Being An Expert on a Life You Don't Actually Want

Morgan Housel (0:06)

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Before investing, consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit statestreet.com/im for a prospectus containing this and other information. Read it carefully. All right, welcome back. Thinking about the news that happened this week, and we'll get to that in a second. I was watching the Acquired podcast a couple years ago. Acquired is, I think, the best business podcast out there. It's just so incredibly good. And in the podcast, they were interviewing NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong.

And he said something in the podcast that stopped me in my tracks, and it was like, hit pause, write this down. I can't believe how incredible and revealing that was. And the question that the interviewers, Ben and David, of Acquired asked Jensen was, if you could go back to 1993, I think it was, when he started NVIDIA in a Denny's with a couple of his buddies, what advice would you have for yourself? And Jensen said, I wouldn't do it.

And Ben and David laughed. Like, are you kidding me? NVIDIA, if you're not aware, because it's not really a household product, a consumer product, is the most valuable company in America, at least back and forth in the last year, and is probably the most exceptional and impressive technological marvel, not just of today, but of the last American era, the last 25, 30, 40 years, something like that. It's incredible. It makes the chips that makes AI work effectively is what it is. Just an incredible company. And Jensen Wong himself is one of the richest men in the world now. He's worth almost $200 billion, top 10 richest men in the world. This is the epitome of the ultimate success that any founder or entrepreneur can possibly dream of, a product that changes the world, unbelievable wealth created, not just for yourself, but for other people. And looking back, the advice for himself is I wouldn't do it. And so Ben and David laugh, like, what do you mean? How could you possibly say that? And I want to read you Jensen's response here. He says, he makes a point that he doesn't necessarily regret starting NVIDIA, but he says, The way that I feel about it is that building NVIDIA turned out to be a million times harder than I expected, a million times harder than any of us expected. If we had any idea of the pain and the suffering, the vulnerability and the challenges, the embarrassment and the shame, the list of all the things that would go wrong, I don't think anybody would do it. Nobody in their right mind would do it.

And then he goes on to say, that's the superpower of an entrepreneur, is that despite those long odds, they still do it. They just have this shield over their eyes where they wake up every morning and say, despite those odds, we're going to keep doing it. That's where innovation comes from. But I think there was a broader point that I took away from this, which is that there is a level of success and ambition that starts to obviously backfire. Not just ambition. Maybe ambition is obvious. There is a level of wealth and success that begins to backfire. And I've made this point in my last book that there is an ideal net worth for most people, beyond which money becomes a social liability, by and large because the effort that goes into earning it and the sacrifices go into earning it take away from other parts of your life more than they contribute. There's a net worth beyond which your lifestyle is not going to change very much. But time away from your family and your own health does change your life considerably, for the worse. And I think for a lot of things with wealth, we are very cognizant of the upside. We can count the upside. Oh, if I have this much ambition, I'm going to make this much money. My net worth will increase by this much. I can buy this much house. Very easy to count the upside and to imagine the upside. And very oblivious to the downside. To the extent that we even think about the downside at all, it's very difficult to quantify. So it might as well be out of sight, out of mind. And I want to make the point that on net, this is great because that's where progress comes from. People who wake up every morning willing to sacrifice, to build a product, to support their family, to save for the future, whatever it might be. On net, this is fantastic. It's amazing, though, to watch individuals look back at their career, a very successful career that you and I, or particularly young people, might look up to and say, that's what I want to be someday. That's the best. And the people who've achieved it say, I wouldn't do it again. And I had a similar conversation with a doctor a couple of years ago who was retired and looked back on his career and said, to the effect, I'm proud of my career. I did a lot of good.