Character is incredibly jagged, and incredibly contextualized, even to the point where I still feel uncomfortable thinking about it..

We need to develop people rather than process them..

Right now, for instance, we resist giving people extra time on exams or for assignments, as though it's unfair to the faster students..

I care deeply about opportunity and fairness, because I grew up really poor..

It's fine to pretend that people are one-dimensional, like in body size; the problem comes when you forget that you are just pretending..

Education and the workforce: I think these two things go together in terms of human potential..

Our biggest project is actually more in the social sciences, where we are studying mastery - how people get good at things - only we do it from an in….

Historically, education has been about batch processing: standardize everything against the average, rank kids, sort them to see who gets more and wh….

The whole idea of timing tests is a century old, from a scientist who thought speed and ability were tightly correlated, which they are not..

We use the Air Force analogy: there were expensive things they had to do to get a cockpit suitable for a lot of pilots, like wraparound windshields, ….

Talent - really, everyone agrees, it's multidimensional, and often overlooked in standard assessments. That's not hard for people to accept..

We've become so used to the concept as a measuring and sorting tool, that it and its correlates - below-average, above-average - are everyday speech.….

The Age of Average gave us a lot. Take clothing: We've all benefited remarkably from large, medium and small sizes making things affordable and avail….

Growing up in rural Utah had a lot of benefits, but in an environment that prized conformity, fit wasn't one of them. I ended up in my senior year wi….

I enrolled at a local college, but this time paid attention to myself - took only courses that really interested me, even if they weren't in sequence….

When you start digging into things like character, though, the notion that people have high character or low character is very strong. What's crazy i….

That was one of my most surprising discoveries when I dug into the history of average-ism: When you actually get the data, it rarely captures anyone.….