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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.