It's not uncommon to get advice from the successful people about suffering and resilience. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang famously said, ‘I hope suffering happens to you,’ in his Stanford speech. The newly minted Olympic champion in tennis, Qinwen Zheng, sang a Chinese rap called 经济舱 (The Economy Class), which is about underdogs, after she won the final at the Paris Olympics. Nobel Prize winner and mRNA vaccine pioneer Katalin Karikó’s entire academic career is filled with rejections and humiliations, yet she persevered and made it. There are countless examples like these.

We all agree that resilience is extremely important to success, and suffering is generally required to achieve it. But something seems off here—there is a missing link between them and success. This is rather important—if they don’t lead to success, why do we place so much emphasis on them? The good news is that if we decompose success into more fundamental factors, we can see the role resilience plays. This clarity of understanding can even lead to actionable insights.

Position Matters

If we consider the people who attribute their successes to suffering and resilience, you’ll notice that their paths are usually quite unique. Some are entrepreneurs building category-defining products, some are athletes making history, and some are scientists creating breakthroughs. What they have in common is that they are all in a position to create something new, and their creations have a pathway to influence the world. It is true that the world might not value them before they make it, but they always know the significance of their work, whether others see it or not. Like it or not, the majority of people aren’t in a position similar to theirs.

Whenever people want to do something that changes things or is simply different from what others are doing, it is very hard. The more significant the change is, the harder it will be. The suffering that comes from wanting to make a change is an inevitable by-product of the process. The scale of the success comes from the type and nature of the change, similar to the source of abnormal returns in investment management. If the change itself does not have significant value, then there is no success by default, whether the sufferings are overcome or not. In other words, overcoming suffering is a necessary condition for success for people who are on the path to making a significant change. However, it is by no means a source of success, especially if the change itself has limited value. Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman also stressed the importance of this:

Avoid The Unworthy Suffering

Jensen Huang’s promotion of suffering attracted a lot of criticism, unsurprisingly. Many people cited examples of abuse and mistreatment from families and workplaces to prove that suffering does not deserve to be promoted. I think both views are right, but under different conditions. Just like risks, some risks carry a fair or even outsized risk premium, yet other risks have no upside at all and need to be avoided.

Jensen’s suffering came from pushing the boundaries of his field, which is not avoidable. When you shy away from those sufferings, you are also choosing not to work on things that shape the world.

The criticism focuses on sufferings from toxic relationships and workplaces. They don’t really help with anything, to be honest. Avoiding them and protecting ourselves is important. When people take the face value of sufferings and artificially create them and impose them on families, tragedies occur—countless traumas are a result of abusive relationships in the name of love. When a workplace demands someone to overcommit without a comparable payoff, it is simply a form of inequality that needs to be addressed, not tolerated. Unworthy sufferings are worse than no returns; they cause longstanding psychological issues and mental trauma that require significant efforts to manage and cure, not to mention the opportunity costs.

When there are artificial sufferings in one’s relationship or environment, run.

Resilience and Mental Capacity

When people say sufferings lead to resilience, what does that mean? As someone who doesn’t handle sufferings well, I am always hoping for resilience. Recently, my thinking around the nature of resilience has evolved, and I found it surprisingly simple.

Firstly, how does suffering influence us? Much like pathogens and immune systems, it’s our response to the suffering rather than the suffering itself that causes issues. When we are impacted, we get drowned in negative emotions. All the negativities take up our mental capacity, and we can’t do other things as a result.

Resilience is an abstract word, but it may just be the power of insensitivity. For all those people who praise sufferings, you’ll notice how they handle sufferings is by ignoring them.

When Qinwen Zheng was slammed by her opponent Emma Navarro after defeating her in the semi-final, she said the following, which was short and sharp:

Similar things were said by Schwarzman and Karikó

By ignoring sufferings and not letting them get to you, your mental capacity will remain intact, allowing for great decision-making during the most critical time—not before the suffering, but after the suffering.

An interesting observation I made from my daily life was that my wife had very good insensitivity to people’s hostility, and I was ultra-sensitive about it. This contrast resulted in some profound differences between our execution efficiency. When investing in real estate, we go with properties in great locations, with great land and at great prices. The former can be solved analytically, but the price factor requires heavy negotiation with the agent, coupled with timing and the vendor’s special situations. We often offer significantly lower than the price guide. Naturally, we get rejected a lot, and sometimes the rejections come with mockery and dismissal from the agents. I could be very deflated after two or three rejections, but my wife almost didn’t feel like she got rejected. I recall once when an agent called her taste ‘cheap,’ and she thought it was complimentary. In the end, we bought an even better property in that area thanks to her.

The power of insensitivity is a blessing, allowing one to handle the most high-stakes situations well. Unfortunately, people need sufferings to help develop thick skin, except for the lucky ones like my wife.

Beta with Diminishing Downside

Earlier, I used risks as an example to explain the different types of suffering. The suffering resulting from doing great work is like systematic risk with a high-risk premium attached. The suffering artificially imposed is like idiosyncratic risk, where there is not only no premium but plenty of downsides. However, the former type of suffering is better than systematic beta, as it has a diminishing downside, making it look like alpha.

If we consider something hard and intimidating, most people’s initial reaction is to avoid it. When the brave ones try it out, they get burnt and will not do it again. That’s almost the end of the story for the vast majority. However, if the people who were burnt have the chance to do something similar, they will harvest the same gain but get burned less, due to thick skin, experience, and the mental capacity to navigate things better. Over time, mastery gets developed where the downside keeps going down, yet the upside could increase. The ability to endure sufferings becomes the moat, and this becomes pure alpha.

Don’t hope for suffering; hope for a suffering-proof mind that pursues great things instead.