“If you watched the entire election cycle and concluded that Trump was nothing but a lucky clown, you missed one of the most important perceptual shifts in the history of humankind. I’ll fix that for you in this book.”
Adams was one of the earliest public figures to predict Trump’s win, doing so a week after Nate Silver put Trump’s odds at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog. The mainstream media regarded Trump as a novelty and a sideshow. But Adams recognized in Trump a level of persuasion you only see once in a generation.
Trump triggered massive cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias on both the left and the right. We’re hardwired to respond to emotion, not reason. We might listen to 10 percent of a speech – a hand gesture here, a phrase there – and if the right buttons are pushed, we decide we agree with the speaker and invent reasons to justify that decision after the fact.
The point isn’t whether Trump was right or wrong, good or bad. Win Bigly goes beyond politics to look at persuasion tools that can work in any setting – the same ones Adams saw in Steve Jobs when he invested in Apple decades ago. For instance:
If you need to convince people that something is important, make a claim that’s directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration in it. Everyone will spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is and will remember the issue as high priority. Stop wasting time on elaborate presentation preparations. In this book you’ll learn which components of your messaging matter and where you can wing it. Planting simple, sticky ideas (such as “Crooked Hillary”) is more powerful than stating facts. Just find a phrase without previous baggage that grabs your audience at an emotional level.
Adams offers nothing less than “access to the admin passwords to human beings”. This is a must-listen if you care about persuading others in any field – or if you just want to resist the tactics of emotional persuasion when they’re used on you.
You too, Can Win Bigly One of the best books on persuasion ever written. A story of one man believing facts wouldn’t matter to win the presidency (at least not entirely)and called the winner over a year in advance. Scott Adams explains in great detail how we too can use persuasion with practice. Great follow up to his “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”. Will definitely have to read more than once, Huge!
A Crash Course in Modern Politics and Persuasion I received an early copy of Win Bigly by using tips from Scott’s previous book, “How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big.” =)Â
Not a Trump fan, but this book is blowing my mind I like a book that makes you question how you think, this one has me feeling like I just fell down the rabbit hole. it’s great. It has me questioning everything I feel like I have a solid rational opinion on and is helping me understand why it is that people who I think are reasonable in other instances can believe in things that I think are so obviously wrong. I am not a trump fan but I do find him interesting, who couldn’t? Using Trump as a case study for how persuasion can work is a…