2025-04-16 20:00:02
Have you ever met somebody who was trying really hard to convince you that they’re somebody they’re not, and then you get to know them and you like them but not for the person they’re trying to be? That’s how I feel about Buenos Aires.
A week there piqued my curiosity, and at the risk of being offensively reductive, this is what I came to: You can blame the city’s early elites, who dreamed of making it “The Paris of South America.” And they weren’t subtle about it. They built wide avenues like the Champs-Élysées, opulent buildings like the Opéra Garnier, and grand parks like the Luxembourg Gardens.
Even the tango, which is now synonymous with Argentina, was rejected by the elites when it first emerged in the immigrant neighborhood of La Boca, where fishermen would gather to sing and dance after a long day’s work at the port. The Buenos Aires elites dismissed tango as a vile, vulgar, low-class, good-for-nothing form of expression. Meanwhile, a few decades after it was invented, the Parisians embraced it as a daring and exotic art form. Only after it became popular in Paris did the people of Buenos Aires say: “Wait, wait… the tango is ours!”
The Buenos Aires boom began around 1880 and lasted until the stock market crashed at the end of the 1920s. Argentina had the 8th-largest economy in the world at one point. To me, the nature of its early optimism was different from cities like New York. The Gatsby-esque optimism of New York in the 1920s was “things are happening here” while the optimism of Buenos Aires was closer to “things will happen here.”
These grand ambitions shaped life in Buenos Aires — and also death. I like to sign up for Airbnb Experiences whenever I travel, and I was perplexed to see how many of them were tours of the Recoleta Cemetery. Who wants to visit a cemetery on vacation? But it seemed so strange that I had to visit. Sure enough, the mausoleums were some of the most beautiful art in the city because of the roaring status competition for who could spend eternity under the grandest hunk of stone. The city’s elites were not only interested in promoting their city but also themselves.
Reflecting their obsession with Europe, the elites hired French and Italian designers instead of Argentinian ones, which is why the cemetery doesn’t look Latin. These mausoleums were the Birkin bags of the time. Many of them even have glass doors as a way of saying: “Look inside to see just how rich I was.” Even after visiting, the idea of a bougie cemetery feels like a complete and total oxymoron to me.
With hope came immigration, and those early immigrants were mostly Italian. In 1910, the number of Buenos Aires school children with two parents born in Argentina was half the number of kids with two parents born in Italy. Today, Argentina has one of the largest Italian communities outside of Italy, and 63% of people in Buenos Aires have Italian roots. During my visit, President Milei was granted Italian citizenship.
Italian roots bring Italian food, and if there’s any category where Buenos Aires reigns supreme, it’s the gelato. If you ever visit, skip the standard restaurant dessert and go out for ice cream instead. Just know that even at midnight, the best ice cream shops will have a line.
The dulce de leche flavors may be delicious, but the Argentinian dreams of tomorrow never quite materialized. The elites (who made their money from agriculture and cattle ranching, and eventually, land ownership) built mini-palaces in town, many of which were converted into hotels and embassies after the economy tanked.
Since then, the city’s fate has played out like the story of a prodigious athlete from a rich family who squandered her potential with 10,000 self-inflicted wounds. The stagnation is evident in the architecture. Most of the beautiful buildings were built before the Great Depression, and many of the more recent ones look like no thought went into them.
The façade on these new buildings are simple. They value function over form and don’t have a shred of ornamentation. Certain views from the street level are defaced by hanging telephone wires, and too many buildings are yearning for a power wash.
The shorter the building, the older and therefore the more beautiful it’s likely to be. For that reason, the city is prettier from the streets than the top floor of a skyscraper. From on high, the eye is drawn to the shoddy maintenance and architecture of the average building, rather than the decor of the many beautiful buildings you’ll see on a walk around town.
Though Argentina does have a unique culture of food and dance and the general passion of its people, I can’t find it in the art or architecture. I’m sure the early elites are rolling over in their ostentatious mausoleums because of the more recent buildings, which are sterile and purely utilitarian. I never got to the bottom of why Argentina doesn’t have a rich visual arts tradition, but it’s a strange void in the culture. Maybe economic struggles are to blame.
Everybody talks about it. Waiters, cab drivers, hotel receptionists. You name it. Just a year ago, the monthly inflation rate was 25.5%, and inflation of that magnitude taints daily life.
Echoes of hyperinflation show up all over the place. Restaurant menus are designed so that the prices can be easily changed, because, just a year ago, when money printing was at its peak, the price of a steak might’ve been different on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
The bills locals grew up with are practically worthless now. At the end of one of my taxi rides, the cab driver shined a $10,000 peso bill (equivalent of $10 USD) under the light to check its legitimacy. My first thought was “Wow, there must be a lot of fake currency circling around here” until a friend told me this is the first year that $10,000 bills have ever been printed — and the old administration didn’t print larger bills because it felt like admitting defeat to inflation. At the bank, I asked for $65,000 Argentine Pesos ($65 USD) and received it all in $1,000 and $2,000 bills. My wallet was so fat that sitting on it for an hour straight would have given me scoliosis.
One friend griped about how President Milei repeats the same few talking points about the causes of inflation, but based on how fluently people talk about the economy, it’s working. An American economist I had dinner with there insisted he’s rarely recognized on the streets when he travels, but was recognized twice in Buenos Aires, presumably because people have been binge-watching his inflation-related YouTube videos.
When I asked one cab driver what he thought of Milei’s ideas, he said something to the effect of: “I like his ideas. He’s a little crazy, but he’s smart and good for Argentina.”
To bring this conversation to the streets, a major talking point for a group chat I joined down there was how to exchange money around town. Though I didn’t plan ahead enough to do it, word on the street is that it’s best practice to bring a fat wad of American Benjamins and exchange them for Argentinian pesos once you arrive. Historically, there’ve been black market money exchangers called cuevas who offer a better exchange rate than the banks.
These economic struggles, and the black market ways to skirt them, aren’t a new phenomenon. A New York Times guide to Buenos Aires from 1974 says: “The official exchange rate is 10 pesos to a dollar. But in the stamp‐and‐coin stores that line Corrientes Avenue, money is openly exchanged at the black market rate, which is hovering nowadays at around 13 pesos to the dollar.”
Just like the architecture, the story on the surface distorted what was really going on. Politicians refused to acknowledge the true scale of inflation. Black market exchange rates diverged from official ones. In this way, the financial fiasco was yet another façade.
For all its economic troubles, the people of Buenos Aires haven’t lost their fire — and nowhere does this shine through more than its obsession with meat.
Buenos Aires’s meat culture is dictated by its geography. People rave about the steaks, but the ones I ate at restaurants were only okay and consistently overcooked. Maybe I didn’t go to the right places. Or maybe the restaurant steaks in Buenos Aires are overrated. That said, they’re relatively cheap (even though food prices are much more expensive for Americans now than they were a year ago, due to the inflation slowdown). The steaks I can buy in Buenos Aires are better than what I can get in America for the same price, but the very best steaks I’ve had in America are better than the best ones I had at restaurants in Buenos Aires.
The best meat I had was at an asado, a uniquely Argentinian approach to cooking and eating meat. Grilling happens over the course of a few hours, and you can come and go as you wish. I attended two of them. When I asked the chef how hot the steaks should be on the grill, he said: “Your hand should be able to hover one inch over the meat for roughly ten seconds. If you can’t last that long, the meat’s too hot. If you can last longer, the meat’s too cold.”
In addition to the meat, both asados flowed with malbec and a curious local concoction of Coca-Cola and a bitter alcoholic drink called Fernet that tastes like medicine but is supposedly good for digestion.
Much of Argentina, and especially its central region called The Pampas, which exists just outside of Buenos Aires, is covered in vast and open fields of grass where cattle can freely graze and feed off the fertile soil. Relative to Texas, the beef I had down there was salted less, not as fatty, and served without the rubs or seasoning that are par for the course at a Texas BBQ joint. Pits, smokers, and BBQ sauce were nowhere to be found. The emphasis was on Chimichurri, malbec wine, and open-fire grills instead.
Pro-tip: The fun of eating steak in Buenos Aires is all the different cuts of meat you get to try. Besides the sirloin strip (bife de chorizo), save room for cuts you wouldn’t ordinarily eat at home. They’re called achuras, and they consist of kidneys, intestines, and sweetbreads. Standard steaks are cooked more in Buenos Aires than they are in the States, so be explicit about how you like yours cooked and ask for table salt as well.
| Aspect | Argentina BBQ | Texas BBQ |
| Salt Quantity | Little salt | Lots of salt |
| Seasoning | No rubs or seasoning | Diverse rubs and seasoning |
| Cooking Equipment | Parilla (open grill) | Pits and smokers |
| Sauce | Chimichurri | BBQ sauce |
| Specialty Sides | Intestines and grilled cheese | Pork belly and burnt ends |
| How the Cattle is Fed | Grass-Fed | Grain-Fed |
| Wine on the Side | Oh yeahhhh | Eh, not really |
Buenos Aires is Latin for a city so influenced by Europe, and European for a city so influenced by Latin America.
As you’re probably expecting by now, the areas closest to the elite neighborhood of Recoleta feel the most like Paris: wide avenues, big parks, grand statues. It’s the Upper East Side of Buenos Aires. Though it’s delightful, it’s unlike the rest of Buenos Aires which feels more like Brooklyn or Barcelona. Neighborhoods like Palermo are arranged in a grid with trees on the sidewalks. They have the same density of hipster baristas, international restaurants, and surprisingly elaborate houseplant shops. The murals and graffiti are the kind of things you’d see in Bushwick, though the volume of them isn’t as high and I don’t get the sense the artists painted them under the influence of mushrooms.
The streets feel fairly safe too. Nobody mentioned any safety concerns, at least in the neighborhoods I frequented like Palermo and Recoleta. That’s why I was so surprised when I witnessed a theft. I was walking to my hotel when a thief in an orange construction vest jumped off his motorcycle and ripped a backpack right out of a tourist’s hands, only to hop back on the motorcycle, crank the engine, and speed right off. I wanted to shout, to chase him, to do something — but I was completely helpless. It all happened faster than I could process what was going on. It was a reminder that crimes of this sort happen fast. One second, you’re soaking in the peace of an afternoon stroll; the next, you’re pulsing with adrenaline and ready for a fight.
Many of the fights in Buenos Aires happen amongst soccer fans. Buenos Aires has more soccer stadiums than any city in the world. More than 20 professional clubs play in and around the city. All of them have their own stadium, and six of them seat 47,000 people or more. The most prominent (and vicious) rivalry is between Boca Juniors and River Plate. Boca plays in the port neighborhood, and has working-class fans, while River Plate plays in a bougier part of town. Echoes of the rivalry carry so far that later on the trip, when I was up by the Brazil border, I sat next to one couple wearing Boca Juniors jerseys and another guy in River Plate gear, and they instantly started throwing shade at each other.
Visit, and you’ll spend a lot of time in cabs, both because they’re so cheap and the city is so big. Many of the major streets have dedicated lanes for taxis and buses which makes it faster to get around in a cab too. Which reminds me… I’ve missed flagging down cabs. It’s now as fun as what calling an Uber and magically having it arrive at your home used to be. If getting an Uber to show up right at your home felt like the epitome of luxury, whistling for a cab now feels like the epitome of cool.
I can’t shake the feeling that people in Buenos Aires really like to drive. Car culture reigns supreme. There’s a car club, a car museum, many car dealerships, and even the public buses are the kinds of things I’d want to buy a model of for my office. Their design blends Art Deco futurism with the lively and colorful Fileteado Porteño art style that was born in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century.
The people in Buenos Aires drive like they love to drive. None of my taxi drivers ever seemed stressed or anxious or anything of the sort. People honk, but in friendly ways. Beep-beep is a way of talking, not screaming.
There’s a romance about the way locals drive. Come to think of it, their driving style reminds me of the way Argentinians play soccer, and especially, the ready-for-a-fight passion they brought to their semifinal game against Holland in the 2022 World Cup, and the elegance of Diego Maradona’s iconic “Goal of the Century” against England in the ‘86 quarterfinal when he weaved between defenders, juking them left and right, as if the ball was tethered to his foot, with levels of grace that’d historically been reserved for the tango dance floor.
You don’t see many stop signs on the streets either. In America, when people get to an intersection, they stop. In Buenos Aires, drivers don’t stop much at all. Instead they slow down, eye the other drivers’ progress, and when in doubt, give the right of way to the driver on the right. It’s negotiation-by-momentum. This only works because most streets are one-way and I’m shocked there aren’t more T-bone collisions.
Strangely, none of my cab drivers spoke English but just about all of them drove to the sound of American musicians like Bruno Mars and Sinatra. Or maybe they just changed the radio station when this Texas-based gringo got in the car. Who knows?
I like Buenos Aires. I really do — more than any other city I’ve been to in Latin or South America, in fact.
And it’s especially attractive in December, before the high season, when people are freezing their giblets off in the northern hemisphere. Buenos Aires is the meeting point between French facades, Italian food, and Latin passion. I just wish it didn’t try so hard to be something it’s not.
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P.S This piece was written with help of LLMs like Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT. There’s no way they could’ve written this piece for me, but they did write it with me, and I recommend the video below if you’re curious about how AI is changing writing.
The post Buenos Aires: The Paris of South America? appeared first on David Perell.
2025-02-01 07:01:58
There’s a famous saying in golf: “Drive for show, putt for dough.”
You’ll hear it at every course and every tournament. It’s the closest thing we have to gospel in the world of golf. It means that even though hitting long drives is sexy, the lowest scores are shot by the best putters. The saying makes intuitive sense. Golf is a game of getting the ball in the hole, so the best golfers are the ones who are the best at doing that. There’s only one problem with this phrase: it’s wrong.
You can predict rapid progress in places where computers can see what’s happening. For all of the 20th century, there was virtually no data on the factors that led to golfing success. People had opinions, but nobody did data-driven analysis. That changed in 2004 when the PGA Tour started tracking every shot, all 1.5 million of them per season. Today, the system stores more than 174 attributes from over 20 million shots.
Armed with the data, statisticians including Columbia professor Mark Broadie dispelled myths about good golf. First, Broadie found that traditional statistics, like greens in regulation and putts per round, were misleading. Then he discovered that players focused too much on shots from under 100 yards. Ball-striking, especially off the tee and on shots from 150-225 yards, are the most important factors in the quest to shoot low scores. Thanks to this work, we can measure a player’s performance against the rest of the field and get a granular analysis of every aspect of a player’s game.
After studying Mark Broadie’s ideas, Bryson DeChambeau knew that the conventional wisdom, “drive for show, putt for dough,” was wrong. Known as “The Mad Scientist of Golf,” he’s spent the last ten years questioning conventional assumptions about how golf is played. He started with a controversial 1969 book called The Golfing Machine which describes 144 ways to swing a golf club and inspired him to adopt a single-plane swing.
Even though Broadie found that mid-irons have the biggest influence on scoring outcomes, Bryson focused on other aspects of his game because he’s always been an exceptional iron player. Bryson determined that if he wanted to be #1 in the world, he needed to drive the ball farther—challenging the popular belief that accuracy was more important than distance.
To hit the ball farther, Bryson changed his diet and his golf swing. Every morning, he eats six eggs, six pieces of bacon, and three pieces of French toast, then washes all that down with two protein shakes. With a new routine in place, he committed to daily workouts and swinging as hard as possible. On top of that, to improve his technique, he studied the world’s long drive champions. This is interesting because these guys are considered specialized golfers who are trained to drive the ball far but not score well. Adopting their form was akin to a marathon runner studying sprinters, but Bryson did it anyway.
Now, he’s 40 pounds heavier and the longest driver on tour. In 2019, he ranked 24th and 34th in strokes-gained off-the-tee and driving distance respectively. One year later, he’s first in both categories. This is unheard of.
In 2020, Bryson averaged 323.8 yards off the tee, which is the highest in PGA Tour history. In tee shots on par-4 and par-5 holes, Bryson averaged 18.6 yards longer than the average PGA Tour player, while remaining at the tour average in fairways hit per round. By Broadie’s strokes-gained measurement, he climbed from 55th on Tour during the 2015-2016 season to 2nd by the 2019-2020 season.
Seeing the errors in how people intuitively think about the golf swing made Bryson question how other parts of the game were played. Having majored in physics at college, he operates like a scientist. He subscribes to Charles Dickens’ famous line from Great Expectations: “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
Where other golfers guess why they’re struggling at the driving range, Bryson brings two military-grade launch monitors so he can quantify his swing path to the tenth-of-a-degree. Where other golfers use standard grips, Bryson uses the world’s largest commercially available grips so he can reduce wrist cock in his swing and hold the club with his palms instead of his fingertips. Where other golfers have a half-inch length difference between every iron, all of Bryson’s are cut to 37.5 inches, the length of a standard 8-iron. Where other golfers change their putting technique based on how they feel that day, Bryson’s implemented a system called vector putting: he uses math to compute the break and determine how the ball will roll along the grass. Where other golfers hit 7-10 degree drivers, Bryson copied the world long-drive champion and put a 5.5 degree driver in the bag. Where other golfers use a 45-inch driver, Bryson’s experimenting with a 48-inch one.
Bryson showed that a determined contrarian, armed with the right data and a definitive plan, can upend conventional wisdom and prove that there’s a better way to do something.
I also explain these ideas in a video on my YouTube channel.
Trusting empirical data over intuition was one of the defining ideas of the Enlightenment. Through paradigm shifts like the Copernican Revolution, which found that humans weren’t the center of the universe, people began trusting instruments over their senses. That isn’t to say that science is always correct, but ever since the Enlightenment, it’s been obviously foolish to ignore it. Yet, that’s exactly what golfers did—for decades.
Old school players have criticized Bryson for his scientific approach. The golf announcer Brandel Chamblee says the way Bryson focuses on the geometry and physics of the swing robs him of his natural talent. He criticizes today’s young golfers for training too much and being overly technical. There’s some wisdom in his critique, but the explosion in information propelled by cutting-edge technology is making golfers indisputably better.
Golf isn’t the only industry with obvious edges that people are slow to exploit. There are market inefficiencies in many sports. In baseball, Billy Beane famously proved that scouting techniques were outdated and flawed. Then, he found a way to systematically identify under-valued players and strategies. He noticed that talent scouts favored athletic-looking players, but the visibly muscular players weren’t always the best ones. He also instituted defensive shifts and focused on players’ on base percentages instead of batting averages. In basketball, players improve by watching slow-motion videos. Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum was seven-years-old when YouTube was invented, so he grew up studying Kobe Bryant. He didn’t just watch the highlights. He studied Kobe’s footwork, the deception in his shot fake, and the rhythm of his jab steps.
In both of these cases, athletes recalibrated their intuitions based on what the technology showed them, and Bryson follows in their footsteps.
At the same time, a respect for science doesn’t mean intuition goes out the window. In fact, an analytical approach can make your intuition stronger. For example, computers have improved the quality of tournament chess because players have learned how to think more like intelligent machines. Computers don’t just make fewer mistakes; they play with a different style because they see the board differently than humans. As Tyler Cowen wrote: “Younger players, who grew up playing chess with computers, are especially good at this. For older players, it is a good way to learn how unreliable your intuitions can be.” Like aspects of Bryson’s swing, some of the computer’s most effective chess moves are ugly to the human eye because they violate our intuition for what a good chess move looks like. But if you spend enough time watching the computer move, you can incorporate those tactics into your intuitive game and become a stronger player. Intuition isn’t as static as we think. With the right tools, it can improve over time.
I’ve learned this through my personal golfing experience, too: an analytical practice routine sharpened my intuition on the course. When my golf game began to struggle during my junior year of high school, I started working with one of the top golf coaches in the country, Terry Rowles. Using the same cutting-edge technologies as Bryson, we practiced as much with computers as the naked eye. By placing small sensors on my chest, we compared the movements of my body against PGA Tour averages and trained my intuition finding the optimal swing position.
During my senior year of high school, I wrote a 60-page technical manual on the physics of ball flight and the biomechanics of the golf swing. My elevated approach to practice improved my on-course performance because quantitative measurements informed my intuitions about how to improve. Meanwhile, I saw how often TV announcers with a traditional mindset were wrong in their analysis. What they saw with their eyes contradicted what I measured with my instruments. By the end of high school, I was armed with technical knowledge and good enough to be recruited by a Division 1 college.
You don’t reach a state of mastery when you know everything. You reach it when you’ve absorbed the knowledge so deeply that it becomes a part of you.
All artists study the techniques of others until they become a part of their identity. Hunter S. Thompson once re-wrote all of the Great Gatsby so he could feel what it was like to write a great novel. Robert Louis Stevenson used to copy paragraphs by his favorite writers from memory so he could internalize their wisdom. Likewise, Bryson copies the motion of his favorite players and incorporates their movements into his swing until they become natural. For example, he incorporated Jordan Speith’s chicken wing swing motion into his own swing to reduce arm rotation and stop himself from hitting shots left of the target. Today, his new swing aligns scientific optimization with the intuitive movements of his body.
In praise of the golfer Moe Norman, Bryson once said: “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. He found his baseline, then let himself be an artist, not a machine. That’s the ultimate triumph in golf.”
The night before his first major championship victory, Bryson was disappointed with the performance of his driver. Instead of going home after the round, he went to the driving range, where he was the only player hitting balls under the lights. He problem-solved with his technical launch-monitor and his technically minded coach, but his breakthrough came when he took a swing and said: “Oh, that feels right.” Instead of waiting for mathematical perfection, he called it a night once he found the proper feeling for his swing. 24 hours later, he was a US Open winner. By practicing like a scientist, he can play like an artist.
Cover photo by Peter Drew on Unsplash
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2023-12-29 02:02:15
I went from thinking the Bible was the most boring book ever to seeing the magic in it.
Years ago, I realized that the Bible is the foundational book of Western civilization. If I was going to be an educated person, I needed to know what it said. Though I was motivated to learn about it, I didn’t have the patience to read it or the knowledge to understand it.
Generally, I try to follow my 4th-grade English teacher’s advice to read things first-hand. But the Bible seemed too hard, too boring, and too confusing to read on my own. It was a snooze fest. The stories felt outdated in a world of smartphones and fast Internet. Living in the modern world, shouldn’t I be rooting my life in modern books, modern studies, and modern authors?
At the time, I was living in New York when a friend introduced me to the work of Tim Keller. I reluctantly found time to put down the self-help and picked up two of his books instead: The Reason for God and Making Sense of God. It was around that time when I discovered Keller’s Questioning Christianity lecture series.
Instead of focusing on the Bible directly, Keller focused on Christianity’s relationship with culture and the modern world. He spoke to career-driven Gordon Gekkos who were driven by the glories of the material world, but sensed the emptiness at the heart of such a single-minded pursuit. Instead of referencing scripture directly, he spoke about big-picture themes like identity and purpose, morality and meaning.
This was back when I thought all Christians had the intelligence of sidewalk pigeons. I would scoff at church-goers because I didn’t understand why anyone would worship a sky fairy or follow rules from thousands of years ago. Keller was the guide I needed.
For the first few years, I looked at faith through a cultural lens instead of reading the Bible directly. I literally knew nothing about Jesus or Christianity — and I came to realize how little I knew about my own atheism too. In school, while studying the Declaration of Independence, I’d learned that it’s “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.” Turns out, this defining American ideal is only self-evident if you assume that every person has inherent worth because they’re made in the image of God. I was stumped. Where did my moral compass come from? Do people have inherent value? And if so, is it because every human is a child of God?
In addition to advocating for the life of Jesus and the truth of his message, Keller revealed the many assumptions underlying my own atheistic worldview. He taught me that every worldview requires a leap of faith. Sure, Christianity couldn’t perfectly explain everything in the universe, but then again, neither can any worldview. Astrophysicists say that much of the universe is made up of “dark matter,” which is a scientific-sounding way to talk about a leap of faith
Though I did some Bible studies, I never enjoyed them. They felt more like reading tedious academic papers than drinking directly from the fountain of God’s wisdom. Instead of reading Scripture directly, I joined a small Christian reading group where I was the only non-believer. By showing me coherent ways to interpret reality besides my science-based materialism, books like The Story of Reality and I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist loosened the screws on my atheism.
My palate was beginning to change. Like a fine wine, the same flavors that were once repulsive to me started to appeal to my intellectual taste buds. I surrounded myself with wise Christians who were orthodox about scripture and eager to answer my hardest questions about faith. I asked them to dinner and invited myself to Church with them.
This marked a new era. Once again, I found some guides: books, Internet sources, and an in-person leader to show me the way. On the Internet, I’d turn to The Bible Project to answer my big-picture thematic questions. I picked up the ESV Study Bible, which I still read every day on the white boucle couch in my living room (if you like reading on the computer, I recommend The Bible Study App by Olive Tree).
For years, I’d stiff-armed the Bible. Now, I was skipping to a 7am Bible Study led by a devout believer who’d been reading God’s word every day for almost a quarter-century, and wasn’t afraid to rebuke my theology.
What surprised me most was how carefully we read. I admired the integrity of our study. We live in a culture of binge-reading where people boast about how many books they can complete in a given year. We did the opposite. We never read more than ~20 verses in a single session and dissected every word, every verse, and every story. (I once spent two hours studying John 1:1-4 — just four verses — at a strip-mall Schlotzsky’s in the Texas Hill Country.)
Never in my life had I read so deliberately. I spent months in the books of Ephesians, Romans, John, and 2 Corinthians, and there’s no way I would’ve known how to read the Bible so diligently on my own. I learned to look beyond English translations, and I use the BibleHub to look up the original Greek and Hebrew whenever possible.
For a translation, I recommend the English Standard Version (ESV) (no, you don’t need to read the King James Version). And If you’re going to pick two books, I recommend the Gospel of John and the Book of Romans. Either find a guide to read them carefully with you or follow along with The Bible Project and The ESV Study Bible. Whatever you do, read slowly.
I used to be a serial consumer who’d brag about how many books I read every year. I’d pick up anything and everything. The more, the merry. But the more I study the Bible, the more careful I’ve become about who I read and listen to. Gone are my days as a serial consumer. Frauds, charlatans, and false teachers abound, so be skeptical and vet your sources. In all this time, I’ve had no more than ten serious teachers. Fortunately, that’s all you need.
I became a believer on March 20th of this year, four years after attending my first Tim Keller lecture, and the Bible is alive for me now like no book I’ve ever read.
These days, I read the Bible and basically nothing else.
Opening it up is the best part of my daily routine. The words twinkle. The stories are supernatural. It’s a living, breathing document, and I wholeheartedly believe it’s the Word of God, which makes every other book feel dim by comparison.
Cover photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash
The post How I’ve Studied the Bible appeared first on David Perell.
2023-06-24 04:08:54
At times, I’ve taken on too many responsibilities, only to pay the price later with poor follow-through — which is ultimately more painful than saying “no” at the outset.
My poor follow-through is downstream of my ambition and my desire to people-please, both of which seem noble but can lead to consequences. When it comes to ambition, I’m like a starving guy at a buffet. Not only am I unable to eat everything on my plate, but I get sick from trying. My desire to people-please is why I say “yes” to opportunities as they arise, but I disappoint people later when I’m late on a project or have to cancel at the last minute.
To combat this, I’ve adopted a principle called “Own It Mentality.”
My goal is simple: Be a man of my word. Do what I say I’m going to do, when I say I’m going to do it. That means showing up on schedule, communicating clearly, and getting things done on time.
Being reliable is table stakes. My friend Chris, who used to run giant concerts, tells me that the most successful bands are also the most operationally buttoned-up. They run on schedule, communicate clearly, and pay invoices on time.
I want to do the same. Practically, the best change I’ve made to my own working habits is scheduling time to respond to messages every day (inbox zero, Slack zero, Twitter DM zero, text message zero).1 I used to wait a long time to respond to important messages because “it’s good to think about things,” only to never reply because so much time had passed that my message now had to begin with an apology, which made things even more ominous — until the whole situation turned into a monster that I was too terrified to confront. The solution is to respond fast because the faster you respond, the less energy it takes to do so.2
Scheduling time every day keeps me focused on my work when I need to because I know that I have response times built into my schedule.
Many Silicon Valley investors say that fast response times for important messages correlate highly with a founder’s long-term success.
Good executives are information-routers. Much of their job is making introductions, giving feedback, and setting the tempo for the organization — all of which demand fast response times. They need an Own It Mentality because they are ultimately responsible for following up and following through on the organization’s commitments.
Own It Mentality doesn’t just apply to executives. It’s important for all members of a team. David Ogilvy says, “In the best companies, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime.”
One core difference between low- and high-performing companies is that one wishes while the other promises. At high-performing companies, diligent follow-through is the norm. People do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it. Meanwhile, low-performing organizations are ruled by excuses. Tasks slip through the cracks. Timelines are outright ignored.
High-performing companies are the opposite. They do the simple things right. Commitments are kept, repeatedly. When deliverables are late, people communicate. When things go wrong, the blame is owned, not deflected.
I expect an Own It Mentality from myself and from everyone I work with.
Own It Mentality means confronting conflict as soon as it arises. By not saying what needs to be said, you trade short-term comfort for long-term pain, and the longer you wait to deal with an issue, the worse it usually becomes. Avoiding conflict means borrowing time and energy from your future-self (and the interest rates are high).
For example, people avoid conflict by saying “yes” to everything and taking on too much work. Saying “yes” feels good in the moment because the expectation of achievement comes with an instant dopamine rush. All the pain of saying “no” is postponed.
One way I reduce conflict is by setting clear expectations and outlining a person’s scope of responsibilities before I start working with them. Such clarity is a way of immediately addressing conflict.
Everybody benefits from clear expectations and a high standard of excellence. Own It Mentality means that once somebody says they’re going to do something, I don’t have to worry about their ability to get it done. That, then, gives them freedom in their work. I give people lots of autonomy. I don’t micromanage. In return, I expect people to take initiative, be proactive, communicate well, and follow through on their commitments. So long as they have an Own It Mentality, I don’t care how much somebody works, when they work, or where they work from.
Expecting an Own It Mentality doesn’t mean that you expect perfection. Life gets in the way sometimes. People get sick. Accidents happen. Projects take longer than expected. That’s fine. But when things don’t go according to plan, you have to communicate — and if people are chasing you down for information, you’re probably not communicating enough. Own It Mentality also means that you own the fact that you aren’t able to “Own It” right now.
Do you follow through on your commitments? Is your word a wish or a promise?
Thanks to Brent Beshore, Jeremy Giffon, Will Mannon, and Chris Monk for conversations that led to this article. It was informed by Brent’s idea of “Extreme Reliability.”
Cover photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash
The post Own It Mentality appeared first on David Perell.
2023-04-19 21:54:31
There are two kinds of intuition: a secular intuition and a God-inspired one.
Under a secular mindset, intuition comes from a vague sense of feeling what moves and excites you. It’s all about you — your wants, needs, passions, and desires. As society trends towards a secular mindset, it forfeits the divinity around us.
A heavenly, God-inspired intuition is different.1 Self-gain is replaced by self-sacrifice, in service of a higher purpose. It’s a divinity-led adventure, not a solo endeavor — where you surrender to the wishes of a higher power instead of relentlessly going after your self-driven desires. Worshippers come to understand God’s wishes by reading Scripture. Through prayer, we come to ask Him questions.
I’m referring to a Judeo-Christian God here.
The deeper your relationship is with God, the more He works through you and steers your intuition.
And so, intuition becomes a union between man and the divine. It stops being about what you want and more about how you can uniquely serve God.
(Also… If you’re interested in faith, you’ll like my pieces on the Bible and Christianity’s influence on Western civilization.)
Cover photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
The post A Divine Intuition appeared first on David Perell.
2023-04-19 04:32:44
We’ve lost touch with the ultimate purpose of education: to transform our being and improve our character.
A century ago, the purpose of education was so widely accepted that it wouldn’t have been worth mentioning. But today, it’s controversial.
In the 1970s, three-quarters of freshmen said college was essential to developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Only one-third said it was essential to financial well-being. Today, those fractions have flipped.
Runaway student debt and high tuition costs may be to blame. Regardless, American universities have been reduced to farm teams for the corporate big leagues. They assume that you have to accumulate wealth before you can cultivate goodness — as if you can only focus on bettering yourself once you’re financially secure.
Take Harvard. Like many of the Ivy Leagues, it was founded to produce students of exceptional moral character. But today, it’s been reduced to an institution designed to help students fatten their wallets and climb the power ladder.
One reason why people belittle the liberal arts is that we lack a consensus for what a virtuous life looks like (no surprise that the decline of the liberal arts traces the decline of religion). Without a shared moral code, even the world’s top universities are lowering their sights to mere utilitarian endeavors, like making money or building a professional network — all of which are necessary pursuits, but only a means to the higher ends of wisdom and virtue.
The liberal arts are the ends, not the means.
They’re a capsule for the human spirit. Through art, we express our humanity. Through history, we solidify our civilization. Through spiritual practice, we generate meaning.
The treasures of the liberal arts lie not in financial riches, but rather in the wealth that comes with depth and wisdom — the stuff of a life well-lived. That we belittle such a worthy endeavor as a “useless major” and a “colossal waste of time” should make us wonder what’s gone wrong.
Cover photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash
The post Where the Liberal Arts Went Wrong appeared first on David Perell.
