We as humans (what else would we be?) discuss strengths as though they’re infinitely transferable, almost portable, as though the systematic thinking that makes one excellent at debugging code will serve us just as well when one’s body is demanding rest. Or as though the determination that propelled you through university will be precisely what’s needed when you’re recovering from burnout (it won’t). This assumption is, I think, one of the more insidious lies we tell ourselves about personal development, right up there with “just be yourself” and “everything happens for a reason”; advice that sounds useful and profound on the surface, but is often said with as much vacancy and hollowness as the mug whereon it was printed.
The problem (and this becomes obvious the moment you examine what we really mean by “strength”) is that we’ve muddled capability with virtue. What do we actually mean by “a strength”? In a nutshell, it’s a cognitive or behavioural pattern that produces outcomes we like in certain contexts, something at which we appear to excel. Yet today, we dress it up in moral language and place it upon a throne, and have decided that it’s something to be celebrated unconditionally. (Note to self: your systematic thinking it’s virtuous; it’s useful when you need to break down complex problems and organise information, but it’s actively harmful when what you need is to stop analysing, optimising, and turning even rest into a project to be managed). Strengths indeed can become weapons when wielded in the wrong context, and can become even our weaknesses. Empathy can turn to manipulation, just as humour can morph into vanity, and being dutiful can lead to the kind of “just following orders” issue seen in the first half of the 20th century in Europe.
An example, the systematic thinker encounters uncertainty and does what systematic thinkers do: builds a system to manage it. Quite reasonable in many contexts, and it is, after all, what has served them well up to this point; what was praised in childhood, rewarded at work, or produced a satisfying boost of dopamine and self-assurance, ingrains habits that may have kept them organised, optimised, reliable, perhaps even achieving highly. But what happens when the systematic thinker, propelled by frameworks and efficiency, becomes ill or faces burnout? Uncertainty in this case isn’t a problem to be systematised and managed like a mere machine; it’s a condition to be endured. The systematic approach transforms into a control mechanism, a way to feel like one is doing something when what one actually needs is to do nothing. It masks an inability to be bored, a sense of self-esteem that crumbles under the pressure of others, or an addiction to stress and adrenaline. Of course, the strength itself hasn’t changed. The systematic thinker is still capable of brilliant systematic thinking, but the context has shifted, and suddenly, the most reliable tool at their disposal is simply digging them deeper into the hole they’re trying to escape.
This is one of the rare times I’ll say this, but it isn’t merely about moderation, which is usually what people look to 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, or too much caution becomes cowardice. In that framework, it’s still assumed that the quality itself is virtuous, but one has simply got the dosage wrong. I’m suggesting something even more fundamental than that: the quality that serves you brilliantly in one domain can be the exact wrong quality in another domain, and not because you’re applying too much thereof, but because the thing itself is contraindicated.
The determined person that pushes 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. The person who excels at anticipating problems and planning for contingencies is a gift to a project team and an absolute nightmare to themselves when they turn that same anticipatory anxiety loose on their life, generating elaborate disaster scenarios that haven’t happened and probably won’t.
We often 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). If strengths aren’t universally or inherently good, if they’re highly context-dependent, the you can’t just “discover your strengths” and “play to your strengths” while assuming that everything will work out; you have to develop the considerably more difficult skill of recognising when your strengths become liabilities, and when they very thing that makes you effective in most situations is precisely what makes you ineffective in this one.
And that recognition can be brutal, by the way, because it requires acknowledging that the things you’re good at, the thing with which you’ve possibly built your world and identity, needs to be suppressed or redirected, or even entirely abandoned in certain contexts. It can be like having your security blanket ripped away, your safe house torched. The systematic thinker must learn to stop systematising. The determined person has to learn to quit. The analyst has to learn to simply be confused. And naturally, this feels like betrayal—your most trusted cognitive patterns are not essential virtues or badges of honour, but are in fact undermining your through black ops methods unseen.
But perhaps, and here I’ll 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 possible mere patterns useful in different contexts, but you’ve stifled them into a dusty lock box, disallowing them to breathe and grow the way your favoured children, your strengths, have. The person who can’t stick to mundane routine and rigid schedules may in fact be better equipped for environments that require flexibility and improvisation. Perhaps the person who gives up easily isn’t simply lacking determination, but is better at recognising when something isn’t worth pursuing. As with most things in the contemporary world, we’ve turned natural human variation into a moral hierarchy, a deficient diagnosis, and a damning prognosis, with some patterns deemed “strengths” and others “weaknesses”, when what we actually have is a collection of different tools, each useful in specific contexts, and none necessarily universally applicable.
The practical takeaway here is that what we don’t need even more of is cultivating our strengths and repairing our weaknesses; we need to develop the meta-skill of recognising which contexts call for which tools, and retain the flexibility and humility to deploy different approaches in difference situations—even when that means setting aside the very capabilities of which we’ve become proudest. If we start learning the difference between virtue and strength, we may actually get somewhere, or rather, we may learn when “getting somewhere” isn’t the point.