Inspiration can strike in the most unlikely of places—from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying a gardener taught him one of “most profound learnings” in his life, to Uber’s cofounders creating their company to fix a common inconvenience. Hollywood actor Henry Golding also spent years penning words of wisdom from strangers on the fly, finding power behind the random musings of locals to coveted writers.
“When I was living in London, [I] must have been about 19, 20-ish, I would go around with a notebook and write bits of advice that I heard, or some random musings from the local drunk, or anything that I would come across,” Golding tells Fortune. “It was the romantic period of a young man coming into his adulthood and trying to find mentorship.”
Golding was going through quite a career transformation at the time he penciled down his favorite quotes. From the age of 17 to 22 he was a hair stylist working at high-end salon Richard Ward in London’s Sloane Square—with affluent clientele including Princess of Wales Kate Middleton’s brother. Hair styling was Golding’s “first passion,” but after rounding out his early 20s, he made a big career leap. He packed up his things and moved to Malaysia—where the actor was born—to pursue travel television. Eleven years into his successful travel-host career, Hollywood director John Chu (who directed blockbuster Wicked) found his clips on YouTube and recognized his star power for a new project: Crazy Rich Asians, which earned more than $238 million worldwide in box offices. That was his first major studio role, and the rest is history.
Throughout his several professional changes, Golding has lived by one quote he jotted down in passing. It’s a musing on life from renowned 20th century photographer Edward J. Stieglitz: “The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years!” Whether it be globetrotting as a TV host for BBC’s The Travel Show or starring in multimillion-dollar box office successes, Golding has stuck with the perspective on living.
“It really rang true. At the end of it, I just want to be able to tell some crazy stories and have fun anecdotes and tell of the gloriousness of change and possibility,” Golding muses. “So that’s always been in the back of my mind—it’s kind of helped me navigate and align with.”
Other unconventional ways leaders have found inspiration
Sometimes the best advice comes from complete strangers, and epiphanies are experienced through the most ordinary tasks.
Uber was born out of correcting a daily annoyance, which scaled a $203 billion company. It was 2008, and cofounder friends Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were attending an event in Paris. Once the evening came to a close, they needed a ride home, but they couldn’t manage to hail a taxi. Standing cold in the showy streets, they daydreamed about the prospect of ordering a car straight from their smartphones. One year later in 2009, the idea was hatched into the business that now has more than 180 million monthly customers.
Nvidia CEO Huang had an intense revelation one summer when spending a summer in Japan. One weekend, he and his family visited Kyoto’s Silver Temple, and Huang noticed a gardner diligently tending to the moss under suffocating heat. The man managed the garden with bamboo tweezers. Puzzled by his painstaking care, the tech leader had to ask why.
“I walked up to him and I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Huang recounted during a commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology last year. “He said, ‘I’m picking dead moss. I’m taking care of my garden.’ And I said, ‘But your garden is so big.’ And he responded, ‘I have cared for my garden for 25 years. I have plenty of time.’”
“It really taught me something,” Huang said. “This gardener has dedicated himself to his craft and doing his life’s work. And when you do that, you have plenty of time.”
