The importance of hardship
If we look around, we will find ample evidence about role of hardship in shaping the character of a leader.
Unfortunately, the popular narrative is quite different. When you search google about the life of a successful leader today, the first few things that pop up are about the leader’s pay, net worth, the beautiful villa they live in, the market capitalization of their company and so on.
Not very often are we led to pay attention to the hardship that they went through for perhaps decades to get there.
The most current and powerful example of this is the co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang. The media and public frenzy around him certainly reinforced his image as the Taylor Swift of Tech.
Google him and you find the same things pop up including being one of the richest individuals in the world.
What really touched me was his view on hardship and how it shaped him as a person and leader.
He says he and his co-founders would not have done what they did if they had realized up front “the pain and suffering, the challenges they were going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame and the list of all the things that would go wrong”.
By around August 1997, Nvidia was down to one month of payroll, resulting in the unofficial company motto, “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.”
Recently, in his address at his alma mater, Stanford University, he said, ““For all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
He believed in the role of pain, suffering, the tolerance to failure and the resilience to deal with it as key to shape character.
What worries me today is the myth (that is actively encouraged) of quickly starting something and making lots of money. I strongly believe that we owe it to the youth in our country to shape the narrative and help them focus not on the wealth that someone made today but the huge hardship they had to go through for maybe decades to actually get there.
This applies to our mistaken view that hardship at work diminishes engagement. What diminishes engagement is actually the lack of managerial support to deal with hardship, not removal of hardship.
It is this same view that affluent parents have about their children. That if they take away all the hardship (that they went through), they will be seen as a good parent and in return their children will do well.
Hardship has a very important role in shaping character and leadership. That has been my personal experience too. And we need to talk about it as much as we talk about the pot of gold at the other end of that rainbow!
Youtube Video: https://youtu.be/cpWKYg95cEM
