Why did Jensen Huang refuse to see the future?
On the June 10 episode of tvN's "You Quiz on the Block," host Yoo Jae-suk asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to choose between perfect foresight and unbreakable resilience. Huang answered without hesitation: resilience. His reasoning was arithmetic. One option is impossible for any human to hold. The other anyone can be built. There was nothing to weigh.
Set that beside the second question Yoo posed. Speak with your past self or your future self? Huang chose the future. He declined the chance to correct past mistakes and instead walked toward his future self. Two answers, one worldview. He does not try to reach back and control time. He bets on enduring whatever arrives and standing up again.
Nvidia is the proof. In 2006, when the market was focused on graphics cards and nothing more, Huang poured a fortune into CUDA. For nearly a decade, investors looked away, and the company's value once fell below $10 billion. He has spoken often about the mid-1990s, when Nvidia came within weeks of collapse. He did not survive by predicting the artificial intelligence wave. He survived by surviving the years.
The issue here is less about positive thinking than about control. The more the future unsettles us, the harder we try to forecast it. We read market reports, draft scenarios and track competitors. We spend almost no time on the one capacity that meets the unpredictable moment: the ability to rise after the fall. Huang's choice exposes the trade we keep making backward. The skill we polish daily — prediction — is the one no human can have. The skill we neglect — resilience — is the one we can actually grow. We chase what cannot be held and leave to chance what can.
So the real test is whether resilience is teachable at all. After decades of research, the American Psychological Association (APA) defines resilience as ordinary, not extraordinary. It is a set of behaviors and thoughts that anyone can learn, not the inheritance of a few steel-nerved people, but a bundle of trainable skills: emotional regulation, coping strategy, a network of relationships. The APA presses the point further. Resilience is a process, not a trait. The question is not who is strong, but under what conditions a person becomes strong.
How it works is stranger still. A 2025 study in Behavioral Sciences, tracking 483 university students, mapped the path from resilience to lower anxiety about the future. The finding: Resilience rarely acts directly on that anxiety. It moves through subjective well-being first. People who recover well endure the future not because it frightens them less, but because their present feels more stable.
That mechanism matters because it marks the limit. Resilience changes nothing about the future. It cannot move next quarter's revenue, the investment market or a rival's next play. It changes your current state, and a steadier present makes the future easier to face. Huang said resilience is built only through experience, by giving yourself the chance to fail and recover. The muscle is not learned from books. It is written into the body by falling and rising.
The study has limits. One campus, one self-reported survey, no easy leap to a room of executives. Yet its shape gives Huang's answer a firm spine. Return now to the balance game. Prediction is a wager on the impossible. Resilience is an investment in the possible. Our calendars and our energy pour into the first. Huang could answer in half a second because he had already digested that truth in his own body.
How many hours this month did you spend forecasting a future you cannot control? And how few did you give to the one muscle that bends without breaking?
Choi Hee-jin is an educator and practical theologian, Yale Divinity School fellow (2025–2026), exploring medical humanities at Duke. She writes about medicine, technology, and human flourishing, with imagination and hope, at Human Becoming (humanbecom.ing).