Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter

by Scott Adams

Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.

Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion.

The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

The things you think about the most, and remember best, seem more important to you than other things.

A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.

This is a great example of how visual persuasion is more powerful than auditory persuasion. Our visual sense changes what we are hearing in real time, even when we know the illusion.

It is easy to fit completely different explanations to the observed facts. Don’t trust any interpretation of reality that isn’t able to predict.

If you want the audience to embrace your content, leave out any detail that is both unimportant and would give people a reason to think, That’s not me. Design into your content enough blank spaces so people can fill them in with whatever makes them happiest.

Below I rank for you the broad forms of persuasion by their relative power. The strongest are at the top. Notice that the emotional topics near the top are stronger than the more “rational” ones at the bottom. This is based entirely on my own experience as a persuader. The persuasion stack isn’t science, so I recommend viewing it as directional. Big fear Identity Smaller fear Aspirations Habit Analogies Reason Hypocrisy Word-thinking

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words.

As I explained, the first reason analogies fail at persuasion is that they are not designed for that job. Analogies are not logic. They are just a quick way to explain a new concept.

analogies are great for explaining a new concept.

The best way to think of pre-suasion is that it creates an emotional state that bleeds over from unrelated topics to the topic of your persuasion.

There is an old banking saying: If you borrow a million dollars from a bank, the bank essentially owns you. But if you borrow $10 billion, you own the bank.

In business, always present your ideas in the context of alternatives that are clearly worse. Don’t just sell your proposed solution; slime all the other options with badness.

If someone you know is treating a small issue as a big one, remind them what a big problem looks like. That can reframe how they process their small worries.

Always remember that people make decisions in the context of alternatives. If you aren’t framing the alternatives as b...