Danger in the Comfort Zone

5

Understanding How People Work—The Earning Curve

Everything discussed so far can be summarized in one simple drawing. If we make a graph with productivity on one plane and pressure (anxiety, risk, stress, fear—here they all mean the same) on the other, and draw in the familiar bell-shaped curve (see Fig. 5-1), we can see how productivity and anxiety relate:

Productivity is very low when the level of stress is either very low or very high.

The graph is what social scientists call a model—a way of displaying relationships in visual format. I developed the model from my observations about how people behave and also from two other sources.

The first is the Yerkes-Dodson law, sometimes cited as the only example of a really scientific psychological ...