If you frequent my part of Twitter, especially in the past month, you might’ve seen the tweets of Sherry, better known as @SchrodingrsBrat, who talks about psychology and human nature. She also writes a Substack called
.Her Twitter growth has been been wild to watch. I followed her when she had around two thousand followers. She now has 60,827 followers as of my writing this. Guess how many of those followers were gained in the past month? 60,827!
Just look at this Social Blade chart. She gained 44k followers, over fourteen times my cumulative follower count, in a single day:
While there are many factors involved in Twitter growth, such as what happens “backstage” in the DMs, I think it’s fair to say that Sherry’s public tweets themselves are very effective. I spent some time the past week reading them and trying to understand what she does well, and I gained a lot from that exercise.
Here’s what I learned:
Poetic Language
People are hungry for interesting ideas communicated in well-crafted language. Many people don’t optimize for either, or think about one axis but not the other. So when you come across someone who’s aware of both axes, such as Sherry, then they instantly stand out.
As an example, here’s one of my median tweets:
Don’t get me wrong, some of my tweets have genuine content, but a large number of them are incredibly sloppy. I have spent at most two minutes constructing a tweet. I have rarely considered phrasing my tweets in a way that makes them sound poetic. Cogent yes, but beautiful? Never.
Let’s take a look at Sherry’s tweet about being like water. It reads like she put time and effort into writing these sentences: each sentence is a metaphor that flows well into the next one, culminating with the final takeaway to the reader that they can be both gentle and powerful.
Here’s the thing: each tweet of hers is just as well-constructed. That’s one of the first things I notice about her tweets, and it’s a unique view I have of her tweets compared to that of other people’s.
Presentation is important. It’s not enough to have a good idea. You have to package it well. As Sherry puts it:
Evocative Imagery
If an image is worth a thousand words, good imagery is worth three hundred. A well-crafted image that helps you illustrate an argument? At least a thousand. I think Sherry is really skilled at curating the right imagery.
Lets take Sherry’s most popular tweet (thus far). She uses a single metaphor with fresh, strong imagery to make a point about our worries about the future can actually be holding us back:
This is an incredibly striking image that grabs my attention because it’s shocking and unintuitive. It’s one of those facts that I could tell my friends about because of how implausible it sounds, like how chickens can run with their heads cut off. Can you believe that people have died in the desert from worrying about the future, even if they have literal water bottles nearby? What a captivating premise, one that I can imagine TV reporters immediately swooping on.
Distilling Ideas into Single Tweets
Here’s your SAT word for the day: aphorism. Per Wikipedia, it means “a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle.” Sherry dabbles in the concise and the memorable. Take this popular tweets of hers, which is the embodiment of the word “aphorism”:
Or look at this reframing of “the early bird gets the worm”:
Or this career advice:
I have a lot to learn from Sherry’s ability to give her own takes on common advice. One thing I’m struck by is how much of her writing tightly captures the rewards of taking certain actions: if you do good work, the journey will “naturally” be filled with good people, and if you have the discipline to regularly wake up early, “there’s a true inner sense of polished power”.
She makes the process sound simple and easy. Even I’m tempted to wake up early and develop a true inner sense of polished power, and this is coming from a girl who procrastinates sleeping every night by reading comics.
Leverage Pre-existing Material
How do you get people to connect with your work? Use material that people already appreciate to make your point. I’ve sometimes been told that pop culture commentary is a great way to get engagement, but I never understood how it could seem natural until I saw some of Sherry’s tweets. Let’s take the following:
Note that Sherry didn’t even use any of the characters’ names. People reacted well to this tweet because they recognized The Menu or Hannibal, and resonated with Sherry’s simple framing.
This tweet was followed up by a quote from Solzhenitsyn:
One of my takeaways here is that leveraging pop culture and “sophisticated” writing to help illustrate points doesn’t have to be this 5-D chess game. You don’t have to write lengthy analytical essays to make a point, not when a picture is worth 1000 words and a quote is worth 500. I feel more empowered to loosen up and write about the pop culture I give a shit about. Nothing is off the table here, be it Mean Girls or Joe Rogan.
Closing Thoughts
A few days ago, Sherry wrote this blog post about escaping competition through authenticity. Here’s a snippet:
But when I’m asked about how I do it—how I write, how I grow my following, etc.—what I think people are truly asking is, “how do you do this so effortlessly?”
And my secret is that there really are no secrets—of course it’s easy for me to be Sherry, I am me. Of course what I do looks effortless, because this is what I naturally do. This is who I am. I do not try, I never have, and I never will.
Only create from a place of truth and selfhood. You are impossible to impersonate because no one can outcompete you on being you. You have one life, don’t spend it copying someone else.
For me, being the best version of myself means learning from those who are clearly doing something right without shaping myself into a copy of them. Sherry’s authenticity is different from mine. For one thing, I’m not going to stop posting random tweets about my newest obsessions:
I also have a different vetting threshold for sharing factoids. Maybe I haven’t searched hard enough, but I can’t find any sources backing up the tweet about people often dying next to full bottles of water. The closest I’ve found is an article about a man who died of thirst, without knowing he was 100 yards from water and a Quora comment about people having been found dehydrated to death next to partially full bottles of water, without any reference sources. In Sherry’s defense, she did not present her story as anything more than hearsay.
Overall, I’ve learned a lot from Sherry’s tweets. I feel pretty inspired to explore some of the tactics that excite me — incorporating more of the writers I like, riffing on common advice, and exploring takes on pop culture — in an attempt to find my own niche. I’m pretty excited to loosen up, try and fail at a bunch of new things, and hopefully find more readers I vibe with in the process.
What will you try to explore?
Thank you to Sherry for the permission to write a piece distilling what she does well. A big thank you goes to Alex for helping me edit this essay, and
for initially exploring some of these ideas with me.Speaking of growth, I am hitting a subscriber milestone soon. Would be delighted if you subscribed if you haven’t done so already.
Interesting overview Valerie! There are also other conditions we do not know about, like her initial circle of connections. If they were friends, had thousands of followers, and were avid retweeters, then her growth could be explained that way too.
I think the reference to pop culture is great and something I want to use. I also want to write more in the POP (Personal Observational Playful) style that David Perell recommends. It's very hard to develop ideas that fit into this framework, but I think it's a good exercise.
Very cool analysis Val! Sherry is explodinggg, I remember when she is <1k when I followed her 🙈