Sultan Osman III was the leader of the entire Ottoman Empire, briefly, in the 17th century. Here was a guy who had everything. Power. Money. Sex. Food. He had it all. While he was waiting to take over as Sultan, he was put in the harem to keep him from causing problems. The Ottomans confined their princes in the harem so they wouldn’t challenge the authority of the Sultan himself.

So, Osman III spent his life among the women of the harem until he was 56 years old. He got all the food and sex he wanted. What happened? He got fat and hated women. He put on iron boots so that women could scurry out of the way and he wouldn’t have to see them.

And then, when his father finally died, he took power. What kind of an emperor was this man? With no training. No experience. No mistakes. No successes. No lessons. No failures. Nothing except the intrigues of harem life. We don’t really know. He died three years later.

The newspapers and tabloids are full of stories of people who have had too much luck. They won the lottery. They were born into rich families. They have a way with women, or men. They toil not. Neither do they spin. Often, they are walking disasters.

Humans were showed the door from Eden a long time ago. Now, we live in imperfection and need correction. We need an adversary. We need setbacks. We need to push against something. Our muscles need to strain in opposition to some force – or else they wither. So do our characters and our minds. “Too much” is not a blessing; it is a curse. We benefit from scarcity, not from having too much. When things are too plentiful and too easy — when we’re able to get what we want without resistance — we’re headed for weakness, for fragility, and for disaster. We flourish when things are hard, not when they are easy.

The story of human life is a story of conflict and of challenge. It is the story of evolution, constantly flushing out the weak, constantly making the strong stronger through adversity. We face problems and conflicts; we find ways to rise above them. Or we sink.

Humans are better off, generally, when things go wrong rather than when they go right. The hero doesn’t become heroic unless he faces an antagonist. He can’t triumph unless he has something to triumph over.

When there is no real challenge, we invent them. We suffer from imaginary ailments. We pick unnecessary fights. We find unworthy enemies and make war on them. That is the real backstory to the war on terror. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US had no enemy. It had to invent one.

Whether you are talking about human muscles, human bones, human careers, or families or enterprises – without real challenges, they become fragile. Like bones in space, they lose their density and their strength. It is the osteoporosis of Life.

As Nietszche tells us, ‘that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ I’m not sure that is literally true, but it true enough. You don’t get very strong if you have nothing to push against. You get weak.

What happens if you give all the kids in a math class an A? What happens if you make the playground so safe that the kids never get hurt? What happens if investors never lose money, businesses never go broke, and banks always get bailed out? What happens if the economy is not allowed to go through a depression?

Well, can you imagine what you would look like if bad barbers were never forced out of business? Or how well your business would do if you never fired anyone?

What kind of success will your children have if they are not allowed to fail?

‘Having it good’ is, in fact, a leading cause of hormegeddon. Starting out in life, the worst kind of luck you can have is good luck. Image that you get As in your classes without working. Imagine that all the pretty girls you meet like you. Imagine that your first investments are great successes. If you have that kind of success, you’re doomed. You learn nothing from success. Like so many other things, good luck reaches the point of declining marginal utility quickly — just ask any child movie star. Starting with bad luck is much, much better. Because it’s failure that teaches the important lessons.