On Strengths as Virtues
A 5-minute read
We as humans discuss strengths as though they’re portable—as though the systematic thinking that makes you excellent at debugging code will serve you equally well when your body is demanding rest, or as though the determination that got you through university will be precisely what you need when you’re recovering from burnout (it won’t). This portability assumption is, I think, one of the more insidious lies we tell ourselves about personal development; it’s right up there with “just be yourself” and “everything happens for a reason” in terms of advice that sounds profound but doesn’t really mean much past the mug whereon it was printed.
The problem—and this becomes obvious the moment you actually examine what we mean by “strength”—is that we’ve confused capability with virtue. A strength is simply a cognitive or behavioural pattern that produces good outcomes in certain contexts, but we’ve dressed it up in moral language, placed it upon a throne, and decided that it’s something to be celebrated unconditionally. Note to self: your systematic thinking isn’t virtuous; it’s useful when you need to break down complex problems, organise information, or build frameworks, but it’s actively harmful when what you actually need is to stop analysing, stop optimising, and just exist for a moment without turning your own rest into a project to be managed. (The irony is that I write this while procrastinating from much-needed rest prescribed by my other half). Strengths can indeed become weapons when wielded in the wrong context. Empathy can turn to manipulation, humour can morph into vanity, and even being dutiful can lead to the kind of “just following orders” issue seen in the first half of the 20th century in Europe.
If you’ll allow me to indulge by using myself as an example: the systematic thinker encounters uncertainty and does what systematic thinkers do—builds a system to manage it. Perfectly reasonable in most contexts (this is, after all, what has served them well up to this point: what got praised in childhood, rewarded at work, or produced a satisfying boost of dopamine and self-reassurance). But uncertainty during burnout, for example, isn’t a problem to be systematised; it’s a condition to be endured, and the systematic approach transforms into a control mechanism, a way to feel like you’re doing something when what you actually need is to do nothing. It masks an inability to be bored, a self-esteem that crumbles under the pressure of others, or an addiction to adrenaline. Of course, strength hasn’t changed—you’re still capable of systematic thinking—but the context has shifted underneath you, and suddenly, your most reliable tool is digging you deeper into the hole you’re trying to escape.
This is one of the few times I’ll say this, but it isn’t about moderation, which is what people usually mean when they acknowledge that strengths can be “overdone”—the Aristotelian “golden mean” (or Confucian Doctrine of the Mean) approach where too much courage becomes recklessness, too much caution becomes cowardice. That framework still assumes the quality itself is virtuous; you’ve just got the dosage wrong. What I’m suggesting is more fundamental: the quality that serves you brilliantly in one domain can be the exact wrong quality for another domain, not because you’re applying too much thereof, but because the thing itself—the pattern, the approach, the cognitive habit—is contraindicated.
The determined person pushing through obstacles is admirable until the obstacle is their own nervous system telling them to stop pushing. The analytical mind breaking down problems is invaluable, until the problem is that they won’t stop breaking things down long enough to simply experience them. And the person who excels at anticipating problems and planning for contingencies is a gift to any project team and an absolute nightmare to themselves when they turn that same anticipatory anxiety loose on their own life, generating elaborate disaster scenarios that haven’t happened and probably won’t.
We don’t like admitting this because it undermines the entire self-improvement sphere (and yes, I’m aware of the incongruity of writing what amounts to a self-improvement essay while critiquing self-improvement—I contain myriad contradictions and hypocrisies when nuance is lost). If strengths aren’t universally or inherently good, if they’re highly context-dependent, then you can’t just “discover your strengths” and “play to your strengths” and assume everything will work out; you have to develop the considerably more difficult skill of recognising when your strengths have become liabilities, when the very thing that makes you effective in most situations is precisely what’s making you ineffective in this one.
And that recognition is brutal, by the way—genuinely brutal, not charmingly difficult—because it requires acknowledging that the thing you’re good at, the thing with which you’ve built your world, needs to be suppressed or redirected or entirely abandoned in certain contexts. The systematic thinker has to learn to stop systematising. The determined person has to learn to quit. The analyser has to learn to simply be confused without immediately trying to resolve the confusion. And naturally, this feels like betrayal—your most trusted cognitive patterns suddenly revealed as context-dependent tools rather than essential virtues, undermining you through black ops methods unseen.
But perhaps (and here I’m going to attempt something resembling optimism) this recognition is also liberating. If your strengths aren’t inherently virtues, then your weaknesses aren’t inherently sins—they’re quite possibly mere patterns that are useful in different contexts. The person who can’t stick to a systematic routine isn’t morally deficient; they’re perhaps better equipped for situations requiring flexibility and improvisation. Maybe the person who gives up easily isn’t lacking determination, but are better at recognising when something isn’t worth pursuing. We’ve turned natural human variation in cognitive and behavioural patterns into a moral hierarchy, with some patterns deemed “strengths” and others deemed “weaknesses”, when what we actually have is a collection of different tools, each useful in specific contexts, none necessarily universally applicable.
The practical sequela of all this—assuming there is one—is that the work lies not in solely developing your strengths or fixing your weaknesses, but rather in developing the meta-skill of recognising which contexts call for which patterns, and having the flexibility (and humility) to deploy different approaches in different situations, even when that means setting aside the very capabilities of which you’re most proud. Maybe one’s systematic thinking serves them brilliantly when solving problems, but betrays them when trying to rest. I propose we start learning to recognise the difference, and we might actually get somewhere—or more accurately, we may learn when getting somewhere isn’t the point.