[bell-cot]

> The difference is: he got lucky

So...back in 1993, when Jensen Huang was founding Nvidia, how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?

Yes, luck favored him a number of times, to make it to $8e10 net worth. If he was only worth a measly $8e5, would you have some other reason(s) to sneer at him?

[Draiken]

I don't understand why everyone assumes I'm talking down on him. I'm merely pointing out how irrelevant that quote is.

> how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?

That's not the right question. The right question is: how many of those even had the opportunity to do this? I'd doubt it's more than a single digit.

He made it. Congrats to him. But we don't know why he made it. No, it wasn't because he "suffered". It wasn't because he worked hard. We quite simply can't know.

If you can't attribute his success to what he is saying, it's not relevant. Now that he made it, he can proclaim it was any of his millions of choices, but by definition it cannot be a few generic choices, because many more made the same choices and never made it.

Luck is a stub for all of the infinite choices and events that conspired for him to be where he is today. It's nice to pretend it's hard work that leads to success (or in this case "pain and suffering"), but it's most definitely not true.