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

by Scott Adams

The book is organized by three major themes. We’ll start by talking about the limits of the human brain to perceive reality, and that will prime you for the persuasion lessons that follow. Once you have a working understanding of the basics, I’ll show you how I used my understanding of persuasion to predict events in the presidential election of 2016.

Trump used the intentional wrongness persuasion play often, and it seemed to work every time, at least in terms of attracting attention where he wanted it. It even works when you know he’s doing it.

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

When you first saw the title of this book, did you think to yourself that Trump doesn’t say “bigly,” he says “big league”? If you noticed my title “error,” it probably helped you remember the book. And now whenever you hear the words “bigly” or “big league” in some other context, it will make you think of this book. The things you think about the most, and remember best, seem more important to you than other things. That’s the persuasion I engineered into the title.

FACTS ARE WEAKER THAN FICTION

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

you become aware that your perceptions are independent from the underlying reality. That awareness never leaves you. Once you understand your experience of life as an interpretation of reality, you can’t go back to your old way of thinking.

The pundits and the voters who believed they were the smart ones suddenly learned they were not. And they learned it in the clearest possible way. They were wrong about the voters in swing states. They were wrong to trust the polls. They were wrong to underestimate Trump’s intelligence. They were wrong to underestimate his campaign’s effectiveness. They were wrong about his need to do traditional advertising. They were wrong about his ground game. They were wrong in thinking that his provocative statements would end him. They were wrong to believe that his alleged scandals would end him. They were wrong about his tweeting being a bad idea. They were wrong that Trump would cause down-ticket Republicans to lose. They were wrong about just about everything.

Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.

The people on your team were the ones helping to keep you alive. The people on every other team were trying to kill you or take your resources.

Trump engineers his nicknames for future confirmation bias. By that I mean he primed our brains to see the future through his filter.

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.

I think of democracy as more of a mental condition than a political system.

People care that you’re on their team more than they care why.

main point of this book is that humans do not see reality as it exists.

All we can know for sure is that the filter we pick for reality makes us happy, or it doesn’t, and it predicts the future well, or it doesn’t. That’s all we know.

turned out to be the one I tried to create.

you can force-fit lots of different interpretations to the past, and they all work.

simple, provocative, visual, and quotable. Some

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader.

Write short sentences.

Learn how brains organize ideas.