Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says if you want to be successful, prepare to suffer: ‘If it’s a walk in the park, anybody could do it’

Nvidia’s rise from an idea hatched in a booth at Denny’s to the world’s most valuable company is one of the defining business stories of the AI boom.

But according to CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth now sits at $196 billion, there’s a less glamorous ingredient behind that success: suffering.

“Nobody suffers better than I can,” Huang said in conversation with the Korea Society late last month.

“In order to do something incredible, you have to suffer.

It’s not a walk in the park.

If it’s a walk in the park, anybody could do it.” For Huang, that suffering has taken different forms over Nvidia’s 33-year history.

In the company’s early days, he said, it was largely the result of simply not knowing what he was doing.

“As the company endeavors, there are setbacks, or people didn’t believe in your future, or they didn’t believe in you,” Huang said.

“Maybe the market didn’t believe in you; maybe the customers didn’t believe in you.” But suffering alone isn’t enough, according to Huang.

It takes resilience, stubbornness, and determination to push through it.

“It takes resilience to continue to believe in yourself,” he added.

Huang’s fear of failure keeps him working 7 days a week This is not the first time Huang has spoken about the suffering that comes with building a successful company.

In a conversation with Stanford business school students in 2024, he encouraged young people to embrace friction in their careers .

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said.