The Advantage of Anxiety

Adam Grant, University of Pennsylvania

Adam Grant, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about how the energy of nervous anticipation allows “defensive pessimists” to perform just as well as those who calmly prepare for a looming challenge and visualize success in advance. He adds that efforts to reduce stress in such instances can even be counterproductive. “The great thing about both anxiety and excitement is they both involve uncertainty,” Grant observes.