World Builders' Guild Newsletter

World-changers always seem crazy at first

A traditional set of golf clubs varies in shaft length. Clubs that shoot farther are longer. Shorter clubs are for shorter distances. Everybody on the PGA tour uses clubs like these.

Everybody except for Bryson DeChambeau.

Five years ago DeChambeau made his name as a rising amateur with a strange setup: all his clubs were the same length. His swing was weird. He didn't play the game "right" according to the critics. He went pro too early. Nobody with his weird mechanics should make it on tour, let alone win anything significant. The only thing "normal" about him was his everyman golf attire and Payne Stewart/Ben Hogan tribute hat style.

Ask the 120th US Open Champion, Bryson DeChambeau, what he thinks about those critics.

He'll probably tell you they never mattered. He was too busy being himself and working on his game to care about the way things used to be.

World-Changers Make Everybody Uncomfortable

Dick Fosbury blew up the track and field world in the 60s when he unleashed his daredevil high jump technique the "Fosbury Flop". It was looked as reckless, dangerous, and in poor form. Jumping over a bar headfirst was a shortcut to injury. It made the sport look "ridiculous."

Definitely crazy. (Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash)

NBA players like former Rockets power forward Chinau Onuwaku rekindled antiquated techniques like the underhanded free-throw to great success. Crowds laughed. Coaches fumed. Their shooting percentages flew up despite the pushback. Old world success smashed its way back into fashion.

The same is true of all world-changers, famous or not: Nikola Tesla, Martin Luther King Jr., Pierre and Marie Curie. They did it their way because they had to. Because the existing rules didn't make sense for the worlds they were trying to build. They pissed people off. They made them brutally uncomfortable.

They They Re-Establish the Limits

If you've watched the high jump at all in the past 50 years, you won't see anything but the Fosbury Flop in action. There are literally no other ways to compete in the event. If you're not flopping, you're not high jumping.

The reason you're reading this newsletter on a small computer you pulled out of your pocket is because Steve Jobs broke the boundaries of the world we used to know and redrew them to accommodate his company's success (and, by proxy, our species').

Asked if he's changing the game with his unorthodox style DeChambeau replied, "I feel like I'm inspiring people to try new things and do anything they think they can do." He may set the record for longest drive, lowest round score, and highest putting percentage. He wants to live to 130 years old.

He's got me thinking about trading in my clubs for a single-length set.

Expect the World-Changers.

Sharpening the Toolkit

• Wired published a great look at a puzzling cheating scandal that made headlines in the professional poker and streaming worlds.
• The NFL is using NFL Films' archives to source stadium and situation-accurate crowd noises for empty-stadium television broadcasts.
• The master World-Builders at Capcom are at it again as they unveil new details about the next entry in the acclaimed Monster Hunter video game series.

To future worlds,

Matt Ventre

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