Have you read about Jensen Huang's "Top 5 Things" strategy? (I may be butchering the name.)

He regularly has everyone in his company send him a short email directly, listing the top 5 things on their mind, and he reads through them all. It helps sort through the bureaucracy that ends up distorting information signals, and lets him cut directly to what people are thinking at every organizational level in the company.

Very smart.

Yeah, hard work is necessary, but you also must have extra doses of both talent and luck to get to the top as he has.

My dad always taught me growing up that if my job is digging ditches, that if I was the best ditch digger there, eventually I would own the place.

It's not exactly true, but it's not exactly false either.

Good reminder that I wanted to write about hormesis for ~HealthAndFitness.

"willingness, and ability, to put in more effort, and tolerate more suffering, than anyone else"

Most people cannot traverse this path, which is why it works. It doesn't come without cost though. Burnout and regret are likely side effects. My entire lifestyle now is based on trying to avoid stress, toil, pain and suffering.

I think you are misinterpreting the suffering part or at least oversimplifying it. The suffering doesn't merely come from working hard or long hours. It comes from the constant pressure, problems, sacrifices one needs to make to put their vocational duty above all else. The tendency to not be present for your loved ones, even when you are physically present.

I will give you an example. When my son was young we decided to take a short overnight trip from Toronto to Niagara Falls so my son could see the falls. Also my wife wanted to do some shopping on the US side (I don't recall but the Can/US exchange rate was much closer to par back then) while we were shopping in the US I got a call from one of my employees who supervised a 3 person overnight crew that worked 7 nights a week in downtown Toronto and he was sick with the flu and couldn't come in to work. I thought not good but they will get through. I called the second most senior guy to tell him and he refused to go to work and quit because he didn't want to have to work harder or longer. The third guy had only been working with us for a week. There was no way, even if he wanted to work more hours he was going to be able to work on his own. So, I told my wife "I have to go to work". She replied "when?" and I said "now". She was very displeased with me, it was not a fun 2 hours drive back to Toronto, but this was our biggest contract and in my mind I could not risk pissing them off or hoping they would be understanding of our situation. So we dropped everything and got back around 8pm. I left right away and worked until 9am. Crap like that used to happen all the time especially in the early years of my business. Later when we had a couple supervisors working for us it was a little easier but mentally you could never truly be present or at least I couldn't. There was always some problem to solve or some email or text message to take you away from what you really should be doing. I think the suffering is more in things you sacrifice rather than the actual hard work.

I agree. I don't believe the outcome of suffering can be success, in any ways.

Such suffering stories are so similar for self made men that you can believe only people who suffered in their life become successful on their own.

I think everyone goes through suffering in his life but we only have chance to listen the stories of successful people.

Thiel often says that success is overdetermined. It's also hard to imagine Huang getting Nvidia to where it is without suffering a lot.