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.

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.

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?

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.

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.