Air Jordan X "Double Nickel" 28 March 1995. Madison Square Garden. Jordan's fifth game back after 17 months of baseball. 37 shots. 21 made. 55 points. Nine days earlier, against Indiana, he went 7 from 28. He kept shooting. ---- **The Comeback** His body was conditioned for baseball. He hadn't had the training. The team had changed. Horace Grant had left. Toni Kukoč, Luc Longley and Steve Kerr were new. His performance dropped. He still took roughly the same number of shots. - 25.7 shots a game in 1992-93, 23.8 in 1994-95 - Accuracy down from 49.5% to 41.1% - 14 misses a game, up from 13 (Basketball Reference, regular season) "Why would I think about missing a shot I haven't taken yet?" Jordan's words, as Mark Vancil recalls them in The Last Dance. Orlando knocked the Bulls out. Jordan told Tim Grover he'd see him tomorrow. That summer he filmed Space Jam and trained in the Jordan Dome. The following year they won another three in a row. ---- **The Outsole** Nike released the X while Jordan was playing baseball. Underneath, where nobody looks: - His career, one achievement per stripe, from Rookie of the Year to the three-peat - The first Air Jordan with a lightweight Phylon midsole A tribute to a retired player. He came back and played in it. Nike closed FY95 on US$4.76B revenue, up 26%. (Nike Inc. 1995 Annual Report, year to 31 May 1995) ---- **What's the point?** People complain about the algorithm. People complain about not getting leads. People complain about how social is changing. People complain about AI slop. The world Jordan came back into had changed too. Complain about the environment, skip the work, worry about the shots you're going to miss... you're missing opportunities regardless. This graphic sat in my Notion board for almost two years. I worried whether it would be well received. This version was created using ChatGPT, and I've just cancelled Leonardo AI. Content is how I understand the algorithm. It's how I understand AI. Post something and get one impression, or zero. Don't post and you're 100% going to get zero. If you never got on the content bandwagon from late 2022, what have you missed? How generative AI works, diffusion models and LLMs. How algorithms work. How social works. Social is no longer posting and ghosting. It's a channel to connect with people. Sitting on the sidelines commenting on how sh*t things are? Pull your head out and get in the game.