My father was a blacksmith.
No, I don’t mean that metaphorically. My dad woke up at 5am every day of his working life, and went to the “shop” as he called it. He shaped metal, using the blowtorch and the hammer, heating the metal until it glowed, striking it, turning it, striking it again. If you have never watched a blacksmith work, the thing that surprises you is how much of what they’re doing looks like they are just beating the hell out of the metal. The heat is brutal. The metal does not, at any stage, look like something beautiful (or useful) is being shaped. And the maker himself, the blacksmith, also looks as if he is going through it. (and yes, of the blacksmith could also be a girl – I saw Flashdance, too, people.)
The finished thing the blacksmith makes— the hinge, the blade, the rail, the fence — does not remember being ore. It doesn’t carry visible evidence of the fire or hammer. But it would not, could not, exist without them. Masterworks are not shaped despite the blows they endure; they’re shaped because of them. The heat and the striking are not interruptions to the process; they are the process.
I’ve been thinking about this, because as I tiptoe into the wide world of tech, the path of the blacksmith comes to mind often. Because the process is painful and I often don’t know what shape things will take.
it makes sense, then, that I look often to Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, for guidance.
Why?
Because Jensen is one of the most quoted sages in business. Part of the reason, despite his wild success, Jensen has always remained humble, open, authentic. Almost silly, at times (watch his GTC robot interactions). Most of all, Jensen is very open about the guiding principles that have helped him throughout his life – whether he’s been “up” or “down”. (And he has, quite frequently, been “down.”)
Jensen’s particular brand of madness does, indeed, have a method. Going over his many speeches and podcast chats, one can assemble a coherent, stable set of ideas about suffering, character, and what greatness actually costs. Although Jensen comes across as breezy and amiable, if you step back, you might realize that he is also serving insights that any aspiring builder could emulate.
In March 2024, speaking to Stanford students at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Jensen said:
People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you, except for I hope suffering happens to you.
He added, almost shockingly: I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.
At face value, it’s harsh. But I think, truthfully, Jensen was addressing a highly enfranchised (and some might say, arrogant) audience with a hard-earned reality that they may not have encountered before. Jensen loves to say that he uses “pain and suffering” as a catchphrase inside Nvidia with great glee. Not as a warning, or as an aspiration. Because greatness, in his view, is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And character is not formed, necessarily, because one has a high IQ or SAT score. It is formed from people who have suffered, transcended, persevered…and kept going.
Jensen’s philosophical claim, to a room of Stanford elite: that suffering is not the obstacle to becoming the person you want to be. It is the mechanism of your excellence. How you transcend—in fact, whether or not you transcend—depends on the lens with which you perceive your sufferings.
He said it again at Caltech’s commencement that same year, but this time he got personal:
Of all the things that I value most about my abilities, intelligence is not at the top of that list. My ability to endure pain and suffering, my ability to work on something for a very, very long period of time, my ability to handle setbacks and see the opportunity just around the corner — I consider to be my superpowers.
How is intelligence is not top of the list? Especially in an industry in which people are constantly showing off their IQ, their degrees, their Series B funding numbers. But Jensen is ranking intelligence as something that in Silicon Valley, is more or less, a commodity. The thing that Jensen ranks more highly among his gifts is something much rarer in his world: it’s the ability to absorb the blows and allow yourself to be shaped by them. Jensen’s secret weapon (one of many) is that he willingly puts himself in the place of the metal – allowing the jolts and shocks of life to transform him…always into something more fine, more performant.
In an earlier interview — a conversation with Patrick Collison at a Stripe Sessions event —Jensen drew a distinction that, once you hear it, rearranges the whole picture.
He said: I don’t love every day of my job. I don’t think every day brings me joy, nor does joy have to be the definition of a good day. And every day I’m not happy. Every year I’m not happy about the company. But I love the company every single second.
Jensen separates two things that most of us use interchangeably — happiness and love. For him, suffering doesn’t exist in opposition to love. The suffering is intertwined with the love. The hard days are part of the thing you love. They are not the price. They are the formative matter.
As I think about all this, I’ve slowly realized that Jensen’s words remind me of Friedrich Nietzsche — that quirky, controversial German philosopher who wrote in near-isolation in the Swiss mountains, half-blind, often ill. In the 1880s, Nietzsche, coined the phrase amor fati, which echoes Jensen’s guiding principles. Love of fate. Nietzsche would have recognized exactly what Jensen is describing, although the two could not be more different in temperament, century, or aspiration.
But amor fati isn’t acceptance. Nor is it resilience. Resilience says: I can bounce back from this. Amor fati says something more radical and more uncomfortable: I would not wish this away. Not the pain. Not the failure. Not the embarrassment. None of it. Because removing the suffering would remove the person it made.
Nietzsche distilled the idea further into a single sentence: his formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati — that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. When Nietzsche articulated his “theory of eternal return”, he talked about this embracing of the harshest part – that even if you had to do it again, you would. Not merely to bear what is necessary — that’s not enough — but to embrace it.
The ancient Stoics had an image for this, too — a dog tied to a moving wagon. You can run alongside willingly, or you can resist and be dragged. Either way, the wagon carries on. But Nietzsche went further than the Stoics. He didn’t just say run alongside. He said love the wagon. Love the road. Love the dust in your teeth.
Jensen is the living embodiment of this. “The suffering, I barely remembered it” is not the answer of someone who survived something. It is the answer of someone who absorbed it — who would not subtract the CUDA decade or the stock-price humiliations or the boarding school in Kentucky where, at nine years old, an immigrant kid cleaned bathrooms that you couldn’t unsee, and did it, in his own words, delightfully. These are not items on a ledger of hardship to be offset by later success. They are part of the deposit. They are the metal before the blade.
I, too, have experienced the hard knocks of the blacksmith’s hammer. And while I never cleaned bathrooms as a nine year old, I did suffer as a youth coming from a working-class background, hoping for a better education, a better life…fighting for scholarships and job opportunities that were so often reserved for those who already had so much privilege. But I was raised to never complain. I was raised to keep working. I have kept going. For that common ground, I am aligned with Jensen.
Neither Jensen nor Nietzsche would use the other’s vocabulary. But they are describing the same forge, the same hammer, the same insistence that the blows are not damage — the craft, the whittling down of the excess, and turning it into something of greatness.
Nietzsche and Jensen, from disparate sides of history, are suggesting an uncomfortable truth: those were not detours. They were the forge. The person you are now — the one reading this, the one navigating a world that keeps transforming with every model release — was shaped right there, in the forge of difficulty. Not despite it. By it.
What happened to you has made you, and what it has made of you is not insignificant. Embrace that.
The blacksmith does not apologize to the metal for the hammer. The hammer is how the thing becomes what it was always destined to be. Amor fati.