Jensen Huang Never Did 'Self-Development.' He Just Worked.

Opening

Dear reader, someone once asked Jensen Huang, “How did you work on your self-development?” Interestingly, he looked like he genuinely didn’t understand the question. Only when it was asked a second time did he answer, and it boiled down to this: “I just worked my ass off.”

It reminds me of a famous anecdote about Kim Yuna, South Korea’s Olympic figure skating champion. “What do you think about while you’re practicing?” “I just do it.” Jensen Huang’s answer and Kim Yuna’s answer share the same essence. But this raised a question for me: is what we call “self-development” actually a concept that doesn’t exist for the people who’ve truly succeeded?

Why ‘Self-Development’ Doesn’t Exist for Successful People

Ask Jensen Huang what he does to relax, and the answer is “I work.” A reporter pushes back: “Isn’t working the opposite of resting?” His reply: “For me, thinking about work is how I rest. Thinking about succeeding at work just makes me feel too good.”

Elon Musk is cut from similar cloth. His approach to time is remarkably simple: throw himself into a project, spend the leftover time with family, and sleep the rest to recover energy. People who’ve worked with him tell a consistent story in interviews — he hires the best talent he can find, hands them the reins, and never touches their work again. Call it delegation if you’re being kind, or neglect if you’re not.

The same holds true in Korea. Read the memoirs of Chung Ju-yung (founder of Hyundai), Lee Byung-chul (founder of Samsung), or Seo Jung-jin (founder of Celltrion), and you won’t find a single line like “I woke up at 5 a.m., took a cold shower, meditated, and that’s how I succeeded.” Self-development doesn’t even exist as a separate category in their life stories. There’s no split between work and life — just accounts of people throwing themselves into what they wanted to do.

The Irony of a $48.4 Billion Market

And yet, ironically, the self-development market is enormous. According to Grand View Research, the global personal development market was estimated at roughly $48.4 billion (~₩67 trillion) in 2024, and it’s projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 5.7% through 2030.

Here’s what’s interesting: the fact that this market keeps growing means demand for self-development isn’t shrinking at all. But at the same time, the reality of the startup world collides head-on with this market’s promises. Even among companies that made it through Y Combinator — the most successful startup accelerator in the world — about 88% shut down or get acquired within 12 years. For ordinary startups, the 10-year survival rate is just 10%.

Here’s the core of it: these founders aren’t lazy. They work incredibly hard. Most of the people I’ve personally evaluated, worked alongside, and watched over the years were genuinely, deeply committed. But whether something works out or not can’t be explained by any formula. There’s no secret manual for success.

Why There’s No Secret Manual: The Ratatouille Rule

Success is like ratatouille¹. Just as the dish is made by layering whatever leftover vegetables happen to be in the fridge, a single outcome only emerges once countless experiences, judgment calls, and chance events pile up together.

Say your mom throws together whatever’s in the fridge, drizzles in some sesame oil, stir-fries it with gochujang (Korean fermented chili paste), and makes a delicious fried rice. If you say, “Mom, give me the recipe,” what does she say? “I just mixed together whatever was there.” That’s it. That’s the whole story.

But the self-development industry tries to turn this recipe into a matrix. It manufactures a formula — “wake up at 5 a.m. + cold shower + meditation + reading = success” — and sells it. Scroll through Instagram or Threads, and you’ll find posts saying “comment below if you want this method,” racking up hundreds of comments. People treat it like a lifeline that will save them. It’s structurally identical to the logic that buying a top student’s study notes from Seoul National University — Korea’s most prestigious university — will get you admitted there too.

I’m not saying cold showers are bad. Meditation, yoga, pilates — they’re all great. But none of them, on their own, will change your life. Just as splashing cold water on your face every morning won’t raise every student’s grades.

How AI Is Reshaping the Landscape of Self-Development

Here’s where one variable enters the picture: AI.

We’ve now reached a point where even free AI models can produce answers as good as a top-tier (Grade 1) student’s on Suneung, Korea’s national college entrance exam. According to Stanford HAI’s 2025 AI Index Report, the cost of AI inference dropped by more than 280x between November 2022 and October 2024. Questions that used to require finding an expert — “Which exercise should I start with?” “Where do I even begin if I want to lose weight?” “How do I write my resume?” — now get remarkably intuitive, efficient answers from AI. Available 24 hours a day, for free.

Jensen Huang himself said as much in a recent interview: “Everyone should have an AI tutor. The barriers to knowledge have come down. I always keep a personal tutor by my side too.”

What this means is clear. Self-development that depends on outside advice — a structure where someone else develops you — can be replaced by AI. Information like “do this and you’ll succeed” is now just a ChatGPT query away. And it gives you an answer tailored to your specific situation.

Oz’s Lens

Watching this unfold, I think we’re entering an era not of self-development, but of self-practice.

An analogy from wuxia novels might make this easier to grasp. In wuxia fiction, someone who invents their own martial art and founds a school is called a daejongsa — a grandmaster who forges an entirely new martial arts tradition. The Hwasan Sect, the Gongdong Sect, the Hyeongsan Sect — all of these were founded by some original figure who invented their own martial art from scratch. A daejongsa isn’t someone who followed another master’s secret manual; they’re someone who carved out their own path from within.

Look at pianists like Lim Yunchan and Cho Seong-jin. Nobody’s whipping them into practicing. They play alone, think “that’s not quite the feeling I want,” and play it again, and again. It’s the same with Faker, the professional League of Legends player. Nobody tells him “practice more.” He just keeps repeating, on his own, “I’m not satisfied with today — let’s do a bit more.”

This is the difference between suryeon (修鍊, drilling) and suhaeng (修行, practice). Suryeon is repeating something until you acquire the skill. Suhaeng is a process of assigning meaning to each individual action and awakening to it yourself. These are entirely different dimensions.

Having watched countless successes and failures while building go-to-market strategies, I’ve found that what long-term survivors have in common isn’t that they followed some secret manual well — it’s that they built their own pillar to stand on. Not people who followed a formula someone else made, but people who were so obsessed, so in love with what they were doing, that they threw themselves into it completely. This is exactly why Jensen Huang couldn’t understand the question. For him, “self-development” was never a separate activity — it was simply life itself.

Closing

Here’s the summary. First, for people who succeed, “self-development” was never a separate category — it was a natural extension of life and work. Second, as AI begins to replace the role of information-based self-development, the market built on the structure of “someone else develops me” is hitting an inflection point. Third, what matters going forward isn’t some external secret manual, but a mindset of practice — building your own pillar from within.

That said, this is honestly a hard thing to package and sell as a course. Practice isn’t something you can teach — it’s a path you have to walk yourself. Maybe that’s exactly why the $48.4 billion market exists: buying a secret manual is a lot more convenient than walking the path yourself. Which side are you standing on, dear reader?

📎 References & Further Reading

• Grand View Research, “Personal Development Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report”, 2024. : A solid primer for understanding the size and growth outlook of the global personal development market.
• Stanford HAI, “AI Index Report 2025”, Stanford University, 2025. : Shows in hard data just how quickly AI costs are falling and access is expanding.
• Jared Heyman, “On the life and death of Y Combinator startups”, Medium, 2022. : A batch-by-batch analysis of survival and failure rates among YC startups. It makes the case, with data, that there’s no formula for success.
• Fortune, “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says everyone should get an AI tutor right away”, 2025. : An interview where Jensen Huang talks about AI tutors, offering a glimpse of how AI could reshape education and self-development.
• Mayfield, “How Hard Can It Be? Lessons from Jensen Huang”, 2024. : Covers Jensen Huang’s leadership philosophy and his thoughts on “having a different perspective.”

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

1. Ratatouille: A traditional dish from the Provence region of southern France, made by layering whatever vegetables are left in the fridge and baking them in the oven. Since it’s assembled from whatever ingredients are on hand rather than a fixed recipe, it’s used here as a metaphor for success — not a single formula, but the complex outcome of countless factors. ↩