One of the best things you can do for yourself in adulthood, is to learn how to leave things alone.
Just leave it alone. Situations, people, whatever it is, leave it alone.
Do not rush out of the slippery bathroom to pick your calls. Cultivate the habit of calling back when you are done instead. Airtime is far cheaper than brain surgery.
The older you get, the more you realize luck is mostly exposure. If you sit in the same place, have the same routine, talking to the same people, nothing new really happens. You have to engage the world to win. Travel more. Talk to people.
Nvidia is worth $5 trillion, more than the entire economy of Japan. No company in history has ever been worth more. It was started in 1993 in a Denny's diner by three engineers who put $200 each on the table.
The CEO running it, Jensen Huang, grew up washing dishes at Denny's. He met two engineers at a booth in San Jose. Over cheap coffee, they started sketching out a company. Their plan was to build computer chips for video games, the kind that make 3D graphics look real on a screen.
That was the pond they thought they were swimming in. Video games. Still a small industry in 1993.
In 2006, Jensen made a decision that nearly killed the company. He started building software that turned his gaming chips into something more powerful. Scientists could now use them to do heavy math problems, the kind that used to require expensive supercomputers. Wall Street thought he was crazy. From 2006 to 2017, Nvidia spent close to $12 billion on this work while their revenue was only a few billion dollars a year. In 2014 alone, they put 30 cents of every dollar they made into research that was not paying off. Jensen later said it was the closest he ever came to killing his own company.
Six years later, in 2012, a team at the University of Toronto built a program called AlexNet that could look at a picture and tell you what was in it. They trained it in a grad student's bedroom using two of Jensen's gaming chips that cost $500 each. They entered a contest and beat every other team in the world. Almost no one noticed. But Jensen did. He started rebuilding the entire company around teaching computers to think, even though almost nobody wanted that yet.
Today, almost every AI in the world runs on Jensen's chips. In 2023, Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, said he and other tech CEOs had to spend an hour with Jensen at a sushi restaurant in Palo Alto, begging him for more chips.
Jensen on the early years: "I had no idea how to do it. None of us knew how to do anything."
The pond he thought he was swimming in was video games. The actual pond turned out to be every computer on the planet.
The Denny's booth where it all started has a plaque on it now. It reads: "The booth that launched a trillion-dollar company." That number is now five.
When you stop reading books, you start losing verbal dexterity, depth of thought and imagination.
A closed book is a closed mind.
Don't EVER stop reading.