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.

We've become so used to the concept as a measuring and sorting tool, that it and its correlates - below-average, above-average - are everyday speech. We don't even question the language, although the challenges we face require a different mindset.

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.

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.

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.

We need to develop people rather than process them.