My thesis is not a moral one. It is structural.
Prosperity — material and social alike — creates buffers. Buffers dampen consequences. Dampened consequences interrupt the most important learning mechanism available to human beings: the direct feedback loop between decision and outcome.
In other words: the more comfortable the environment, the less often a person is truly required to be accountable — and the fewer opportunities they have to learn how.
This is not an attack on prosperity. Prosperity is good. But its unintended side effect on the development of accountability is real, scientifically documented, and something I observe in my work every day.
What the research says
Social psychologist Angela Duckworth has shown in her widely cited work on grit that long-term success correlates less with intelligence or talent than with the ability to persist through failure, boredom, and discomfort. Crucially, grit is not built through encouragement. It is built through experience — through real failure with real consequences, overcome.
Those who have never had those experiences, because a safety net was always available, develop grit structurally less well. Not from laziness. From a lack of opportunity.
Psychologist Martin Seligman provides the counterpart with his concept of learned helplessness — originally described as a response to uncontrollable negative stimuli. What is less often discussed is that an analogous effect applies to uncontrollable positive conditions as well. Someone who repeatedly experiences things working out — regardless of their own behaviour — gradually loses their belief in the efficacy of their own actions. They do not become lazy. They become passive in a deeper sense: they no longer experience themselves as a cause.
Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley has demonstrated through years of research into the so-called Power Paradox that wealth and power systematically reduce empathy while increasing the tendency toward self-overestimation. The combination is fatal: one believes oneself to be successful because of ability — not because of luck, network, or a privileged environment.
Management researcher Carol Dweck, in her work on mindsets, shows that people with a rigid self-image — the so-called fixed mindset — experience mistakes as a threat to their identity. Those who have never learned to deal productively with failure are more likely to develop precisely this pattern. The comfort zone protects the ego in the short term. In the long term, it prevents growth.
Finally, the Yerkes-Dodson Law from neuropsychology describes the relationship between arousal and performance as an inverted U-curve: too little pressure leads to lethargy, too much to paralysis — but the optimal performance window sits deliberately outside the comfort zone, in a state of moderate tension that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi later described as flow. The comfort zone is, in other words, neuropsychologically the worst place for development.
The houseplant as a diagnostic tool
There is a test that no MBA programme teaches and no assessment centre measures. It costs nothing, requires no evaluation, and yet delivers results with surprising precision: look at a person's houseplants.
Not as a lifestyle signal. As an indicator.
Someone with three dried-out stumps in plastic pots on the windowsill — and a ready explanation that always begins with "well, actually" — has an accountability problem. Not with plants. With themselves.
That sounds provocative. It is intended as a diagnosis.
Houseplants don't beep. They don't send reminders. They die quietly. That is precisely why they are a reliable test of quiet, consistent reliability — the quality that matters when no one is watching and no incentive system is in play.
People with many genuine friendships — not digital ones, but the kind that require effort and are sometimes uncomfortable — have trained the same capacity. Parents who are truly present, likewise. And elite athletes perhaps most consistently of all: they know that results are the sum of decisions no one sees. The early morning training session at minus two degrees. The sacrifice. The commitment to treating defeat as a data point rather than a victim narrative.
Prosperity as a comfort zone amplifier
Back to my daughter's question over lunch: why can so few people do this?
The answer lies neither in genetics nor in character. It lies in the system.
Prosperous societies — and Switzerland is among the most prosperous in the world — create conditions that structurally impede the development of accountability. Not through malicious intent. Through good intentions taken too far.
Overprotected childhoods in which failure is always cushioned. Education systems that treat failure as a problem rather than as learning material. Social systems that are necessary but do not ensure feedback between effort and outcome. Wealthy families in which the next generation never truly risks anything — because the safety net is always there.
The result: a growing cohort of people who are formally highly qualified, articulate, and conversant with the right concepts — but who have never learned to be lastingly accountable for something that doesn't run on its own.
And when it doesn't work — the company, the project, the leadership role — the excuses follow. With a list of circumstances that always begins outside the person themselves: the economy, the market, the partner, the timing.
That is not a failure of character. It is the logical consequence of a system that has systematically dampened consequences.
Self-reflection as an antidote — and why it is rare
Self-reflection is not a philosophical exercise. It is an operational tool. Those who do not regularly examine their own role in a failure repeat the same mistake under a new name.
The people who are durably successful — structurally, not episodically — practise self-reflection as hygiene, not as crisis response. They do not ask "what went wrong?" when it is too late. They ask themselves weekly: "What could I have done better?" — and receive an honest answer, because they have learned to listen to themselves.
This requires that one does not need to protect one's ego. And that is precisely the connection to prosperity: those who have never truly risked anything — livelihood, status, relationship — have had less practice dealing with vulnerability. The ego remains fragile. And a fragile ego is a poor conversation partner for honest self-analysis.
Self-motivation follows the same logic. It is not a mood or a personality trait — it is a decision that must be made anew each day. Those who cannot make it, because they have never learned to forgo external validation, remain dependent: on team dynamics, on market conditions, on the mood of their manager.
What this means for leadership
Over many years in executive search, I have observed a pattern that no longer surprises me but continues to occupy my thinking: the highest-performing leaders are rarely those who grew up under optimal conditions.
They are the ones who learned early that results are connected to their own behaviour. Who cared for an animal, maintained a friendship, weathered a difficult period without a safety net. Who know what it feels like when no one is applauding — and who continue anyway.
That is not romanticised hardship. It is the neuropsychological foundation of leadership maturity.
Those who have not had these experiences can still acquire them — but only if they are willing to deliberately leave the comfort zone. Not dramatically. Not once. But as a practice: daily, small, consistent.
The houseplant. The friend you write back to. The promise you made to yourself.
Back to the lunch table
After our conversation, my daughter sent me a message. It read: "I think I need to do more things that no one is asking of me."
That is the right answer. Not because it sounds noble — but because it is precise.
Accountability is not a value one resolves to have. It is a habit one builds — in areas that force no consequences, offer no evaluation, promise no applause.
The prosperity we live in is a gift. Its unintended side effect — the dampening of the feedback loops that generate a sense of responsibility — is a task. For parents. For education systems. For leaders who understand that their most important function is not control, but the creation of conditions in which people can grow.
And for every individual who one day asks themselves why it didn't work out.
The plant on the windowsill knows the answer. It just hasn't found anyone willing to listen.
