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.

Historically, education has been about batch processing: standardize everything against the average, rank kids, sort them to see who gets more and who really doesn't deserve to be there. The problem, even if you're just being selfish from an economic standpoint, is we're not producing the talent we need.

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 available, but when it really counts - the wedding gown and the pressurized fighter pilot suit - it's bespoke all the way.

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 is that my thinking is not a new insight. The very first large-scale study of character, still one of the largest ever, was done in the early 1900s by Hugh Hartshorne, an ordained minister and a scientist.

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 need to develop people rather than process them.

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