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

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.

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.

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.

The whole idea of timing tests is a century old, from a scientist who thought speed and ability were tightly correlated, which they are not.

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

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.