Every great leader has their superpower.
Steve Jobs was famous (or infamous) for the “reality distortion field”. This describes his absolute refusal to accept that an objective might be impossible. This quality of his leadership helped give us the iPhone. It probably also gave his team a few ulcers.
Former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was famously persuasive. His version of persuasiveness meant that he would cajole and badger Senators or whoever was in his sights until he got the answer he wanted. While obnoxious, this quality produced great things. There would be no Civil or Voting Rights Acts without this quality.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of AI chip maker Nvidia (with a $3.2 trillion market cap), has his unique superpower — low expectations.
Huang revealed this odd (if relatable) superpower during a recent talk at Stanford University, from which the 61-year-old, Taiwanese-born received a master’s in electrical engineering in 1992. The following year, he founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Huang is currently worth about $106 billion. And he got there by having low expectations.
“Most Stanford graduates have very high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you come from a great school,” Huang said, buttering up the crowd before dropping the hammer.
The High Value of Low Expectations
And down goes the hammer.
“But people with high expectations typically have very low resilience. And resilience matters in success.”
Huang’s comments were less a rant against privileged kids than an endorsement of the power of not being shielded from adversity. While plenty had tougher upbringings than Huang, he did work as a busboy at Denny’s as a teenager (according to Wikipedia).
Huang credited his parents for not over-protecting him from failure and setbacks.
“To this day I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ within our company with great glee,” Huang said. This produced audible nervous chuckles from the crowd.
“And I mean that…Because you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And character…is formed by people who have suffered.”
Huang looked out into the audience of Stanford-ites and said, “I wish you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
Ok, now it makes a certain kind of rough sense. In fairness, the greatness-through-adversity message isn’t exactly new. It just has a new messenger, one who’s worth more than $100 billion.
