NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is now one of the richest men in the world, and his company has become one of the most valuable companies in the world. And while NVIDIA can feel like an overnight success — much of its growth has come since the AI boom — it’s easy to forget what it’s taken Huang to get there.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang works from 5 am to 9 pm everyday, and doesn’t even take Sundays or other holidays off, Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen says. “I asked Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, how much do you work? He said, Nicola, there’s hard work and there’s insanely hard work. I work insanely hard,” Huang told him.
“I work every day from when I wake up at 5 am until I go to bed at 9 pm. I work every weekday, Saturdays, Sundays and even on holidays,” Huang said.
But while this would feel like a grueling schedule to many, it works for Jensen Huang. When asked when he found the time to relax, he said he relaxed all the time. “I relax all the time, because I love what I do. And I think if you really love what you do, it’s not going to feel like work,” he added.
It’s a pretty profound thought — Huang says that he likes his job as NVIDIA founder and CEO so much that it doesn’t feel like work. A lot of this attitude perhaps comes down to Huang’s background — he had immigrated to the US from Taiwan at the age of 9 with an uncle. He’d done well in school, attended Stanford, and then founded NVIDIA at the age of 29. “To me, no task is beneath me. Remember, I used to be a dishwasher. I mean that. I used to clean toilets. I’ve cleaned a lot of toilets,” he’d once said.
Jensen Huang’s attitude to work life balance also mirrors what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says on the topic. He says that the phrase work life balance is misleading, because it implies a trade off between ‘work’ and ‘life’. What Bezos seems to prefer is something he called ‘work-life harmony’, which urges employees to have “life at the office” and “life at home”, with neither of them feeling like a trade off over the other. But whichever way you put it, it appears that it takes incredible hard work to be able to achieve outsized successes in life and business.