“I wish upon you pain and suffering”: Why Jensen Huang once told Stanford students to lower their expectations

Much of modern education grind rests on a simple promise. Aim high, work hard, and success will follow. Elite universities use this logic through rankings, placement statistics and the price tags attached to admission letters. But when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he put out a different warning.

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said, Fortune reports. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”

The words might have landed awkwardly in a room full of selective admissions and high tuition.

Stanford consistently ranks among the most selective universities in the United States, and annual tuition costs exceed $68,000. Students who make it through that filter are encouraged to believe that preparation and talent will shield them from prolonged failure. But, Huang suggested the opposite.

Why resilience sits outside the syllabus

Resilience is not something elite institutions reliably produce. “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you,” he told students during the interview.

This is not an abstract provocation. Huang put it forward as a reflection on his own career path, which he described as uneven and uncomfortable. Born in Taiwan in 1963, he spent part of his childhood in Thailand before moving to the US at the age of nine. His family’s relocation followed his father’s decision to pursue work opportunities in the US, a choice Huang later described as both supportive and uncertain.

“There were plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering,” he said.

Growing up with instability

One of those setbacks shaped his teenage years. While attending public school in Kentucky, Huang crossed a footbridge with missing planks each day to get to class. In interviews with The New Yorker, he has talked about being subjected to racial slurs and physical intimidation, including attempts by classmates to push him off the bridge.

Those experiences did not translate into an immediate success narrative. Huang’s early working life included a job at Denny’s, where he started as a dishwasher. In the Stanford interview, he described approaching the role with routine discipline.

“I never left the station empty-handed. I never came back empty-handed,” he said. “Eventually I became a CEO. I’m still working on being a good CEO.”

From service work to Silicon Valley

It was also at Denny’s that Huang, along with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, discussed the idea that would become Nvidia, a company now valued at around $2 trillion. The contrast between that outcome and his earlier years formed the basis of his advice to students who might have encountered fewer obstacles.

For those who have grown up with consistent access to support, Huang offered no formula for manufacturing hardship. He did, however, argue that discomfort remains necessary.

“For all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering,” he said. “Greatness comes from character and character is not formed out of smart people. It is formed out of people who suffered.”

A corporate philosophy shaped by pressure

That view extends into how he describes leadership at Nvidia. Despite the company’s financial success, Huang told Stanford students that he continues to use the phrase “pain and suffering” internally. He framed it not as punishment but as pressure designed to prevent complacency.

“You want to refine the character of your company,” he said, according to Fortune.

What students are rarely prepared for

Read narrowly, Huang’s words can sound like a personal creed shaped by biography. Read more broadly, they sit uneasily alongside the expectations elite education sells to students. Universities can teach skills, confer credentials and expand networks. They are less equipped to simulate failure without cushioning its consequences.

Huang’s message questions the assumption that high expectations alone prepare students for volatility. For grads raised on predictability, the risk is not a lack of talent, but a lack of exposure to sustained difficulty.

Lowering expectations is needed to build the capacity to endure when outcomes diverge from Plan A.
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