Most don’t realize how heavy a tray of coffee cups gets when you’re trying to carry one more than you probably should. One mistake and the whole thing comes down.
It’s not easy work. Dirty dishes. Sticky tables. Customers waiting. Orders piling up. Clean the table. Wipe the counter. Do it again.
And when somebody doesn’t show up for their shift, you’re suddenly the host, the dishwasher, the busboy and the waiter all at once.
The kind of job that leaves your feet aching at the end of the night. The kind of job where nobody notices when you do it well, but everybody notices when you make a mistake.
Sometimes they look right through you, as if the job is who you are instead of honest work that deserves respect.
That was Jensen Huang’s first job. At 15, he worked at a Denny’s. One of my favorite diners!
Service trained Jensen Huang before the world knew his name.
As a boy, he and his brother were sent from Taiwan to the U.S. They ended up at Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, which their family thought was a boarding school but was actually a religious reform academy. The New Yorker reported that he was bullied there and later said, “Back then, you just had to toughen up and move on.”
Years later, after school, engineering and long days in Silicon Valley, he found himself back at a Denny’s, not wearing an apron. Not carrying plates. Sitting in a booth with two other engineers, talking about a company they wanted to build.
It was just three engineers sitting in a booth, drinking coffee and talking about an idea.
None of them could see the future. That is the strange thing about destiny. It rarely walks in dressed like destiny. Sometimes it is just a half cup of coffee, a thought that will not leave you alone, and a fire burning where nobody else can see it.
That idea became NVIDIA.
Today, people talk about NVIDIA as if it had appeared fully formed, as if a $5 trillion machine had dropped from the sky.
Funny.
In 1993, he helped start NVIDIA. They raised money, made the wrong technical bet, almost killed the company, laid off more than half their people, and ended up with about one month of payroll left. Then Huang bet what remained on a chip he wasn’t sure would work.
He opened staff presentations by saying, “Our company is 30 days from going out of business.”
A voice in your head gets loud in moments like that. You missed it. You’re a failure. Go home.
Most leaders cover the panic. Huang named it. Thirty days. One month. A clock over every desk. The voice that said you were going to fail no longer was whispering. It was standing in the room with a calendar.
And still, they built.
The RIVA 128 graphics chip worked. It sold fast enough to give NVIDIA another breath.
It is hard to sound like a genius when you are laying people off. It is hard to believe in destiny when payroll is 30 days away. It is hard to remember the fire when the numbers say the fire is about to go out.
A person who has been looked through knows how to work without applause. A person who has carried too much on a tray knows balance. A person who has cleaned up messes knows panic does not clear the table. Hands do.
Years later, Huang said, “No one can carry more coffee cups than I can.”
That is the part people miss about service. It teaches you to notice. It teaches you to move when the room gets loud. When the room is falling apart, the server has to hold it together. Responsibility without applause.
A person who learns to serve without being seen may be learning how to lead before anyone gives them a title.
No honest work is small. No beginning owns your ending.
And no one gets to decide how far you can go just because they met you while you were still serving coffee.
• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.