Hi. I'm Malcom Gladwell. You may know me from my many successful books or my innumerable talk show appearances to promote them. The guy with the hair. Yes, that's me. For a while now, I've been writing books about what makes people different and how certain people succeed while others don't, the sort of thing that's just counter-intuitive enough to sound innovative but not so ground-breaking as to require actual documented research.

Well, now that Gov. Palin's book has pushed my earlier offerings further down the best-seller's list (honestly, I can't wait until it comes out that it, too, was ghostwritten by Ken Ayers), I need to do something to keep the hair gel money rolling in. (You might have noticed that I just ended a sentence in a preposition. Don't worry. I have a license to do that- yes, an actual license.) The point is that I need a reason to get out on the talk show circuit again with my rhetorical spoon-bending act. With that motivation in mind, I crapped out a new one yesterday afternoon.

In my new book "Correlation = Causality: How My Hair Tricked Academia Into Taking Me Seriously" I share those success secrets with you so that you, too, might become an intellectual witch doctor like me.

Here's the trick: pick two completely separate anecdotes and claim a connection based on a premise that people already believe (or want to believe). Repeat this thirty or forty times, barf it all into Word over one long meth-fueled weekend and, once the pool of bile dries, ship it off to the publisher. Congratulations. You're not only on the road to becoming a best-selling author. You're now a guru of sorts.

For this to work, you're going to have to get your audience to believe that correlation is the same thing as causality. Thankfully, only about five percent of Americans understand that concept. (By the way, I just made up that last statistic, but since it sounds plausible you probably won't bother to check it for yourself). Of course, there's no real causal-link between, for example, the frequency of South Korean airline disasters and their class-conscious culture. I just picked two facts out of a hat and went with it. But it sounds good, doesn't it? It almost sounds like science.

For people to buy it, though, you're going to need credibility. Of course, that's never been an issue for me because I have credibility coming out of my ass (I mean this literally; it's a very serious gastrointestinal condition that has plagued me for many years).

Academic credentials after your name are a plus, but weird hair is an absolute necessity. I cannot stress this enough. In all honesty, the only significant thing separating my work from The Rules or The Secret is my fabulous coiffure. Wherever I go- bam! The hair. It's the look that says "hey, look at me and my 'do, my bouncy follicle garden of perceived genius!" And people do look. They can't help it. It's the book-worm equivalent of having giant boobs. "I'm down here, people."

Everyone knows that a true genius doesn't have time to brush his or her hair. Just look at Einstein or his female counterpart Carol Channing. Sure, that premise is completely farcical, but you're in the premise-selling business now. Go with it!

A word of warning, though. People will be asking you all sorts of questions about difficult life decisions or, worse, in-depth discussions of the topics you touched on in your book. If you're not careful, you could walk into a trap and expose yourself. The best thing to do in this situation is to answer the question with a completely unrelated anecdote. Keep talking until everyone is nodding then walk away. I cannot count how many times this has worked for me.

This reminds me of the spent a month working with a multi-billion dollar bovine waste processing company in Houston. The CEO asked me if he could cultivate a workforce of motivated employees without competitive pay or benefits. I told him it was simple, then proceeded to regale him with tales of thirteen century Algonquin monks harvesting their sweat to make wine. I then pointed to the mountain of offal behind his plant and gestured in a way that indicated that this was his answer.

"That's bullshit," he said. "Precisely," I replied. We've been very close friends ever since.