19 March 1995. Michael Jordan plays his first game back after 17 months of baseball. 28 shots. 7 go in. And he doesn't stop shooting. ---- **The Comeback** Jordan came back and he lacked the conditioning. His body was conditioned to baseball, and he hadn't had the training. The team had changed too. Horace Grant had left, so they'd lost a key interior defender and rebounder. Toni Kukoč, Luc Longley and Steve Kerr were new. So his performance dropped. His accuracy went from 49.5% to 41.1%. But that didn't stop him taking roughly the same amount of shots... 23.8 a game, against 25.7 the season before he retired. (Basketball Reference) He knew the game he could play. His conditioning just wasn't there yet, and taking less shots wasn't going to change that. He still needed the reps. He wasn't scared of failing. He had this deep desire to win, and to win you've got to go through the repetitions of failure to improve. ---- **The Work** Then Orlando knocks them out. Jordan tells Tim Grover he'll see him tomorrow, and starts working out whilst he's filming Space Jam. Warner Brothers set up the Jordan Dome. He's got a weight room, a full gym, a basketball court, and pickup games going on and on over the break. He's just working. And you know what happened next... they won another three in a row. ---- **What's the point?** "Why would I think about missing a shot I haven't taken yet?" (Jordan, as Mark Vancil recalls it in The Last Dance) People complain about the algorithm. People complain about not getting leads. People complain about how social is changing. People complain about AI slop. But if you think about it, the world Jordan came back into had changed too. His team had changed. The game had changed. So if you're complaining about the environment, you're not putting in the work, and you're worried about the shots you're going to miss... you're missing opportunities regardless. Ironically, the idea for this graphic has been sitting in my Notion board for almost 2 years. At the time I was worried whether it would be well received. I've come and gone with content creation. But the funny thing is, content for me is the tool, 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. This image was created in ChatGPT. It wasn't made the way I used to, prompting into Leonardo AI. Which, incidentally, I've just cancelled. I just don't see the value in it anymore. You're better off posting something and getting one impression, or zero, than not posting. Because if you don't post, you're 100% going to get zero. So if you never got on the content bandwagon when it all started in late 2022... what have you missed? How generative AI actually works. How algorithms work. How social works. Social is no longer just posting and ghosting. It's a channel to connect with people. And if you've missed that because you're sitting on the sidelines commenting on how sh!t things are... Pull your head out and get in the game.