News Jensen Huang tells Caltech grads to pursue 'zero-billion-dollar markets' — hopes to inspire the next big tech leaders

[Admin]

'I hope you believe in something. Something unconventional, something unexplored. But let it be informed, and let it be reasoned, and dedicate yourself to making that happen.'

Jensen Huang tells Caltech grads to pursue 'zero-billion-dollar markets' — hopes to inspire the next big tech leaders : Read more

 

[CmdrShepard]

“If you haven’t been yelled at by him, it means he doesn't care about you.”

If that's not Stockholm syndrome I don't know what is.

 

[kristoffe]

His advice is trash. He's becoming the older Jim Carrey of tech. So is Musk.

 

[bit_user]

His advice is trash.

I don't know, but it does bug me to hear successful people give out advice as if there wasn't a huge amount of luck and good timing that enabled them to finally break through.

 

[Li Ken-un]

I don't know, but it does bug me to hear successful people give out advice as if there wasn't a huge amount of luck and good timing that enabled them to finally break through.

The system sort of self-reinforces. People want to believe in the dream that grit and hard work is what it takes to be successful (and the anti-corollary being that unsuccessful people are lazy). When you’re successful, and you have an audience who wants to hear how you did it you can:

1. Tell them how your breakthrough and subsequent success largely depended on factors you had little agency over; or
2. Tell them the romantic tale of how you took the reins of your own destiny into your own hands and that your hard work paid off.

In my opinion, it’s neither purely luck nor hard work, but a lot of places one gets to will be because they were somewhere doing something at the just the right time. I didn’t start my current career with any advanced planning or inclination, but it happened due to a string of highly unlikely events that connected.

I don’t have the opportunity to regale youngsters about career history. But the truth would be an affront to all that the American Dream represents. Yes, there is opportunity for success, but you do not have agency over many of the factors that will get you there. You may be bursting at the seams with merit, but never meet the right people or debut at the wrong time. And that is not a very sexy thing to say.

its unofficial corporate motto, which it still uses internally today, is, “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.”

For every company that’s able to adopt a cheeky motto such at this, there are innumerably more which have actually gone out of business thirty days after saying that.

 

[bit_user]

In my opinion, it’s neither purely luck nor hard work, but a lot of places one gets to will be because they were somewhere doing something at the just the right time.

Agreed. There's the old saying: Chance favors the prepared mind.
Heh, I'm just now reading it was actually Louis Pasteur who said that.

I've long postulated that most wildly successful people probably would've been at least somewhat successful, no matter what. But it's only through luck & timing (or "factors outside their control", as you so eloquently put it) that they rose above the rest of their peers to such rarefied air.

You may be bursting at the seams with merit, but never meet the right people or debut at the wrong time. And that is not a very sexy thing to say.

I have an older sibling who's probably smarter and definitely worked harder, early in life, and yet no more successful simply due the fact that my interests were better aligned with what the economy seemed to value, at the time.

 

[Kondamin]

A company 30days away from going under wouldn’t price their products out of reach of people buying them

 

[bit_user]

A company 30days away from going under wouldn’t price their products out of reach of people buying them

I think he was talking about the 1990's and maybe the early 2000's.