Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a counterintuitive take on workplace stress: it doesn’t come from hard work itself, but from avoiding problems you know you need to address. In a 2001 interview , Bezos said “stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over.”

Bezos, then a freshly minted billionaire following Amazon’s 1997 IPO, was talking at the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio . He described stress as a warning signal rather than an inevitable byproduct of demanding work. “So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me,” Bezos said. “What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me and I haven’t yet ta

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