Update: 15 December 2025
These are some of the notes that I took down from the Joe Rogan podcast with Jensen Huang.
"Suffering is part of the journey. You will appreciate it so these horrible feelings that you have when things are not going so well. You will appreciate it so much more when they do go well."
I should expect suffering is part of life. By going through suffering, I appreciate the positive side of things. I can relate to this feeling when I can finally pay for my children's school fees. As I went through years of uncertainty, this is the biggest relive.
"I have a greater drive from not wanting to fail than the drive of wanting to succeed."
I am glad that I am not the only one. Despite Jensen Huang's success, his is constantly fear of failure. Same here, my success is no where near Mr Huang's success. I could not stop fearing and kicking myself to move forward.
"I just have to make sure that I stay alert, that I reason about things from first principles all the time. Always break things down to first principles."
I keep hearing about First Principles. I do not really grasps the idea. I see it as going back to the most fundamental intention on whatever that I am doing. Anything extra is irrelevant.
"I went down to the store... I bought three textbooks... I brought it back and I gave one to each one of the architects and I said 'Read that and let's go save the company.'
For context, that time Mr Huang's company NVIDIA was behind the technology curve. He went out to buy textbooks written by his competitor - Silicon Graphics and learn from them.
Never stop learning! Read and learn from information dense books like textbooks. Be humble, your competitor can be your teacher. If I pretend to be right all the time, I cannot adapt.