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“You suck.”

Apparently, that’s what Jensen Huang (Nvidia’s co-founder) tells himself in the mirror. Yes, really lol.

After a great quarter, an Nvidia executive recalled Huang saying:

“I look in the mirror every morning and say: ‘You suck.’”

Most people start with coffee and a little existential dread (no, just me?). Jensen skips straight to the performance review.

As of October, Jensen’s net worth was around $200 billion. We all know money doesn’t buy happiness. But apparently, it doesn’t buy a quieter inner critic either.

I meet a lot of entrepreneurs with that same mentality. Sometimes it comes from how they were raised, a rough time at school, or a chip they’ve carried for years. Sometimes it’s simply the urge to prove themselves wrong.

Jensen has said, “In order to do something incredible, you have to suffer.” Asked on the Acquired podcast whether he’d do the founder journey again, knowing what he knows now, he said, “I wouldn’t do it.” He described building Nvidia as “a million times harder” than he expected.

A quick recap of the road there:

Not exactly a straight line from good idea to billionaire.

Jensen’s morning routine sounds brutal, but there’s an important distinction: suffering for its own sake is different from accepting the hard parts of building something you care about.

No big personal achievement comes for free.

I wrote in June that Stoicism isn’t about chasing pain. It’s about choosing the right pain, the kind that builds competence, without turning self-punishment into a personality. Learn to suffer joyfully →

The goal isn’t to become better at suffering. It’s to learn to love the journey, keep getting better, and celebrate a win before immediately inventing a new problem.

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WOD “Denny’s detour” (12-minute AMRAP):

Founder challenge: make 10 hard calls

Ari Emanuel built his career as a talent agent by “rolling the calls,” sometimes making 100-plus calls a day. He says the 10,000-hour rule doesn’t hold a candle to making 10,000 hard calls.

As he puts it, “The ten-thousand-phone-call rule is undefeated.”

But today is your lucky day: you only have to make 10.

Want a full week of these? Try the free 7-day founder fitness challenge →

This week’s deal breakdown is of the ‘highest volume’ med spa on the west coast with VERY (🙄) high margins… leaving a few question marks

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