[This is part of the series: 31 Persuasion Tips That I Learned From Scott Adams]
If you want to strategically inflate the importance of a something, you have to get others to focus on it.
And one way of doing this is by being prudently wrong.
Let me follow this line of logic.
Issue: You have a broad idea that you want other people to notice.
To accomplish this, you make an intentional error in a detail.
When you do this, everyone will focus on the detail.
They will get mad. They will call you out. Etc.
This focus will increase the importance of your statement in everyone’s minds.
Here is the example of this.
What? You thought every political gaffe, every outlandish statement, was an accident?
And everyone dances to our music.
PERSUASION TIP 5: 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.
-Scott Adams, Win Bigly