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Editor's Note: This is part of a new series on KSL.com where we do a follow-up article about Utahns who we have previously featured on KSL. If you have been the subject of a feature story on KSL in the past and would like to be part of our "Where Are They Now?" series, email cwilliams@deseretdigital.com for consideration.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Todd Rose’s path to Harvard was anything but average; however, average is something the Utah native has spent the past decade trying to abolish from the human mindset.
When KSL last featured Rose in 2000, he had recently graduated from Weber State, where he made his way from dropping out of Layton High School in the early ‘90s to becoming a college graduate. He also had his sights on Harvard, where he was heading to Cambridge to work on a graduate degree.
Since then, he’s received his doctorate degree at Harvard and is now the director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Mind, Brain and Education program.
He’s also the author of two books regarding his life and studies revolving around the idea of average and has given speeches at TED Talks, Talks at Google and many other places about his work.
As a part of his graduate studies and as his current position at Harvard, Rose has broken away from studying averages in people, and instead studies "the science of the individual." He said that has completely changed the medical and nutrition fields, but much hasn’t changed in the business world, as well as the educational system.
Instead of crunching in the averages of multiple people’s information in a certain field subject, Rose said the research has been focused on “trying to understand individuals on their own terms.”
“We’ve been watching it transform all kinds of fields, including neuroscience,” Rose said. “The place it wasn’t really having much of an impact was in education and the workplace, which they’re both really reliant on old average-based approaches.”
Rose went on to write a book about his studies — his second book since 2013. While his first covered his story as a high school dropout, the 2015 book “The End of Average” focused more on studies he believes matter “in a big way” and that a book might be the best way to reach the general public.
"We’ve been watching it transform all kinds of fields, including neuroscience. The place it wasn’t really having much of an impact was in education and the workplace, which they’re both really reliant on old average-based approaches." — Todd Rose
How Rose ended up in the position he’s in now began all the way back in Utah. Rose said he was taking psychology classes at Weber State, but the theories didn’t seem to apply to him and his approach to learning.
As he went on to Harvard, he learned a new field of thinking from Harvard professor Kurt Fischer, whom Rose refers to as his mentor. Fischer helped pioneer ideas around failures in averages and focusing on individuals instead.
That resonated with Rose.
“It dawned on me like ‘oh wow.’ This is a fundamental flaw at the heart of social science,” he said. “So I got really interested in pursuing it not just for my own understandings, but for if this is the problem, how do we fix this and replace this wrong system with something better?”
Rose said “The End of Average” is based on taking his Harvard studies and enacting them in real settings under a nonprofit organization he co-founded, the Center of Individual Opportunity. The nonprofit company, he said, was created to “take these ideas and get them to the public in a big as way as possible.”
The book ended up on Newsweek’s list of J.P. Morgan’s suggested summer reading list for business clients last month. Rose said the response he’s seen has shown there is a climate for disruption in the fields he said were lacking the use of individual science.
Rose has garnered consulting jobs with clientele ranging everywhere from “Sesame Street” to the NBA, where he returned to Utah this week for the Utah Jazz Summer League to begin the groundwork on a future project revolving around basketball officiating.
“I’m just happy to see teachers are using it as summer reading books and businesses are responding to it,” Rose said. “Truthfully, I think it shows the ideas are in the air and I think it’s just giving them a science and a form of way of thinking about things that people feel intuitively.”
Considering his beginning as a former high school dropout, Rose said it’s still unfathomable at times thinking where he is now in life, especially working at Harvard.
However, he added his experience has taught him to curb old traditional values of thinking for success.
“You don’t have to know ‘what’s my 10-year plan?’ I just don’t believe in that,” Rose said. “I think you figure out what you care about and just take the next bold move and then go from there. I’ve tried to do that in my life — part of desperation when you’re trying to dig yourself out of a hole but then it’s been my life philosophy now.”
