We need to develop people rather than process them.

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 individuality perspective.

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.

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

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.

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