Growing up in rural Utah had a lot of benefits, but in an environment that prized conformity, fit wasn't one of them. I ended up in my senior year with a 0.9 GPA, which I think you actually have to work pretty hard to get. In the exact same month they kicked me out of school, my girlfriend - still my wife today - told me she was pregnant. So, it was an interesting start to life: working 10 or 12 minimum-wage jobs; getting bored really quickly and quitting; having my in-laws - rightly - in full panic mode and thinking I had some kind of character flaw.

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.

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.

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.

We need to develop people rather than process them.

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