"Nvidia's Jensen Huang told me: "Winners lose more often than losers. Winners try more things, more often, fail faster, and get smarter each time. Losers don't harvest any of that genius." He shared those insights with me at Stanford in 2010, during the opening of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center, when Nvidia's market value was just $8.2 billion. Fifteen years later, in 2025, Nvidia became the first company in history to surpass a $4 trillion market capitalization - a nearly 500-fold increase."
"Huang insists that the trajectory was anything but smooth. Product flops, near-misses, and cash crises nearly sank the company. But he claims that those failures weren't detours on the way to success - they were the engine, helping them power in a better direction faster. Each stumble forced Huang's team to rethink, redesign, and innovate at a pace that steady success never would have demanded."
Top leaders embrace setbacks as sources of insight and momentum, transforming wounds into wisdom and failures into competitive advantages. They persistently experiment, fail faster, and extract lessons that accelerate innovation. Nvidia's trajectory exemplifies this: early product flops, near-misses, and cash crises forced rapid rethinking, redesign, and faster product cycles, contributing to massive growth and internal wealth creation. Richard Branson emphasizes willingness to turn setbacks into superpowers. CEOs who endure attribute success to iterative learning from mistakes rather than flawless planning. Resilient leadership requires absorbing punches, adapting plans, and trying more things more often to harvest strategic genius from failures.
Read at Big Think
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