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David Perell

@david_perell

Sep 20, 2020 • 30 tweets • 13 min read • Read on X

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Bryson DeChambeau might be the most innovative athlete in the world right now.

He just won his first major championship and is changing how golf is played at the highest levels. People call him "The Mad Scientist of Golf." Here's what you can learn from him.

THREAD

1. Great ideas are buried in history

Bryson's swing is inspired by a 1969 book called The Golfing Machine. It describes 144 ways you can swing a club and inspired Bryson to adopt a "single plane swing." It's one of the most controversial books ever written about golf.

2. Experiment with yourself

Most players have irons of different lengths, but all of Bryson's are 37.5 inches long. Unlike other pros, all his irons have the same swing weight. Their lie angles are 10 degrees more upright than usual, which is why his swing looks funky.

@MarkBroadie

3. Follow the math

Bryson studied @MarkBroadie's ideas and determined that if he wanted to be #1 in the world, he needed to hit the ball farther. To do that, he gained 40 pounds, started swinging as hard as possible, and changed his swing. Now, he's the longest driver on tour.

4. Make progress by turning an art into a science

For all of golf history, golfers putted based on their feel and intuition. But Bryson uses a system called vector putting where he uses math to compute the break and determine how the ball will roll along the grass.

5. Optimal performance happens somewhere between conventional wisdom and what your body tells you

Most trainers will tell you to rest, but Bryson DeChambeau works out every day. Most golf coaches tell you to hit with a 7-10 degree driver, but Bryson's is only 5.5 degrees.

6. If you’re innovative, people will laugh at you

Bryson’s been criticized for turning golf into a science. Instead of “trusting his feel,” he pulls from physics and geometry. He’s the only golfer I’ve ever seen who consistently brings a launch monitor to the driving range.

7. Seeing that experts are wrong in one area inspires you to question conventional wisdom in other areas too.

He first questioned conventional wisdom with "The Golfing Machine." Then, he did it by putting big grips on his clubs. Now his goal is to live for "130 or 140" years.

8. Identify the highest leverage ways to improve

Professional golf increasingly rewards people who drive the ball far. But Bryson’s also improved his putting.

When he first turned pro, he was 157th in putting. Now, he’s 12th. Likewise, he’s climbed from 55th to 2nd in driving.

9. Work hard

The night before his US Open win, he was the last player on the driving range.

"People don't realize how hard I work to try and get a better understanding of my biomechanics. Right around 14, I started working really hard and that's kind of what changed my game."

10. Measure what you can

Bryson gets instant feedback after every shot on the driving range, which is unprecedented in the golf world.

The data pays off too. With a 200 mile-per-hour ball speed, this drive drive flew 365 yards — more than 3.5 football fields.

11. Unique people do unique things, even outside their main area of expertise

Bryson's autograph is as unique as his approach to the game. Even though he's right-handed, he often signs his autograph backward with his left hand.

12. Extreme results require extreme dedication.

Bryson once said: "I can be good at anything if I love it and dedicate myself. And I love history. I love science. I love music. I love golf. I love learning. I love life. I love trying to be the best at anything and everything."

@GOLF_com

13. Greatness is grueling

Bryson and his coach Chris Como set up the ideal indoor practice studio. This video shows how he swings as hard as he possibly can to increase his clubhead speed. Note the force plates under his feet and the data at the end of the video.

h/t @GOLF_com

14. Cutting-edge innovation happens in weird ways

Bryson works out his brain by watching movies. He measures the peaks and valleys of his brain's electrical current, with a goal of staying calm during stressful scenes.

He also monitors his brain activity on the course.

15. Collect more data

Bryson insists on collecting data beyond the driving range. He's the first golfer I've seen that brings his launch monitor onto the course so he can mimic tournament conditions.

With all that data, he can study trends and identify where he can improve.

16. Stick to the plan

At the gym, Bryson focuses on isolation exercises instead of compound movements like squats and deadlifts.

Gaining weight gives him stability on the course which has helped him increase his swing speed to 135mph and his ball speed to 200 mph.

17. Keep pushing the limits, even after other people think you’ve made it.

Right after winning the US Open, Bryson announced that he’s going to experiment with a 48-inch driver (3 inches longer than the norm) so he can drive the ball even farther — “maybe 360 or 370 yards.”

18. Perform intuitively

Bryson practices like a scientist so he can play like an artist. Here's what he learned from his hero, Moe Norman: "Why was he able to hit it straight every time? It wasn’t that he was thinking about everything. More like he was thinking about nothing."

19. Ground yourself in timeless ideas

In 2014, Byson almost quit playing golf. He was depressed and unhealthily obsessed. Desperate for answers, he turned to his favorite Bible passage from Colossians 3:23: "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men."

@MarkBroadie

20. Surround yourself with experts

Early in the week of his US Open win, @MarkBroadie and Bryson’s coach realized that the fairways were so small that driving distance would be a deciding factor.

Bryson heard that, doubled-down on long drives, and over-powered the golf course.

More than 1 million people have now seen this Twitter thread, making it one of my most popular threads of all-time.

If you want to read it as an article, I published it on my website.

perell.com/tweetstorms/wh…

21. If you’re want to become world class at your craft, it helps to have fun

Here’s a video where Bryson hits a driver with 203 mph ball speed. That’s insane. For reference, the PGA Tour average is 167 mph.

He’s like a kid in this video too — playing instead of working.

22. Trust your DNA

Bryson believes that his only constraints are the laws of physics and the rules of golf. That’s why he continues to experiment with his technique, even after he wins a major championship.... it’s who he is.

Great interview with his coach, Chris Como.

23. Use the data of science and the wisdom of intuition

Bryson may take a scientific approach to the game but that doesn't mean he ignores his hunches. Internalizing the technical side of the game should actually improve your intuition.

Love these ideas from his coach below.

24. Question the standard trade offs

Bryson refused to accept that there was a trade off between distance and accuracy. He copied both the world’s long drive champions and the straightest hitters in golf history.

What Billy Beane is to baseball, Bryson DeChambeau is to golf.

You don’t reach a state of mastery when you know it all. You reach it when you’ve absorbed the knowledge so deeply that it becomes a part of you. Though Bryson thinks like a scientist, he ultimately trusts his intuition.

Here's my Bryson-inspired essay.

perell.com/blog/practice-…

27. Find what you’re uniquely good at

Bryson is an exceptionally quick information-processor, as shown by his ability to solve Rubik’s Cubes.

With that mentality, he prefers practicing instead of playing.

https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1366596660860776454?s=20

Mastery shows up in all kinds of weird ways. When you're an amateur, the act of performing can send you into a daze. But professionals work with superhuman presence, sort of like how Tiger Woods still remembers shots from 20 years ago.

LeBron James, too.

https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1366596660860776454?s=20

Bryson’s unique approach to the game has him looking at golf courses in ways that players have never looked at them before.

I haven’t seen golf fans roar like this since Tiger Woods was in his prime.

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More from @david_perell

David Perell

@david_perell

Aug 27, 2025

Kobe Bryant spent 15 years writing every day because he wanted to become the next Walt Disney.

Now, Jimmy Soni is telling that story.

The first part of our conversation is Kobe’s secret obsession with writing. Then we got into why Michael Lewis once wrote under a pen name, why the publishing industry is broken, and why Jimmy loves writing with AI.

Highlights:

1. The world is a conspiracy designed to prevent you from writing.

2. Jimmy sees himself in a battle against that world to find four hours per day to do focused writing.

3. “I’m researching” is often an excuse not to write. People spend decades researching books they never write, and it’s a writers' job to come up with ways to get research done without falling down a black hole.

4. Using AI to write is like using a very sharp knife to cook. The tool might make it easier, but you still have to cook the meal.

5. If you can’t out-write the AI, what are you doing writing in the first-place?

6. Find a Model Book to serve as the "plaster cast" for the book you’re writing and study it obsessively. Jimmy wanted his book, “The Founders” to be like “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone, and read it more than 20 times to understand what made it so good.

7. People think that being a professional writer means going to a lot of cocktail parties. Nope... the reality is that the craft of writing involves showing up to work every day, putting away the distractions, and focusing for many, many hours. You go to bed early, you wake up early, you get your work done. Do it every day for months in a row and you’ll have a book.

8. A problem with traditional publishing is that the entire system is predicated on your book being a hit within the first two weeks. If it’s not, publishers largely give up and move onto something else.

9. What looks like a talent gap is often just a focus gap. Amateur writers severely underestimate just how much time and effort goes into great books.

10. A/B test the cover art for your book. It’s so easy, so cheap, and the saying is true: People judge a book by its cover.

11. Before Michael Lewis was “Michael Lewis,” he wrote under the pen name of Diana Bleecker because he was writing about Wall Street while working on Wall Street, and didn’t want people to know who he was.

12. Michael Lewis was an art history major at Princeton, and once recounted that a lot of Renaissance-era paintings look quite similar. But if you want to see the idiosyncrasies, look at the toenails. That’s where the artists would lose their steam or put in the most individuality, so they’re some of the most distinctive parts of the art. Many fields have an equivalent — a place where you can find hidden answers, if only you know where to look.

13. Ambition is fuel that can burn relatively clean for a little while, only to become dirty later on. Jimmy says: “For the true greats, the sustained motivation needs to come from something deeper. It needs to come from love. That’s the only sustaining force there is.”

14. Kobe built his own publishing company because he didn’t feel like the big publishing houses could deliver the level of quality he demanded.

15. Kobe once spent two weeks redesigning the barcode on one of his books because he wanted it to blend more fluidly with the back cover design (no traditional publisher would do something like this).

I've shared the full conversation with Jimmy Soni below. The first ~25 minutes are about Kobe Bryant. The rest is about a hodgepodge of other topics.

If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the links in the reply tweets.

Links...

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jim…

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0GDs9K…

YouTube

youtube.com/watch?v=mqupPp…

Kobe Bryant started his own publishing company because he didn't think the traditional ones met his quality bar.

And he was as obsessive about publishing as he was about basketball: he once spent two weeks with his team redesigning the barcode on a book because he wanted it to more fluidly blend in with the rest of the design.

At every part of the process, he'd ask: What's the highest quality thing we can do?

Read 6 tweets

David Perell

@david_perell

Jul 16, 2025

Alain de Botton has written ~17 books and runs the School of Life YouTube channel, which now has almost 10 million subscribers. And this is a rare interview for him.

Some highlights:

1. A clear night sky is a challenge to everything we think we know.

2. If we really took on board what that night sky is telling us, we'd have to lie down and just question absolutely everything.

3. Writer's block is a conflict between shame and the desire for honesty.

4. The effect of mass media is to industrialize and commercialize our thinking, which leaves no room for the free thinker, the honest thinker, and the authentic thinker.

5. You've got to be attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That's the real work of writing.

6. Every person is an incredible library of sensations but so often, particularly in the academic world, people think: “Let’s ignore ourselves as a source of data and find out what Cicero said, or what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said."

7. Writing can be revenge for the silenced person, which is why so many writers are meek in person but fierce on the page.

8. A work of art is the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress, and sometimes, it’s even an alternative to losing your mind.

9. Emerson said: "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts."

10. The thoughts of geniuses aren’t fundamentally different from others. It’s just that they’re able to put words to sensations we’ve long felt but couldn’t articulate.

11. Writing prompt: If there were no rules, if you couldn't fail, if no one was going to laugh, if you were going to be dead tomorrow, what would you actually do and say? How would you write, let's say? That's the thing you should write.

I've shared the full conversation with Alain de Botton below. You can watch here or on YouTube, and listen on Apple or Spotify. You'll find the links in the reply tweets.

Watch on YouTube

If we knew the complexity of the world, we'd know that we need hours and hours to process every waking minute.

George Eliot said something like: "If we were truly attentive to the mystery and complexity of things, we would hear the squirrel's heartbeat and would hear the grass grow. And we'd go mad from the multiplicity of things. We'd lose our minds."

Now that's a paraphrase but the point stands. Can you imagine what it'd be like to hear the heartbeats of squirrels? We repress those things. They're in us, but we don't pay attention to them because, if we were alive to all that's going on in the world, we'd lose ourselves.

Read 8 tweets

David Perell

@david_perell

Jun 12, 2025

I grew up in San Francisco, walking with my family by the Golden Gate Bridge. I still remember the thick and iconic chain railing that gave the place a sense of distinctiveness.

Now the chains are gone, and they've been replaced by a soulless metal railing that's colder than a hospital waiting room. I'm sure some bureaucrat somewhere justified it with a tidy spreadsheet, but they stripped away a little piece of San Francisco's soul in the process.

This is how a culture loses its charm: slowly, quietly... one small decision at a time.

Ok, the poet Dana Gioia explained the problem better than I ever could.

This rips: "The failure of the public sector in this nation is embodied in thousands of ugly buildings and public spaces.

These places have been built practically. They are practical and functional in every respect except in practice, since they communicate to the average person that the citizen is just a number in a game of cost efficiency and crowd control.

The experience that Americans have with walking up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is the experience of beauty, the embodiment of our political vision of the beauty of democracy, expressed in great architecture, great sculpture, great landscaping, and great language, carved calligraphically in the very walls of the memorial.

Just look at a Depression-era post office with marble floors, carved wooden counters, brass fixtures and often an original mural. This was a vision of a beautiful society to which any citizen who entered could participate in.

Today the post office is all vinyl and plexiglass. It offers no vision but expediency. We are not citizens, but customers in a cut rate 99 cent store vision of democracy. No wonder the public doesn't believe in the government. The government seems not to believe in them as alert, intelligent, sensory human beings."

@DanaGioiaPoet

https://x.com/david_perell/status/1545819896004624384

https://x.com/david_perell/status/1545819896004624384

Read 4 tweets

David Perell

@david_perell

May 7, 2025

Dean Koontz has published more than 140 novels, 74 works of short fiction, and sold more than 500 million books.

Simply put, he’s one of the most prolific writers alive today. Some highlights from our chat:

1. Dare to love the English language.

2. Characters come alive when they're given free will. Instead of constraining them in an outline, let them go where they want. You know they’re alive once they start surprising you. He says: “I give the characters free will like God gave it to us.”

3. Everything a writer believes about life and death, culture and society, relationships and the self, God and nature will wind up in their books. A writer’s body of work, therefore, reveals the intellectual and emotional progress of its creator, and over time, becomes a map of their soul.

4. To think you understand the world is to be foolish in the extreme. The world is too complex for us to understand it. To see reality clearly is to be utterly enchanted by its staggering complexity.

5. Where should you look? Well, the supernatural enters the world in mundane ways, and rarely the great and glorious flashes of drama.

6. Dean writes his novels page-by-page, and doesn’t move onto the next page until he nails the existing one. There’s no messy first draft. Because of that, he’s basically done with his novels once he finishes the final page.

7. Where does a unique writing voice come from? Three places: style, perspective, and a philosophy of life.

8. Be skeptical of conventional wisdom. There’s an encyclopedia of common wisdom in publishing. All of it is common and none of it is wise. You have to become aware of that, go your own way, and just stick with it because there are so many ways you can be sent wrong based on "that's the way we always do it."

9. The aesthetic plainness of contemporary writing (and culture at large) is crushing our souls.

10. Contemporary fiction is suffering from plainness in particular. It started when writers started imitating Hemingway (who stripped his prose down but kept the mystery and underlying strangeness of the world by implication). But the imitations that came later stripped the prose down while also removing the underlying depth that made Hemingway so great.

11. Koontz Law of Writing #1: Never go inside more than one character's mind in a scene. Each one should come from a singular viewpoint.

12. Koontz Law of Writing #2: Metaphors aren't meant to dazzle readers, but to seduce them into a more intimate relationship with the story.

13. Koontz Law of Writing #3: Metaphors and similes describe a scene more colorfully than a chain of adjectives — while reinforcing the mood. The point is that you can create depth by describing things metaphorically instead of using blunt adjectives. That’s what poetry does: it uses words to say more than the word itself says, which creates a mood.

14. Great prose doesn't come from piling on adjectives. It comes from finding the perfect metaphor that does triple duty: describes the scene, reinforces the mood, and reveals something about the character.

15. The goal is for metaphors not to pop out like showmanship, but to flow into the music of the language.

16. Develop an ear for the musicality of language.

17. A book can succeed with a mediocre plot if the characters are compelling. Character is the center of good fiction. If the characters work, the story works.

18. From the afterword of his book, Watchers: “We have within us the ability to change for the better and to find dignity as individuals rather than as drones in one mass movement or another. We have the ability to love, the need to be loved, and the willingness to put our own lives on the line to protect those we love, and it is in these aspects of ourselves that we can glimpse the face of God; and through the exercise of these qualities, we come closest to a Godlike state.”

I've shared the full conversation with @deankoontz below.

The YouTube video link is in the replies, and so are the links to Apple and Spotify.

Watch the full thing on YouTube

Listen to the interview...

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dea…

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5TzjVZ…

Read 4 tweets

David Perell

@david_perell

Mar 5, 2025

The world of writing has changed forever.

AI is getting really good, really fast. ChatGPT is already a better writer than most humans and some professional writers. So, what’s the future of writing?

18 thoughts from Tyler Cowen:

1) Don't let AI smooth out your idiosyncrasies. Let your writing stay weird and uniquely yours.

2) Generic content is dying and the burden is on you as the writer to be distinctive.

3) The more personal your writing becomes, the more future-proof it is. Nobody wants to read memoirs from AI, even if they're technically "better."

4) Use AI as your secondary literature when you read — not just for quick answers, but as a thinking companion. As Tyler puts it, "I'll keep on asking the AI: 'What do you think of chapter two? What happened there? What are some puzzles?' It just gets me thinking... and I'm smarter about the thing in the final analysis."

5) Hallucinations aren't the crisis everyone makes them out to be. No matter the source, if you're going to use a piece of information, you should double-check it. This is true for both books and AI.

6) Secrets will become more valuable in an AI-driven world.

7) One way to use AI as a writer is to research fields you aren't as familiar with before you start writing about them. Tyler said: "I just wrote a column about declassifying classified documents. I don't know that law very well. I asked the AI for a lot of background... now I feel like I'm not an idiot on the topic."

8) AI changes what books are even worth writing. "Predictive books and books about the near future. They don't make sense to write anymore."

9) Editing trick: Try running your writing through AI and asking what some people might find obnoxious. It’s a surprisingly powerful editing trick.

10) When prompting AI, put humans out of your mind and imagine you're talking to an alien or a non-human animal.

11) Many of the most significant AI advancements are likely happening behind closed doors. For example, I hear that Google allows employees to use Gemini with virtually unlimited context windows.

12) What possibilities do large context windows open up? Researchers will be able to load entire regulatory frameworks, historical archives, or massive datasets like "tax records from Renaissance Florence" into a single query.

13) The rate of AI improvement matters more than its current capabilities. As Tyler puts it, "This is the worst they will ever be" is key to understanding their trajectory. "A lot of people don't get that. They're impressed by what they see in the moment, but they don't understand the rate of improvement."

14) The best way to appreciate the current rate of improvement is to use the latest models.

15) Being non-technical can sometimes be an advantage when thinking about AI. Here’s Tyler: "If you're not focused on the technical side, you will see other things more clearly... You just focus on what is this actually good for? And not, am I impressed by all the neat bells and whistles on this advance with AI?"

16) How Tyler uses AI to prep for podcast interviews: Don't waste time asking AI for generic interview questions or broad topics. Tyler says that's the worst question you can ask an AI. It’s “too normy.” Instead, ask specific questions about historical examples and get context. Then, let your own creative questions emerge.

17) Your relationship with mentors and peers becomes more crucial, not less, in an AI world. "Two pieces of general advice with or without AI in the world." Tyler says: "Get more and better mentors and work every day at improving the quality of your peer network."

18) The divide between AI and humans creates a striking paradox. As Tyler puts it: "On one hand the AIs are getting so much better, so learn how to use the AIs. On the other hand, the AIs are getting so much better, so invest in these other things that aren't AI—pure networks. You've gotta do both."

I've shared the full conversation with @TylerCowen below.

In the replies, I've also linked to a full transcript and relevant links to YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts if you want to listen there. And if you want a bite-size entry to the episode, I've shared some clips in the replies too.

Watch the podcast on YouTube

Listen to the episode...

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tyl…

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7bLxn6…

Read 5 tweets

David Perell

@david_perell

Feb 26, 2025

Dana Gioia is one of the world’s greatest living poets. He’s been writing for ~55 years, and this 3-hour interview is all about his approach to writing.

Some lessons:

1. What is poetry? Here’s a definition: “Poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”

2. And who is the mother of the muses? Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory.

3. You can’t understand poetry until you start learning it by heart. Yes, memorizing it. The metaphor of knowing something by heart means storing a piece of wisdom in the center of your being and making it a part of you.

4. Poetry exists in the body before it exists in language. For him, great writing is about putting form to felt sensations.

5. First drafts are an act of madness. They’re messy and chaotic, and it’s worth embracing that. Only in the process of revision does the structure begin to reveal itself.

6. The most valuable ideas arrive suddenly, fully formed but fragile, and they won’t wait for you to be ready. If you don’t write them down immediately, you’ll probably forget them.

7. His artistic process: Confusion, followed by madness, exhilaration, and despair.

8. Aspiring writers who can’t find the time to write run the risk of living a life of regret, where destiny takes the wheel and steers them off-course. Seneca says, “If you follow your destiny, it guides you. If you resist it, it drags you behind it.”

9. What’s the purpose of art? Most people, most of the time, go through life half-awake. The purpose of art is to awaken us to reality and help us feel our situation. Done right, it excites, expands, and refines our complete human intelligence.

10. Can you write with a full-time job? T.S. Eliot had a day job at a bank. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. Dana Gioia worked a full-time job in New York and wrote in the evenings.

11. Life is like a wallet full of one-hour bills. You only have 24 hours to spend every day. If you want to do serious writing while raising a family and maintaining a full-time job, almost every hour of every day has to be budgeted.

12. Poetry should turn. It shouldn’t just climb to an emotional height. It should pivot, contradict, or contain its own rebuttal. But most new poems go something like this: “I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, the end,” or “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy, the end. There’s no twist, no turn.

13. You don’t need to be 100% original. All you need to do is assemble parts of the reality that already exists. As George Balanchine said, “God creates, I assemble.”

14. A foundational book in his life: The City of God by St. Augustine. He says there are two cities that exist: There’s the City of Man, which is ruled by wealth and power and all the laws of man. And there’s the City of God which is eternal and governed by the rules of God.

15. Great poetry exists at the level of intuition, and it’s the same intuition that academic education tries to suppress. With great poems, like great songs, you feel before you understand.

16. Art is an argument with yourself. Yeats said: “Out of arguments with others, we make politics. Out of arguments with ourselves, we make poetry.”

17. Great writing should astonish the creator, and if it doesn’t astonish the creator, it won’t astonish the reader.

18. Robert Frost once said: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

19. Beauty is being able to see the form, the shape underneath reality, and to understand why it is right, even when it is destructive or terrifying or humiliating. The most powerful kind of beauty is to discover the secret shape and rightness of things that are terrifying.

20. On novels: Most people don’t understand what a novel is — and how revolutionary the form was. So, what’s a novel? It’s a story that tells you simultaneously what’s happening on the outside of a character and what they’re thinking on the inside.

I’ve shared the full interview with @DanaGioiaPoet below. If you’d rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify, check out the reply tweets.