British Open 2025: Scottie Scheffler’s real secret? A six-step playbook for success

Scottie Scheffler was a good player when he first turned pro. That's putting it too lightly: He was very good.

Yet Scheffler wasn't exuding the best-golfer-since-Tiger-Woods aura that he does now.

Scheffler started his pro career dotting around the mini-tours and failing to get through most of the Monday qualifiers he entered. He spent the next year on the Korn Ferry Tour, then graduated to the PGA Tour with a two-win season, where it took him another two seasons to figure out how to win there. He finally did in his third season, and he never really stopped. On Sunday, Scheffler secured his 14th victory and third major in less than three seasons.

Without any obvious or outward transformations, Scheffler flipped the switch from being a very good player to an indisputably great one.

Because my brain is for some reason hard-wired to never stop thinking about golf at any given point, I was thinking about Scheffler's rise recently when I finally got around to reading a book on my to-do list: Jim Collins' bestselling book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't.

Golfers often think about themselves as CEOs of their own companies—because in a literal sense, many are. Their game is their business. They're responsible for managing it, and employing people around them to help them do it.

Collins' book spent more than five years and a team of researchers selecting a group of companies that transformed themselves from solid performers to the most high-powered ones, outperforming stock market returns by multiples and sustaining that success for at least 15 years.

Collins and his team identified several different traits of these super-achievers—and you don't have to squint too hard to see the same traits in Scheffler.

1. A plow horse, not show horse, mentality

The first trait of these companies is what Collins defines as level 5 leadership: "Extreme personal humility with intense professional will," and leaders who are maniacally driven by "ambition first and foremost for the company and concern for its success rather than for one's own riches and personal renown."

This one has Scheffler written all over it. Jordan Spieth spoke about it after his round on Sunday. Scheffler himself spoke so eloquently about it at the start of the week:

"I'm kind of a sicko; I love putting in the work. I love getting to practice...I love being able to compete," he said. "I love living out my dreams. I love being a father. I love being able to take care of my son. I love being able to provide for my family out here playing golf. It's one of the greatest joys of my life, but does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart? Absolutely not."

Scheffler is a throwback to another era. He's not a YouTuber. He's not on social media. He's not interested in the showbiz side of the sport and probably leaves money on the table because of it. He's a dad, and a man deeply obsessed with the process of getting better at golf, and winning. Even though he's not entirely sure why.

2. Get the right people on the bus

The book found that excellent companies put a huge emphasis on putting the right management team in powerful positions. Delaying hiring decisions until you find the right person to avoid the difficult task of undoing hiring mistakes, sticking with the right people, and being rigorous in making the difficult decisions of moving away from the wrong ones.

The book writes:

"If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. The right people don't need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great."

Scheffler's team is a case study of loyalty and excellence.

Randy Smith is one of the best coaches of his generation and has been Scheffler's coach since childhood.

His caddie, Ted Scott, is regarded as among the very best to ever do it, helping his players to a combined four Masters wins.

Scheffler's longtime agent, Blake Smith, is also a longtime friend. And when Scheffler spoke of the delicate decision to bring on a putting-specific coach onto his team, he hired Phil Kenyon—regarded as the best putting coach on the planet.

The right people were on the bus, and Scheffler knows it. As he said, trophy in hand:

"To my parents and the rest of the team: I can't thank you guys enough. I feel like I have the best support team I could possibly have. Everybody does such a good job of working together, everybody is so humble, and they do such a good job. Thank you very much...my whole team, I wish their names could be on the trophy with me because it takes a village. It really does."

3. Establish your three principles

The book highlights a concept called the "hedgehog concept." Establishing three central principles of your business and guarding them fiercely.

"The good-to-great companies attained a very simple concept that they used as a frame of reference for all their decisions, and this understanding coincided with breakthrough results," it says.

Those principles, and how they relate to Scottie:

"What you can be the best in the world at?"

For Scheffler, it's his ball-striking. He's ranked first in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green for three seasons—and nobody else is particularly close.

"If you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company," the book says.

"What drives your economic engine?"

A little business-speak here, but the book says companies that sustained excellence established one central metric in their business that ruled all. For Scheffler, it's been a fierce focus on clubface control during his golf swing above all else. The reason his feet slide around as he swings is because he and his coach, Randy Smith, simply don't consider it an issue. If it didn't help or hurt him in controlling the clubface, it wasn't a problem that needed to be fixed.

As Randy himself writes:

"His whole game is based on knowing where the clubface is. The only things we've ever done with his swing have been what was needed to keep that feeling of clubface awareness in place—not 'fix' things that other people think look less than traditional."

"What are you deeply passionate about?"

Scottie spoke to that in the response above, and again in his winner's press conference afterwards. His faith; the process of competing; accomplishing his lifelong dreams; providing for his family.

"I'm so grateful I get to live out my lifelong dreams, it's such a special feeling that's hard to describe," Scheffler says. "But my faith and my family are what's most important to me."

4. Be discplined in service of your principles

A key trait of these high-performing companies is a strong sense of discipline. Not discipline in the punitive sense, but in the sense of remaining focused on the principles above and not deviating. It means being disciplined about doing the things that help you accomplish your goals, and waste energy elsehwere. It's a skill that Justin Thomas said earlier this year he admires in Scottie.

"I think it's a serious, serious, serious skill to continue to work on the things that you do really well and not do them differently. For me, I have my fundamentals and things that I do and checkpoints, and I'm sticking to them."

Perhaps the best example of this in Scottie's game is the way he inspects his grip before every shot he hits on the range. It's a tedious task—most amateur golfers go years without thinking about their grip, let alone checking it. Yet the best player on the planet does it every time, because he knows it helps his game.

5. Use technology as a tool, not a dependency

One interesting, counterintuitive finding from the book was that "technology itself is never a primary, root cause of either greatness or decline." The good-to-great companies embraced technology as a way of furthering their principles, but don't lean on it to provide entirely new ones.

Sounds like Scottie to me!

"I use TrackMan every day, but I try not to be overly-reliant on it," he said in Golf Digest's episode of The Grid. "If the distance [of my irons] is where I think it should be, I don't look at anything else. If it isn't, I look at the spin. If I see the spin isn't matched up to how I hit it, it might be because the ball is a little wet or something. If it's not that, then it's something else."

It's a strategic use of technology to help him do the thing he does best: Hit the ball better. But he doesn't delve desperately for answers, hoping a breakthrough lies within.

6. There are no erueka moments; only upgrades

The final marker of a company that made the leap from good-to-great was the antithesis of every get rich quick notion: That it was a steady diet of small, consistent upgrades. No eureka moments, or lottery ticket wins. Just a critical mass of doing the right things, for long enough. Scheffler didn't find one thing that turned him into the World No. 1 player that he is today. He was just singularly focused on improving—a process that continues even still.

"When the season ends I'll go home with my team and look at my game; look at what I'm doing well, look at ways I can get better. I'm always trying to improve," he said with the Claret Jug next to him.

Whether you're trying to learn from Scheffler's accomplishments, or simply understand them, there are lessons sprinkled throughout. Sustained success in golf or in life doesn't happen by mistake. Scheffler is living proof.