This post examines the virtues of moderation, balance, and harmony. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn more. I hope it helps people who want to know more about these virtues and how to nurture them.

I also use this opportunity to go on a (related) tangent about the VIA Institute on Character, and its questionable focus on playing to character strengths over strengthening character weaknesses.

What are these virtues?

If you practice these virtues, you respect that each part of your life is meant to serve the whole of it, not the other way around.

Even with generally beneficial or neutral things, it’s possible to take them too far. Moderation means you are on guard against this. Take fitness, for example: How can anyone complain about being more fit? But a compulsive focus on fitness as an end in itself can make you forget the point of being fit. “People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.”^[1]

If you are immoderate, you risk becoming a fanatic, an obsessive, a monomaniac. Such things in themselves might be mere eccentricities. But they are often accompanied by harmful neglect of other facets of life. Balance means that you have a good perspective on your life as a whole, and that you use this perspective to attend to the points that are most in need of attention, rather than letting habit or lack of moderation constrain your effort to where it’s less helpful. Work/life balance, balance between focus on self and others, and balance between living-in-the-present, learning-from-the-past, and preparing-for-the-future are some common challenges.

Harmony is closely related to integrity. Pursuing the musical analogy, when your life is harmonious, the different parts of it are attuned to each other; they are different instruments but playing the same symphony. Harmony is also not mere melody or monotone: being a “Johnny One-Note” isn’t where it’s at. To everything there is a season, as the song goes.

Some related virtues include temperance (moderation in pursuit of pleasure), conciliation / cooperation / compromise (social harmony advanced through moderation in the pursuit of one’s priorities), perspective, and flexibility.

Avoiding burnout by knowing how to pace yourself is one application of these virtues.

Aristotle made moderation a keystone of his virtue theory, in the form of the “golden mean.” In his theory, all virtues are to be found at a moderate mid-point balanced between opposite extremes.^[2] For example, you can be anxiously over-sensitive to fear, or recklessly insensitive to it; the virtue of courage is the sweet spot moderately in-between.

These virtues apply in the intellectual realm as well. Moderation keeps you from becoming dogmatic, too attached to your theories. Balance keeps you from being close-minded and getting stuck in ideological bubbles; it encourages interdisciplinary thinking. The pursuit of harmony keeps you hunting for ways in which your ideas conflict, for the contradictions and paradoxes that are sometimes the first clues that you’re mistaken about something.

How to strengthen these virtues

In investing, it’s expected that periodically you should rebalance your portfolio so that your investments continue to match your risk tolerance and goals as they change and as you change. Do you ever rebalance your life with the same sort of deliberate, rational attention you would give to your retirement account?

Which hobbies still give you a good return on investment, and which just take up space in your closet? Are there parts of your life that seem at cross-purposes to each other? What are you currently neglecting that you would be wise to devote more attention to?

Where ought you to be investing your time and energy for the best return on investment? Where are you currently investing that time and energy? The first question is difficult to answer precisely and confidently, but the second should be easier: you just have to observe closely and take notes. Then you can ask: Is my answer to that second question a plausible answer to the first one?

What might you learn (and what might you change) if you periodically took the time to do an audit of your life?

Laura Vanderkam found that people tend to poorly estimate how much of their time they spend on various activities. If they were to do an audit (and for her this meant “a spreadsheet in half-hour blocks [for] every one of the 8,784 hours that make up a leap year”^[3] in which she kept track of what she was actually doing as she did it) they would be surprised by what they find about their real priorities and how they live their lives. If you want to try that sort of audit, she has 168-hour (1-week) spreadsheets you can use for the purpose on her website.^[4]

Balance how exactly?

If you want more balance in your life, you seem to be implicitly comparing yourself to some well-balanced alternative. Maybe you know where the imbalance lies, or maybe you just feel vaguely off-kilter but do not know where to make the right adjustment.

One attempt to formalize human balance is Martin Seligman’s PERMA model, named after an acronym that stands for the five components of human wellbeing he identified:^[5]

Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishments

You can answer a 23-question test at the University of Pennsylvania Authentic Happiness site and get a glimpse at how you’re doing in those five areas compared with other people who take the test.^[6] That might give you some idea of where to focus your attention.

The VIA Institute on Character

“As moral agents we tend to specialise.”―Iris Murdoch^[7]

The “positive psychology” movement aims to build versions of psychological interventions that are designed less to fix broken people than to help ordinary people become more extraordinary. One way of thinking about it would be that remedial psychology is to positive psychology as physical therapy is to personal training.

The VIA Institute on Character uses a virtue-oriented approach to positive psychology. It calls the virtues “character strengths” and has identified the following set as those with good cross-cultural and -temporal support:

Wisdom: including creativity, curiosity, judgment, philomathy, and perspective
Courage: including bravery, honesty, perseverance, and zest
Humanity: including kindness, love, and social intelligence
Justice: including fairness, leadership, and teamwork
Temperance: including forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self control
Transcendence: including appreciation of beauty & excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality

The Institute says that each person has certain “signature strengths”—a subset of key virtues that they are especially strong in and that they adopt as part of their identity. The Institute has created a personality test that’s supposed to tell you what your signature strengths are (you can take the test on-line and, if you fork over your email address, you’ll get a summary of your strengths & weaknesses along with an offer to buy a more complete results report).

Their work in trying to make character strengths and character strength-based interventions more rigorous and measurable is the basis for a lot of ongoing scientific research into the virtues. Bully for that.

But here’s why I’m mentioning them today, in this post about harmony and balance: Having identified your signature strengths (and weaknesses), the VIA Institute then counsels exclusively that you play to your strengths. Here’s a quote from a book associated with the Institute:

“The newest research is showing that techniques for helping people boost their strengths can have important advantages over techniques that focus on correcting their deficits.”^[8]

No footnote, though, so I’m left wondering what this “newest research” might be. Some of the citations that I sometimes see mentioned in support of this idea are:

A study of workers in New Zealand found those who gave more positive answers to questions like “I know my strengths well” and “I always try to use my strengths” were more likely to be “flourishing” (using various measures of things related to lifestyle, health, psychology, and employment).^[9]
In The Elements of Great Managing, the authors say that you’ll be more effective as a manager if you assign employees to tasks based on the employees’ existing strengths, rather than trying to mentor their weaknesses.^[10]
“The use of coaching principles to foster employee engagement” builds on that to assert that if an employee has a weakness in a certain area, rather than coaching that employee to become better there, you should encourage them to repurpose one of their existing character strengths to cover the weakness: “For example, if an individual has a strength in collaboration, but not in resilience, then the collaboration strength could be used to manage their lack of resilience by talking through their issues with their colleagues (ideally ones who have a strength in resilience).”^[11]
In another book,^[12] Ryan M. Niemiec begins to defend the play-to-your-strengths thesis by citing a study^[13] of 34 adults diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Different methods of CBT require the patient to use different skills (“e.g., challenging distorted thoughts, increasing behavioral activation, strengthening social networks, heightening awareness of links between emotions, thoughts, and behaviors”). The subjects were tested to determine their preexisting skill levels in areas like these, and then were divided into two groups: one group practiced CBT interventions that played to their preexisting strengths, the other practiced CBT interventions that used skills in which they were originally relatively weak. This study found that the patients in the play-to-their-strengths group improved more and more rapidly.

The examples I usually see deployed to support this idea have to do with employee motivation, satisfaction, and engagement. (This may just reflect where most of the research is being done; practitioners of positive psychology struggle a bit to find a lucrative niche in which to practice their craft; management/employee motivation seems to be one.) It makes sense that if your job tasks match the character strengths you feel the most competence in, you will have more engagement and satisfaction at your job.

I take issue, though, with the VIA Institute’s extrapolation of these results from the workplace to life in general. In life, you don’t have as much opportunity to specialize as you do on-the-job. In life, all of the virtues are important, not just the subset in your job description. Trying to patch a virtue you don’t have by repurposing one you do have can be an inefficient stop-gap solution, not a good long-term strategy.

The study of depression and CBT strikes me as at best suggestive, certainly not conclusive. CBT interventions are not character strengths interventions, and improving in depression symptoms is only a single dimension (if indeed a crucial one) of a well-experienced life; subjects being treated for Major Depressive Disorder cannot be used without caveat as representative of people in general; and 34 people is not a lot.^[14] It also seems plausible to me that playing to your strengths might be the best way to perform best at the task in front of you right now, yet habitually relying on your strengths and neglecting your weaknesses might still be a poor strategy in the long term.

There have been a few studies that directly compare people who try to extend the use of their existing strengths with people who try to strengthen their weaknesses, but the ones I have seen don’t unambiguously support the VIA Institute’s claim that focusing on existing strengths is clearly superior. For example:

One study randomly assigned 76 students to groups in which they would either work on expanding the use of their existing “signature strengths” or would work on a combination of using existing strengths and strengthening existing weaknesses. The authors say that both groups reported higher satisfaction-with-life scores following the work they did, but there was no significant difference between the two groups. They conclude that “focusing on relative character weaknesses (along with strengths) does not diminish—and may assist in increasing—life satisfaction.”^[15]
A larger and better-controlled study (375 people assigned to either signature-strength work, strengthening-weakness work, or a placebo) also found that both styles of strengths-improving interventions were roughly equally effective (in this case, at increasing life satisfaction over a six-month follow-up period).^[16]
Two experiments, each on about 100 university students, compared the effects of play-to-strengths vs. develop-deficiencies interventions on the students’ “personal growth initiative” (PGI: “defined as being proactive about one’s personal development”). The first found play-to-strengths interventions improved PGI, but only in the short term; while develop-deficiencies interventions didn’t help at all. The second, which boosted the amount of intervention, “led to increases in PGI over a 3-month period, but… these increases were bigger for the [play-to-]strengths intervention group.” The researchers theorized that the students who played to their strengths were able in this way to build “psychological capital” (they felt more capable) that they could then apply to PGI.^[17]

Future research may change my mind about this, and the published research I’ve seen so far doesn’t strike me as definitive, but my current best guess is that having a full, broad set of virtues is important to human flourishing, and that it’s short-sighted to concentrate on those virtues you’re already competent in while avoiding work on the ones that need improvement.

For example, if you’re not very courageous, you may have a strong sense of caution or prudence that you have already been using to avoid frightening situations. Further relying on your caution or prudence to avoid what frightens you, rather than working on your courage, is a way of playing to your strengths, sure, but it’s also a way of cementing your weaknesses. You would be more capable, and would be able to use your prudence and caution in more valuable (not merely compensatory) ways, if you tackled your courageousness directly.

There are also good theoretical reasons for believing that the virtues support one another. To have a virtue like courage in Aristotle’s model, for example, means not simply being brave, but being brave on the right occasions, in the right manner, to the right extent, and so forth.^[18] To know which occasions are the right ones, which manners are the right ones, what extent is enough, and so forth, requires the exercise of skills other than bravery: maybe virtues like loyalty, patience, justice, prudence, attention, duty, etc. depending on the situation. You also need to be skillful in the wide variety of virtues so that you can better adjudicate situations in which they appear to conflict. If you are imbalanced, you will not only have fewer virtues to draw on, but the virtues you do have will be stunted.^[19]

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Richard Griffith (impersonating Laurence Sterne), The Koran (1798)
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Ⅱ.2
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Laura Vanderkam “The Busy Person’s Lies” New York Times 13 May 2016
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https://lauravanderkam.com/manage-your-time/
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M.E. Seligman, Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being (2012)
^{^}
https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/
Select Questionnaires > PERMA. You have to register in order to take the test and see the results, which involves disclosing some personal information and an email address.
^{^}
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993) p. 87
^{^}
Ryan M. Niemiec, ‎Robert E. McGrath, The Power of Character Strengths: Appreciate and Ignite Your Positive Personality (2019), p. 18
^{^}
Lucy C. Hone, Aaron Jarden, Scott Duncan, & Grant M. Schofield, “Flourishing in New Zealand Workers: Associations With Lifestyle Behaviors, Physical Health, Psychosocial, and Work-Related Indicators” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (Sept. 2015)
^{^}
Rodd Wagner & James Harter, The Elements of Great Managing (2006)
^{^}
Shane Crabb “The use of coaching principles to foster employee engagement” The Coaching Psychologist (June 2011)
^{^}
Ryan M. Niemiec Character Strengths Interventions: A Field Guide for Practitioners (2018) pp. 32–33
^{^}
J.S. Cheavens, D.R. Strunk, S.A. Lazarus, & L.A. Goldstein “The compensation and capitalization models: A test of two approaches to individualizing the treatment of depression” Behaviour Research and Therapy (2012)
^{^}
“[O]ur overall sample size was small. Thus, replication of our results will be important.” I haven’t come across any replication attempts yet.
^{^}
Teri Rust, Rhett Diessner, & Lindsay Reade, “Strengths Only or Strengths and Relative Weaknesses? A Preliminary Study” The Journal of Psychology (2009)
^{^}
René T. Proyer, Fabian Gander, Sara Wellenzohn, & Willibald Ruch, “Strengths-based positive psychology interventions: a randomized placebo-controlled online trial on long-term effects for a signature strengths- vs. a lesser strengths-intervention” Frontiers in Psychology (2015)
^{^}
M.C. Meyers, M. van Woerkom, R.S. de Reuver, Z. Bakk, & D.L. Oberski “Enhancing psychological capital and personal growth initiative: Working on strengths or deficiencies” Journal of Counseling Psychology (2015)
^{^}
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Ⅲ.7
^{^}
John McDowell “Virtue and Reason” The Monist (1979):
Suppose the relevant range of behaviour, in the case of kindness, is marked out by the notion of proper attentiveness to others’ feelings. Now sometimes acting in such a way to indulge someone’s feelings is not acting rightly: the morally important fact about the situation is not that A will be upset by a projected action (though he will), but, say, that B has a right—a consideration of a sort, sensitivity to which might be thought of as constituting fairness. In such a case, a straightforward propensity to be gentle to others’ feelings would not lead to right conduct. If a genuine virtue is to produce nothing but right conduct, a simple propensity to be gentle cannot be identified with the virtue of kindness. Possession of the virtue must involve not only sensitivity to facts about others’ feelings as reasons for acting in certain ways, but also sensitivity to facts about rights as reasons for acting in certain ways; and when circumstances of both sorts obtain, and circumstance of the second sort is the one that should be acted on, a possessor of the virtue of kindness must be able to tell that it is so. So we cannot disentangle genuine possession of kindness from the sensitivity which constitutes fairness.… [T]he argument can be generalized: no one virtue can be fully possessed except by a possessor of all of them, that is, a possessor of virtue in general. Thus the particular virtues are not a batch of independent sensitivities. Rather, we use the concepts of the particular virtues to mark similarities and dissimilarities among the manifestations of a single sensitivity which is what virtue, in general, is: an ability to recognize requirements which situations impose on one’s behaviour.