What's going on here?

And that really shifted my perspective.

This has been one of the most useful lessons I've learned in my career.

I stumbled onto springboard diving.

I really loved it, but I was afraid of heights and I wanted to get better at it.

And I was a perfectionist, and I thought that was going to help me because in diving, you're supposed to get perfect tents.

Well, guess what?

I have my most basic dive, a front dive pike.

You just jump up, touch your toes, go in head first.

I wanted to work on perfecting that all practice.

And I was working on these tiny little adjustments.

They would take me from a six and a half to a seven and not ever learning harder dives and failing to raise my degree of difficulty.

And that really stunted my growth as a diver until one day my coach, Eric Best, pulled me aside and he said, you know, Adam, there's no such thing as a perfect tent.

And I was like, wait, have the Olympic announcers been lying to me?

When they say a dive was done for perfect tens, what's going on here?

And he said, if you look at the rule book, a ten is for excellence.

There's no such thing as a perfect dive.

And that really shifted my perspective.

What we did then was we said, look, I'm never going to get a ten on any dive.

What we have to do is to calibrate what's a realistic goal for each dive.

For a front dive, we started aiming for sevens and I would want to do 30 of them in practice.

And when I did my third one and Eric said that was a seven, it's time to move on.

When I was learning a much more complicated front two and a half with a full twist, you do two flips, 360 turn and then a dive.

The first goal was we want to do this for twos.

We just want to make it.

And then I got a little better at it and we started aiming for fours and fives on it.

And Steve, I have to tell you, this has been one of the most useful lessons I've learned in my career.

When I start a project, whether it's a book or a podcast season or I'm writing an op-ed, the first thing I do is I ask, what is my target score here?

And for a book, it's a nine, because I'm going to pour two years of my work life into this.

I hope a lot of people read it and it's going to be useful to them.

So it really matters to do it about as well as I can.

When I'm writing a post for Instagram, I'm pretty content with a six and a half.

Just above getting cancelled is my target there.

But that calibration is helpful because I could spend all day crafting that Instagram post and then I'll never get anything done.

Maybe part of the equation is to think about the potential reward from the investment.

Thinking about the return on effort is really valuable.

I think about that less in terms of what's the immediate reward for me and more in terms of how can I have the greatest impact for the investment of my time?

And I think you're right.

Instagram is a it's a quick hit of dopamine and it feels really great when you get a lot of likes and, you know, enthusiastic comments on a post.

And then it fades really fast.

People ask questions about a book that I wrote a decade ago.

Nobody asked me about my social media posts from several years ago.

And I think podcasting actually lives somewhere in between.

Right.

When we talk, sometimes ideas stick.

Actually, there's some evidence that audio is more memorable and more intimate than what you pick up on the page.

But I think it's a little more fleeting.

I don't remember a conversation I listened to from a few years ago the same way I remember a book that changed my worldview.

And so I put a little bit more into writing than I do into talking.