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.

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. Which then begs the question, why are we using this as a reference standard for human beings?

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. We don't even question the language, although the challenges we face require a different mindset.

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; kept out of classes with people I knew from high school, because I tended to act like the class clown around them; selected teachers by their teaching style - until I could build up my study habits. I ended up graduating with a 3.97 GPA and got into Harvard for my doctorate.

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 with a 0.9 GPA, which I think you actually have to work pretty hard to get. In the exact same month they kicked me out of school, my girlfriend - still my wife today - told me she was pregnant. So, it was an interesting start to life: working 10 or 12 minimum-wage jobs; getting bored really quickly and quitting; having my in-laws - rightly - in full panic mode and thinking I had some kind of character flaw.

We need to develop people rather than process them.

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.