This post is about Michael Jordan's output when he returned from his first retirement, after he went to baseball for 18 months. It compares his output from just before his retirement, when he won his last championship with the Chicago Bulls against the Phoenix Suns.

The whole concept here is that the quote is words from a book that were quoted in The Last Dance, where Michael says, why would I be worried about missed shots that I haven't taken? And so the idea is that he came back and he'd lacked the conditioning, because his body was now conditioned to baseball, and he hadn't had the conditioning or the training. The team had changed, and yet his performance had dropped. But that didn't stop him from taking roughly a similar amount of shots. And whilst his performance had dropped, he wasn't scared of failing. In fact, it was the fact that he had this deep desire to win. And in order to win, you've got to go through the repetitions of failure to improve.

And then, after they got knocked out by the Orlando Magic, he said to Tim Grover, "I'll see you tomorrow," and starts working out whilst he's filming Space Jam. Warner Brothers set up the Jordan Dome, and so he's got a weight room, he's got a full gym, and he's got a basketball court, and he's just got pickup games going on and on over the break period, and he's just working. And it's this mentality of just putting in the work and not worrying about will that shot go in or not. It's about knowing that when you do the work, you have to trust the process. Without the work, you're not going to get the outcome.

So when I think about this with content, and specifically business development and outreach, I think about it from the fact that people complain about the algorithm. People complain about not getting leads. People complain about how social is changing. People complain about AI changing things, and AI slop, and all of this sort of change. But if you think about it, the world that Michael Jordan came back into had changed. His team had changed. Horace Grant had left. They lost a key interior defender and rebounder. It was him, Horace and Scottie that were the triangle offence. There were new people on the team: Toni Kukoč, Luc Longley, Steve Kerr. The team had changed, the game had changed. When you complain about the environment outside and you're not putting in the work, and you're worried about the shots that you're going to miss, you're missing opportunities regardless. And I think this is what this post really is for me.

This image, ironically (not this particular image, but the initial graphic idea and concept), has been sitting in my Notion board for almost, I think, 2 years. I'll put a screenshot in of when I actually created the image on Canva. At the time I was worried whether this would be well received or not. I've come and gone about content creation, but the funny thing is content for me is the tool and the proxy to understand the algorithm. It's the tool to understand how to use AI. I don't even know if tool is the right word, but it is the mechanism in which it allows me to fuse what's happening with technology. For example, this image was created using ChatGPT. It wasn't made using my previous methods, which would have been prompting into Leonardo AI, which incidentally I've just cancelled my subscription to because I'm not using it as much. I just don't see the value in it anymore.

And so it's understanding that you miss 100% of the shots by not taking the shots, and worrying about the missed shot before you've even taken it just seems stupid. You're better off posting something and getting one impression or zero impressions than not posting, because you're 100% going to get zero impressions from not posting.

When you look at the stats for Michael in the image, and then you see what happened the following year, they came back and they won another three in a row. So this is a challenge to all those people that are worried. If you never even got on the content bandwagon when it all started to happen, around late 2022 to now, what have you missed? You have missed this whole opportunity to learn how to use generative AI, whether it be diffusion models or LLMs, and understand how these tools actually work. Understand how algorithms work. Understand how social works. Social is no longer just posting and ghosting and getting people to follow. It's actually a channel to connect with people. And if you've missed that because you're sitting on the sidelines commenting on how shit things are, pull your head out and get in the game.