Leadership Isn't Supposed to Make You (or Anyone Else) Feel Good
If you’re doing it right, there will be pain. You will piss people off. Great leaders learn to embrace the discomfort.
Matt Hunter • September 23, 2025
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia—the technology giant worth over $4 trillion—famously said, “If you want to be great, I wish you lots of pain and suffering.”
It’s a bold statement, but he meant it. In fact, Jensen later admitted that if he knew how hard it would be to build Nvidia, he might not have done it at all.
That’s the reality of leadership done right: it’s grueling, often thankless, and full of discomfort, tension, and emotional labor that most people simply aren’t willing to take on.
As an executive coach, I firmly believe that getting comfortable with discomfort is one of the most important skills you can cultivate as a leader. Great leaders don’t shy away from pain. They embrace it. These leaders understand that being possessed by a powerful idea or mission isn’t always a healthy or balanced experience. Yet it’s an experience worth honoring: fully, relentlessly, and often at great personal cost.
More than anything else, great leaders aren’t afraid of the pain of telling the truth. They build great companies that don’t shy away from feedback and tough conversations. And as we all know, the truth can hurt. Not because you’re careless or cruel, but because honesty—real honesty—is often painful. Telling the truth might hurt, but in the long run, it’s usually what’s best for all the stakeholders involved. If you’re a leader, your goal shouldn’t be to avoid upsetting people. It should be to serve the mission and push the work forward, even when it’s uncomfortable. If you’re not pushing anyone’s buttons, you’re probably not leading boldly enough.
Being a strong leader means having the courage to advocate for what you truly want. That’s harder than it sounds. It requires knowing what you desire and then clearly articulating it, even if it ruffles feathers. Standing up, speaking your truth, and being willing to challenge the loudest voices in the room is where real leadership lives.
Strong leaders also know how to bear the discomfort of others’ truth-telling. When someone disagrees with you, it’s not a threat; it’s a gift. It takes courage for someone to challenge your perspective. Their dissent is a signal that reality might be different than what you’re seeing. Embrace that tension. Welcome it.
It’s not supposed to feel great. It’s supposed to be potentially painful. It’s supposed to be awkward. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. Being a leader is all of those things. Your ability and willingness to sit in discomfort—especially the discomfort of honest, hard conversations—is directly correlated to the success of your organization.
The Work Above All Else
The highest-performing teams understand that the work and the mission always come first, above personal feelings or desires. It’s not that feelings don’t matter, but they’re not front and center.
This doesn’t mean leaders should be cruel, but it does mean they must be willing to tell the truth and the whole truth—clearly, directly, and without hesitation.
Steve Jobs embodied this kind of radical truth-telling. In a now-famous exchange, Jobs challenged former Apple Chief Design Officer Jonny Ive during a design review, delivering brutally direct feedback. Ive and the team had been "pouring their heart and soul" into the project. Ive thought Jobs was being harsh, so when he asked if Jobs could moderate the language a bit. Jobs said, "No, Jonny, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. And I'm surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important. Not how you believed that you were perceived by other people." Putting aside the absurdity of a man renowned for his image-conscious perfectionism calling a colleague “vain," this kind of intensity and uncompromising honesty in service of a higher standard is what drives true innovation.
Netflix’s leadership has taken it a step further, staging formal debates in front of a live audience where employees publicly debate each other on business strategies and new products to pursue. When the work comes before personal comfort, the best ideas win.
The Fortitude Required to Receive Feedback
If you’re running a company, you need to be able to do more than deliver hard feedback. You also need to be able to receive it.
Are you constantly dishing out feedback? Great. Then you’d better be tough enough to take it, too. Not all leaders know how to do this. When faced with criticism, it’s easy to posture, pretend you have it all together, or 'big-time' everyone else. This isn’t leadership; this is insecurity in disguise. True toughness is about having the fortitude to stand there, absorb the criticism, and respond with grace and humility.
A tough leader is comfortable taking feedback publicly in group meetings, not just 1-to-1s, so others can see how it’s done. This is one of the best things you can do to encourage a feedback-rich culture.
Here’s the critical point: it’s a red flag if you’re not regularly receiving praise and feedback from your team. It signals either a lack of trust and psychological safety among your people, or it means that your team doesn’t feel empowered to be honest. That’s on you to fix. When you ask for feedback from your team, don’t expect them to jump in right away. They might hesitate. Ask more than once if you need to, and show them it's safe to speak up. When they do give you that hard piece of criticism, take it on the chin—no defensiveness, no passive-aggressiveness. A simple, “Thank you. I’ll work on that,” or “I hear you. Here’s what I’m going to do differently,” is all it takes. If you disagree, explain why, but do it respectfully. The key is showing that feedback matters and that it leads to action. When someone dares to call you out, reward them. Make it known that speaking truth to power is valued in your organization.
Real leaders aren’t the ones who pretend to have all the answers—they’re the ones who seek the truth, even when it hurts. Being truly tough means having the courage to be wrong, to admit it publicly, and then to clean it up all the way through. It means holding the discomfort and tension through the process of addressing challenges and working towards change.
If you can handle the discomfort, you’ll find that there’s real power and freedom in this kind of radical honesty. It will transform you, your people, and your organization.