u/Certain-Anxiety-6786

The grit episode reminded me of how much I hate this type of social science. They all engage in a bad faith TED Talk tango. It's pretty easy if you want to get your own book:

1. Find a commonly used personality trait – say grit.
2. Come up with a way to quantify this trait – surveys or how long a kid takes to eat a marshmallow can work. The important thing is that the measurement should be close enough to the general definition that most audiences won't bat an eye. It doesn't actually matter what you measure as long as there's some variability in the population. If what you measure is actually just a proxy for parental income everything else will become so much easier!
3. Using this extremely specific definition of the personality trait, run as many regressions against "success metrics" as you can. Hope that your participants were involved in applying to Harvard, winning some type of olympiad or w/e the latest craze amongst high school assemblies is.
4. Now you hopefully have either p-hacked or possibly genuinely found a correlation between your measurement and a "success metric." Great, this will be the important middle part of any talk you give.
5. Start implying that your measurement is a general proxy for success. And now for the important part to ensure you go from being a boring academic to actually making money. Instead of being careful, and explaining that what you measured isn't actually the personality trait but your own specific definition of it, you should always just say the personality trait.
6. That's it – now the audience will not only think you're a genius for finding a test that can predict if someone will run a mile. They'll start thinking that the common definition of that trait is the predictive definition.

That's your keys to millions in the 2010s. Good luck!