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 care deeply about opportunity and fairness, because I grew up really poor.

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.

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.

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.

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.