There’s an obvious limit to stress-induced innovation. There’s a delicate balance between helpful stress and crippling disaster. The latter prevents innovation as resources are sapped and people turn their attention from getting out of a crisis to merely surviving it. And perhaps just as important is what happens when we have the opposite. When everything is great—when wealth is flush, when the outlook is bright, when responsibility is low, and threats appear gone—you get some of the worst, dumbest, least-productive human behavior. President Richard Nixon once observed: The unhappiest people
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