly. That is, by the way, what I was trying to explain, is that there's a, there's a incredible superpower of being, being have a, the mind of a child. You know? And I say to myself oftentimes when I look at something, and almost, almost everything, My first thought is, "How hard can it be?" You know? And so you get yourself into that mode, how hard could it be? And, and nobody's ever done it. It looks gigantic. It's gonna cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It's gonna take, you know, all this... And you just go, "Yeah, but how hard could it be?" You know? How hard could it be? And so you gotta get yourself into that state of mind. You don't wanna, you don't wanna actually over simulate everything and all the setbacks and all the trials and tribulations and all the disappointments. You don't wanna simulate all that in advance. You don't wanna know that. You don't, you wanna go into a new experience thinking it's gonna be perfect, it's gonna be great, it's gonna be incredibly fun. And then while you're there, you know, you need to have, you need to have endurance, you need to have grit, so that when the setbacks actually happened, and those setbacks are gonna surprise you, the disappointments are gonna surprise you, you know, the embarrassments are gonna surprise you, the humiliations are gonna surprise you. You just can't let... Now you just gotta turn on the other bit, which is just forget about it. Move on, keep moving. And, and to the extent that, to the extent that my assumptions about the future and why the future is gonna manifest, so long as those assumptions and that input doesn't change or didn't change materially, then I should expect that the output won't change. And so my simulated output of the future is still gonna happen. And if it's still gonna happen, I'm still gonna go after it. I believe it's gonna, you know, and so there's a combination of two or three human characteristics, the ability to go into a, into an experience fresh-minded, the ability to forget the setbacks, the ability to believe in yourself, you know, to believe what you believe and stay, stay true to that belief. But you're constantly reevaluating. This combination of three, four, five things I think is, is really important for resilience. And, and... and, you know, I'm fortunate that, that whatever life experiences led to this, I've got kind of those four, five things. You know, I'm always curious, always learning. I'm always learning from everybody, you know? I'm always asking my... And because I'm humble about everything, I'm always thinking, "Gosh, they did that so nicely. They did that so wonderfully." You know, I wonder what they're thinking through. How do they... You know, so I'm simulating everybody. In a lot of ways, you know, I'm emulating almost everybody I watch, right? You're empathetic towards everything that they do that you're observing and respect. And, and so you're constantly learning and, you know. - You're now one of the wealthiest people on Earth. One of the most successful humans on Earth. Is it harder to be humble and to be able to... Do you feel the effect of money and power and fame in making it harder for you to sort of be wrong in your own head? Enough to hear out an opinion of somebody else when they disagree with you and learn from them? Those kinds of things. - Um, surprisingly, no. And I would, I would actually go the other way. Because I do so much of my work publicly, when I'm wrong, pretty much everybody sees it. - You get humbled. Fair enough. - And when I'm wrong, when I'm wrong or it didn't turn out that way or you know, I mean, most of the things that, that I say outside I'm fairly certain about. And the reason for that is because, because it's gonna impact somebody else and I want to be quite concerned about that and quite, circumspect about that. For stuff that, that I'm reasoning about inside a meeting, you know a lot of things could turn out differently. And so, but it doesn't ever stop me from reasoning. The way that the way that I manage and lead, I, you know, I'm constantly reasoning in front of people. And even when I'm talking to you, you can kind of see me kind of reasoning through things. And I want to make sure that you understand what I'm saying not because I told you- ... because I'm so humble about what I'm about to tell you. I kind of show you the steps that I got there. And then you can decide whether you believe what I said in the end. And so I'm doing that all day long in meetings. With all of my employees, I'm constantly reasoning through, "Let me tell you what, how I see it." And then I reason through it. It gives everybody the opportunity to intercept and say, "I disagree with that part." The nice thing about reasoning through things and letting people interact with it is that they don't have to disagree with your outcome. They can disagree with your reasoning steps. And they could pull me in different directions, and then we can reason forward. And so we're kind of, you know, collective path searching method. And it's really fantastic. - Yeah, you have this way about you of ... When you're explaining stuff, I can feel you actually reasoning on the spot about it with a constant open-mindedness where you could ... I could feel like I could steer your thinking. And that's a, that's really beautiful that you've been able to maintain that after so many years of success, and pain. I think sometimes pain makes you close, closes you down a bit. - Mm-hmm. Yeah. - And I think to maintain- - Yeah. Tolerance for embarrassment, I think is... - Yes, that's ... The tolerance ... I mean, that's a real thing. Is many years of embarrassing yourself. Even those meetings knowing that there's people around you where you declared one idea and it was shown that that idea was wrong- ... and be able to admit that and to grow from that. That's not, that's very difficult on a human level. - Yeah. Well, you know. They knew that recently my first job was, you know, cleaning toilets, so.