Knowing Jensen Huang's Habits Won't Make You Jensen Huang

Working Hard Alone Never Explained the Results

Among the founders I’ve judged, worked with, and watched over the years, many were genuinely immersed in their work. But even when the effort looked similar, the results didn’t. It was hard to explain the failures simply as a lack of effort.

That’s why I can’t easily buy the idea that copying a successful person’s daily routine will produce the same results. Waking up early and reading books can certainly help. But no single habit can explain which clients they met, what judgment calls they made, or when the opportunity arrived.

When I look at self-help content, I keep coming back to this distinction. Knowing what a successful person did is different from deciding what I should do in my own situation.

What to Learn From Success Stories

I think Jensen Huang’s story, too, has more to teach us when we look at his actual decisions rather than his daily routine.

Mayfield’s writeup of its 2024 conversation with him at TiEcon recounts how Nvidia reversed a major early technology bet. Huang explained that if the underlying assumptions change, your thinking has to change with them. It was a decision that put the company’s purpose ahead of the technology it had already chosen. Mayfield’s conversation record

What I’m curious about in cases like this is what they got wrong at the time, and what evidence made them change their mind. Waking up at the same hour or reading the same books can’t reproduce that judgment.

Success stories are told by someone looking back with the outcome already known. At the time, there were multiple options on the table and no one knew how it would turn out. Learn from other people’s experience, by all means, but don’t treat their account as a formula guaranteeing your own success.

Collecting Tips vs. Actually Doing the Work

I see how many people respond to social media posts that say, “Comment below if you want to know how.” I understand the impulse to look for a way to solve your own problem. I, too, believe there’s something to learn from other people’s experience.

But even after you’ve received the materials or bought the course, the work isn’t over. You have to apply what you learned to your own situation, and if the results differ, figure out why. What you didn’t know, and what doesn’t fit your circumstances, only becomes clear through that process.

I’d like us to separate the value of a good habit from a guarantee of success. Saying exercise or reading can improve your life is different from saying they alone will get you the results you want in business or your career.

What bothers me is when this distinction gets left out and the habit is sold as a guaranteed formula. Listing a few things a successful person did doesn’t mean you’ve solved the buyer’s problem.

Getting Advice From AI Has Gotten Easier

The cost of getting an explanation or a first draft out of AI keeps falling. Stanford’s 2025 AI Index reports that the inference cost for a system performing at GPT-3.5’s level dropped by more than 280x between November 2022 and October 2024. That doesn’t mean every AI system’s cost fell uniformly — it’s a comparison benchmarked against a fixed level of performance. Stanford HAI

Now it’s easy to try revising a resume draft or asking for an unfamiliar concept to be explained in different words. You can also cut the time you’d otherwise spend waiting to get generic advice.

But you still have to verify which part of your career is actually a strength, what the company you’re applying to actually needs, and whether the answer contains anything wrong. Even if AI hands you a plausible-looking plan, it doesn’t produce the results of you actually carrying it out.

I think this shift will put pressure on self-help products that only deliver information. They’ll need to go beyond offering explanations anyone can easily get, and actually help people review their own work and fix what’s wrong with it.

Oswarld’s Lens

What I mean by “personal practice” is the process of doing something yourself, examining the result, and adjusting what you do next. It’s not just repeating the same thing for a long time — it’s building your own judgment about why you’re doing it that way.

The successes and failures I’ve watched while building GTM strategy shaped this view too. Among the people who stayed in the work the longest, some built their own standards fit to their customers and market rather than copying someone else’s method. I also saw them get deeply absorbed simply because they loved what they did. I can’t turn that experience into a success formula that works for everyone, but I’ve learned a great deal from that attitude.

Say, for example, you’re writing a pitch deck to meet a client. Don’t stop at studying what makes a good deck — actually write one and show it. Check what the other person didn’t understand, revise it, and you’ll see exactly which part of your explanation fell short. The judgment that forms in that moment can carry into your next piece of work in a way that reading a checklist of tips never does.

This doesn’t mean you should refuse other people’s help. Feedback can surface problems you’d miss on your own. I just don’t want us to confuse the feeling of learning with an actual growth in what we can do.

Practice isn’t a product you can package into a single course and hand over. Others can help, but you’re the one who has to put in the time to actually do it. Before I go looking for yet another new method, I plan to first look back at what I’ve already learned and ask how much of it I’ve actually done.

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References

• Mayfield, How Hard Can It Be? Lessons from Jensen Huang, 2024.05
• Stanford HAI, 2025 AI Index Report

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.