An email from VIA Institute landed in my inbox recently. One line stopped me:
Not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what’s strong in you?”
I had just published a piece about comparative advantage and why compounding your strengths beats fixing your weaknesses. Seeing it stated so plainly by an organisation that has spent twenty years researching exactly this made me pause.
What VIA Actually Is
The VIA Institute on Character is a nonprofit founded in 2004 as part of the positive psychology movement. Their survey measures 24 character strengths, things like creativity, curiosity, honesty, perseverance, and has been taken by over 30 million people worldwide. It is free, scientifically validated, and takes about ten minutes.
I first encountered it in 2022, through Yale’s The Science of Wellbeing course on Coursera. I took the test then and have retaken it every year since to track how my results have shifted.
What My Results Showed
Three tests across four years. Same top five, give or take a position:
- Creativity
- Love of Learning
- Curiosity
- Prudence
- Hope
Perspective swapped in and out of the top five across tests, probably because I have been doing more deliberate reflection and gratitude journaling over the past few years. But the core cluster barely moved. These are not skills I picked up along the way. They are how I am wired. The survey just named them.
Why This Matters (Especially After Writing About Comparative Advantage)
In the previous article, I argued that we waste too much time fixing what we lack instead of compounding what we have. The VIA results gave me something concrete to point at. These five strengths are where my comparative advantage lives. Creativity and curiosity are why I build systems instead of following templates. Love of learning is why I read across disciplines and pull economics into everything. Prudence is why I plan obsessively before I act.
Knowing this does not change what I do day-to-day. But it changes how I evaluate decisions. When an opportunity plays to these five, I lean in. When it does not, I know the energy cost will be higher and the returns lower.
If You Are Not Sure Where Your Strengths Lie
This is not a personality quiz from a magazine. The VIA Survey is backed by two decades of peer-reviewed research and used in clinical and organisational psychology worldwide. If you have been spending too much energy on what you lack, or you simply have not had the vocabulary to describe what you are good at, it is a useful starting point.
Take the test. Read your top five. Then sit with it for a few days and notice where those strengths show up in your life: the tasks that energise you, the problems you gravitate towards, the work that puts you in flow without you realising.
I suspect most people will find, as I did, that they already knew. They just had not named it yet.
