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.

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.

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.

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.

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.