Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
"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. Inside, 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 read 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.
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Reviews for Win Bigly
116 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An interesting and entertaining book on the topic of persuasion. As such, I think it may be misleading on a number of levels, which makes me doubt Mr. Adams' credentials and his persuasion tactics on the 3D plane, as he puts it. That being said, it was entertaining, so it's a fine book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, was one of the first people to predict that Donald Trump would become president of the U.S. He did this by studying and analyzing Mr. Trump as a master persuader -- someone who knows how to position issues emotionally and set a tone in order to influence both the questions being asked and the answers being given. In other words, he sets the agenda, or the rules of engagement for all who engage with him. In this sense, the book was absolutely fascinating and provided, to me, real insights into the art of persuasion and how to critically assess arguments. I did, however, find that the author went a bit too far in positioning himself as someone to watch in the future. Still well worth reading, though.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Scott Adams, the creator of the comic Dilbert, was one of the earliest people to predict that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. He credited Trump's victory to his incredible powers of persuasion. This is a fascinating look at Adams' views on how Trump used the power of persuasion to find a path to victory, despite some incredible gaffes. In Adams' arguments, facts don't matter, people just want justification for their emotional and often irrational decisions regarding voting, and Adams says that persuasive arguments from candidates like Trump allow such people justification after the fact for those decisions. While all of the pundits are trying to explain why Trump won, this explanation makes as much sense as many of the other ones.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I personally love Scott Adams. This book is worth your while.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I followed the blog, been reading about persuasion; it's very helpful to hear a recap of the whole events once more.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5No fan of Trump am I. Not pledging allegiance to one side or the other allows me to stay biased, but neutral to the emotional swings seen in the news and on social media. It helps to remember that these seem to amplify the worst in people as we often wouldn't say the same things to people online that we would in real life. Having spent a bit of time getting familiar to people in the "trolling" community, I have often seen Trump as an amalgam of troll and flamboyant salesman saying the most ridiculous thing to ramp up emotional responses then when asked has a far more nuanced position (immigration for instance: when he said he would "send them all back" then when elected he said he would "only send back the people who committed a crime after already being here" which was puzzlingly interesting. Why would he initially do that? People take the bait it seems, every..single..time and he gets tons of coverage and everyone thinks about him for another full day. My initial thoughts mixed with Adams' perceptions made so much at least seem clearer, which made me feel like I was at least not lost in the mass perception swamp. So, this book was very interesting and made me appreciate how flawed we are at thinking clearly and how we always react emotionally first (I knew this from neuroscience literature), so all in all this was a pleasant confirmation that I was kind of on the right track. Which could be contributing to my confirmation bias from the beginning. lol. Ah, jokes inside jokes.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wasn't expecting it to be about Trump, but I loved it mostly because it's a simplistic way to learn about persuasion with real life examples.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Heavily autobiographical and gets really weird at the end with the simulation world hypothesis nonsense. One of the first things the author says is that he has a lot of money so he can say whatever he wants but then spends the rest of the book justifying his positions.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mainly entertaining. Not a book to be taken too serious.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5One of the few authors that gets Trump. Way too much self aggrandizement and filler
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- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The book didn’t age well... Also, while it has some interesting (but not novel) insights on psychology, it’s still very much an apologist platform for DJT. Fanboy doesn’t begin to describe his point of view.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I have enjoyed reading some of Scott Adam's blog, and so I thought I would enjoy reading this book. Unfortunately, some of the worst parts of what I found on his blog permeated the book, at least the beginning. I find some of his ideas interesting, but others to be naive or dismissive. I decided to stop reading after about 40 pages.