Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang recently revealed that the biggest career lesson he learned did not come from a mentor in the industry or a business leader but from a gardener he came across while travelling in Japan.
“I used to work from one of our international sites for one month each summer,” he said at an event last week. “When our kids were in their teens, we spent a summer in Japan. (One) weekend, we visited Kyoto and the Silver Temple.”
There, on a “suffocatingly hot, humid and sticky" day, the tech billionaire came across a man working in a huge garden. Huang said he saw the man diligently tend to the moss despite the sweltering heat, using only a bamboo tweezer to sift through the foliage. It confused the Nvidia boss.
“I walked up to him and I said, ‘What are you doing?’” the 61-year-old said. “He said, ‘I’m picking dead moss. I’m taking care of my garden.’ And I said, ‘But your garden is so big.’ And he responded, ‘I have cared for my garden for 25 years. I have plenty of time.’”
Although the interaction was brief, but the gardener’s words became one of the “most profound learnings in my life,” Huang added. “It really taught me something. This gardener has dedicated himself to his craft and doing his life’s work. And when you do that, you have plenty of time,” CNBC Make It quoted him as saying.
Jensen Huang had earlier shared that he begins to work from the moment he wakes up and even when he is not working, he is thinking about work, seven days a week.
"I work from the moment I wake up to the moment when I go to bed, and I work seven days a week. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working. And when I’m working, I’m working," he told Stripe CEO Patrick Collison during a podcast. "I used to wake up at 5 (am), but these days, I wake up at 6 (am) because of my dogs... I don't mind waking anybody up, but I feel guilty when I wake the puppies up."
Nvidia on Tuesday became the world's most valuable company, dethroning tech heavyweight Microsoft, as its chips continue to play a central role in a race to dominate the market for artificial intelligence. With this, Huang has become the 11th richest person in the world, with his net worth soaring by over $4 billion to $119 billion, according to Forbes.
Shares of the chipmaker climbed 3.2 percent to $135.21, lifting its market capitalization to $3.326 trillion, just days after overtaking iPhone maker Apple to become the second most valuable company.
The stock has surged about 173 percent so far this year, compared with a rise of about 19 percent in Microsoft shares, with demand for its top-of-the-line processors outpacing supply.
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