Lower Your Expectations, Raise Your Resilience

In March 2024, speaking to Stanford students, Huang said what Fortune and CNBC reported as a plea for lower expectations: people with very high expectations have very low resilience, and resilience matters for success. He added that one of his advantages is that his own expectations are very low, and he wished the students “ample doses of pain and suffering.”

A caution on the record: the wording varies by outlet, the venue is given variously as Stanford GSB or SIEPR, and one columnist could not find the passage in the video. The sentiment is consistent with what he has said elsewhere. At Caltech’s commencement in June 2024 he told graduates: “The ability to make sacrifices, endure pain and suffering, you will need these qualities in life.”

The humility. In his Stanford GSB “View From The Top” session (March 2024) he said: “when your share price drops 80 percent, it’s a little embarrassing, okay?”

The biography behind it. At Stripe Sessions in 2024 Huang recalled being sent to Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, a school with a dormitory and “a lot of chores”: “I was 9 years old,” and his job was to “clean all the bathrooms.” (Other accounts put his age at ten.) CBS’s 60 Minutes reports that he was washing dishes at Denny’s at fifteen.

Doesn’t transfer as advice to seek suffering. This is a survivor talking from the very top; the same hardship that forged him has broken plenty of people who never get a commencement stage. Hardship is not a strategy, and “low expectations” from a boss can become an excuse for a punishing workplace.