Most of us live on a steady diet of confidence via competence: know what to do and how to do it, cold. As a force of human nature, gravity is the sheer intensity of strengths we dig for when the diet only gets us half way there. And once we lunge into the new (or it lunges into us), sometimes nowhere at all. Now, character is competence. The relentless curiosity to forge opportunity out of paralyzing uncertainty. The penetrating empathy to see below the surface and illuminate need. The unshakable equality to crush stereotypes and unify the divided. The radical humility that cuts ego, not power and worships progress, not politics. If that all sounds superpower-ish, well, it’s science. And it comes with a warning. Gravity has a goldilocks zone. In the flash of a synapse, strengths outside the zone flip to counterfeits—behaviors that feel like strengths, minus the benefits. A question impersonates curiosity. Hesitation imitates humility. Grit doesn’t bend. Optimism lives in la la land, empathy comes to everyone’s emotional rescue, the meticulous take control. Every strength has a zero-gravity twin. It’s the biggest fine line of human behavior. And as it turns out, most of us are on the wrong side of the line one out of every five times. You have to see the nuances to stop the switch. Smith and Marcum’s rigorous, awakening work traces every strength to the mentality where it starts and zooms in on the social cues to see exactly why and how we stay in the zone.