WIN BIGLY by Scott Adams

• Winning fixes most problems.
• Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.
• The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason.
• When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to be biased toward the group consensus.
• A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.
• If you don’t sample the news on both sides, you miss a lot of the context.
• When your old worldview falls apart, it can trigger all kinds of irrational behavior before your brain rewrites the movie in your head to make it consistent with your new worldview.
• Persuasion is all about the tools and techniques of changing people’s minds, with or without facts and reason.
• Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.
• Humans are hardwired to reciprocate kindness.
• Persuasion is effective even when the subject recognizes the technique.
• 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 Master Persuader moves energy and attention to where it helps him most.
• An intentional “error” in the details of your message will attract criticism. The attention will make your message rise in importance—at least in people’s minds—simply because everyone is talking about it.
• If you have ever tried to talk someone out of their political beliefs by providing facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s because people think they have their own facts. Better facts.
• If you are not a Master Persuader running for president, find the sweet spot between apologizing too much, which signals a lack of confidence, and never apologizing for anything, which makes you look like a sociopath.
• A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.
• Success cures most types of “mistakes.”
• An anchor is a thought that influences people toward a persuader’s preferred outcome.
• Cognitive dissonance is a condition of mind in which evidence conflicts with a person’s worldview to such a degree that the person spontaneously generates a hallucination to rationalize the incongruity.
• Confirmation bias is the human tendency to irrationally believe new information supports your existing worldview even when it doesn’t.
• The key idea behind a filter is that it does not necessarily give its user an accurate view of reality.
• Moist robot is my framing of human beings as programmable entities.
• A persuasion stack is a collection of persuasion-related skills that work well together.
• Cialdini’s two best-selling books, Influence (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016), are master classes in the irrational nature of human decision making.
• Much of what we know to be true by experiment makes absolutely no sense to our limited human brains.
• Humans think they are rational, and they think they understand their reality. But they are wrong on both counts.
• The main theme of this book is that humans are not rational. We bounce from one illusion to another, all the while thinking we are seeing something we call reality. The truth is that facts and reason don’t have much influence on our decisions, except for trivial things, such as putting gas in your car when you are running low. On all the important stuff, we are emotional creatures who make decisions first and rationalize them after the fact.
• As a general rule, irrational people don’t know they are irrational.
• Once you understand your experience of life as an interpretation of reality, you can’t go back to your old way of thinking.
• Humans don’t always need to know the true nature of reality in order to live well.
• Hypnotists see the world differently. From our perspective, people are irrational 90 percent of the time but don’t know it.
• When our feelings turn on, our sense of reason shuts off.
• When you experience cognitive dissonance, you spontaneously generate a hallucination that becomes your new reality.
• 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.
• Confirmation bias is the human reflex to interpret any new information as being supportive of the opinions we already hold.
• If you don’t understand confirmation bias, you might think new information can change people’s opinions. As a trained persuader, I know that isn’t the case, at least when emotions are involved. People don’t change opinions about emotional topics just because some information proved their opinion to be nonsense. Humans aren’t wired that way.
• Confirmation bias isn’t an occasional bug in our human operating system. It is the operating system.
• Evolution doesn’t care if you understand your reality.
• Mass delusions are influencing every one of us all the time. Until the spell is broken, you can’t tell you are in one.
• People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state of things.
• Smart CEOs try to create visible victories within days of taking the job, to set the tone. It’s all about the psychology.
• Remember what I taught you in the past year: Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.
• The best leaders are the ones who understand human psychology and use that knowledge to address the public’s top priorities.
• The reality one learns while practicing hypnosis is that we make our decisions first—for irrational reasons—and we rationalize them later as having something to do with facts and reason.
• One of the things I’ve learned as a lifelong student of persuasion is that false memories are common. And sometimes adults don’t tell the truth.
• Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.
• Persuasion is strongest when the messenger is credible.
• Guess what people are thinking—at the very moment they think it—and call it out. If you are right, the subject bonds to you for being like-minded.
• 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.
• Love, romance, and sex are fundamentally irrational human behaviors, and it helps to see them that way.
• A talent stack is a collection of skills that work well together and make the person with those skills unique and valuable.
• The power of the talent stack idea is that you can intelligently combine ordinary talents together to create extraordinary value.
• Whenever you see people succeeding beyond your expectations, look for the existence of a well-engineered talent stack.
• Our brains interpret high energy as competence and leadership (even when it isn’t).
• Our brains did not evolve to understand reality. We’re all running different movies in our heads. All that matters is whether or not your filter keeps you happy and does a good job of predicting.
• 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.
• Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces others to join you or be framed as the small thinkers.
• We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t.1 The reality is that we make our decisions first and rationalize them later.2 It just doesn’t feel that way to us.
• Analogies are a good way to explain a new concept.
• While analogies are useful and important for explaining new concepts, here’s the important point for our purposes: Analogies are terrible for persuasion.
• When you attack a person’s belief, the person under attack is more likely to harden his belief than to abandon it, even if your argument is airtight.
• The first thing you hear about a new topic automatically becomes an anchor in your mind that biases your future opinions.
• If you compare any two things long enough, their qualities start to merge in our irrational minds.
• If you want to influence someone to try a new product, it helps to associate it with some part of an existing habit.
• The main way habits come into play for politics is in the way we consume news.
• Studies say humans more easily get addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do predictable rewards.
• Humans reflexively support their own tribe. No thinking is involved.
• Credibility, of any sort, is persuasive.
• When you signal your credentials, people expect you to have more influence over them.
• It is easier to persuade a person who believes you are persuasive.
• Pre-suading, or setting the table, is about creating mental and emotional associations that carry over.
• Bring high energy. People with high energy are more persuasive. We’re all drawn to energy.
• Whenever there is mass confusion and complexity, people automatically gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice.
• Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave.
• People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong.
• Visual persuasion is more powerful than nonvisual persuasion, all else being equal. And the difference is large.
• Humans are visual creatures. We believe our eyes before we believe whatever faulty opinions are coming from our other senses.
• In the context of persuasion, you don’t need a physical picture if you can make someone imagine the scene.
• That’s one of a persuader’s most basic and well-known tricks: People automatically gravitate toward the future they are imagining most vividly, even if they don’t want the future they are seeing.
• Visual memory overwhelms any other kind of memory, and vision is the most persuasive of your senses.
• You can use the power of contrast to improve every part of your professional and personal life.
• Participate in activities at which you excel compared with others. People’s impression of you as talented and capable compared with the average participant will spill over to the rest of your personal brand.
• People are more persuaded by contrast than by facts or reason. Choose your contrasts wisely.
• When you associate any two ideas or images, people’s emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time.
• A great sentence sounds good—in a way that music sounds good—independent of the meaning.
• Persuaders know that humans put more importance on the first part of a sentence than the second part. Our first impressions are hard to dislodge.
• People automatically get used to minor annoyances over time.
• People can get past minor annoyances if you give them enough time. Humans quickly adapt to just about anything that doesn’t kill them.
• One of your brain’s best features is its ability to automatically get over your smaller problems so you can focus on your bigger ones.
• What you say is important, but it is never as important as what people think you are thinking.
• A good system gives you lots of ways to win and far fewer ways to fail.
• If you can frame your preferred strategy as two ways to win and no way to lose, almost no one will disagree with your suggested path because it is a natural High-Ground Maneuver.
• Trump likes to tell us that many people agree with whatever he’s telling us at the moment. That’s an example of “social proof” persuasion. Humans are wired to assume that if lots of people are saying the same thing, it must be true.
• If you are selling, ask your potential customer to buy. Direct requests are persuasive.
• One of the rules of selling is that at some point in the pitch you have to directly ask for what you want.
• Repetition is persuasion. Also, repetition is persuasion. And have I mentioned that repetition is persuasion?
• Match the speaking style of your audience. Once they see you as one of their own, it will be easier to lead them.
• Trump’s simple speaking style made him relatable to the average undereducated voter.
• First you match your audience to gain their trust. Then you can lead them. This is powerful persuasion.
• Our minds are wired to believe that the simplest explanation for events is probably the correct one.
• Simple explanations look more credible than complicated ones.
• Simplicity makes your ideas easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread. You can be persuasive only when you are also memorable.
• “Strategic ambiguity” refers to a deliberate choice of words that allows people to read into your message whatever they want to hear. Or to put it another way, the message intentionally leaves out any part that would be objectionable to anyone. People fill in the gaps with their imagination, and their imagination can be more persuasive than anything you say.
• Once you join a side—for anything—it kicks your confirmation bias into overdrive.
• It is easy to fit the facts to the past in a way that supports a number of theories.
• PERSUASION TIP 31 If you are trying to get a decision from someone who is on the fence but leaning in your direction, try a “fake because” to give them “permission” to agree with you. The reason you offer doesn’t need to be a good one. Any “fake because” will work when people are looking for a reason to move your way. But
• Good writing is also persuasive writing.
• Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
• Simple means getting rid of extra words.
• Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words.
• Your first sentence needs to grab the reader.
• Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.