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

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, but their initial solutions, when they realized average didn't work, were adjustable seats. How in the world did they not already have adjustable seats in their planes? We're looking for adjustable seats for education, for basic things that we can do.

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.

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

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

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.

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