This post was originally part of yesterday’s post, but it was getting a little long so I split it into two pieces. You’ll have to hang in with me with the scuba metaphors, but I’m still riding the high of how good the diving was in Palau last month. 

Yesterday, I talked about finding the right place for your knowledge level and the tactics you wanted to focus on, and how that follows a general progression from very visible, general public places with lots of other people to smaller, more focused groups. 

In a way, it reminds me a lot of progressing as a scuba diver.

When you first begin, the concept is so alien that being in a giant group of divers figuring it out alongside you is really comforting.

Once you’ve picked up a handful of certifications and notched a chunk of dives, you’re ready to dive with a slightly smaller group that is worried less about the bare minimum and more about learning advanced buoyancy, becoming better at spotting macro life, etc.

If you decide to commit and make it a part of your life, you’ll eventually master those skills and decide to scale the hobby by going to remote locales around the world to experience the best diving there is. Because of the effort required to get there, there are far fewer people. Everyone is a proficient diver who is good at spotting marine life (and looking out for fellow divers). 

Once you’ve truly mastered the ability to dive recreationally, one of the most important things you can do is find your 1:1 dive buddy. Having someone you can trust unconditionally underwater (even without a dive slate for communication) unlocks a level of freedom to explore far beyond what’s possible in a larger group. 

This progression maps pretty closely to progression as a churner, too. 

When you’re starting out, you need the size and scale of a public forum or big blog. Since they cover the full breadth of what you’d need to know at the beginner to intermediate level, they give you a chance to get better and start learning what your specialties might be.

Once you graduate from public sources to unindexed ones, you gain access to a smaller group of peers that have the same motivation as you – to keep getting better in a more focused environment. This might be the single most important layer, because it’s where you find the handful of people you actually want to go deeper with.

As you continue to grow and network as a churner, you’ll form the natural connections necessary to build even smaller groups that don’t ever end up being advertised anywhere. Everybody in there will be committed, and the group ends up being stronger than any one person in it.

And lastly, out of those even smaller groups, you’ll have enough trust to work with other MSers on a 1 on 1 basis. Some of the most fruitful plays I’ve been a part of have come from a friendship I made in a larger group. But these only work when you trust each other.

This isn’t to say you need to end up in DMs or a tiny probe group to succeed. But there certainly is value in probing and exploring with people that you’ve been working with for awhile, and that’s a lot easier to do in a less crowded room. 

Getting to a level where you collaborate closely with others (whether that be in DMs or a small probe) doesn’t mean you stop going to more crowded rooms, but it does mean that you have options in where to share your latest find. 

Ultimately, if you ask a diver if they’d prefer to dive on a 30 person cattle boat doing certs in Cozumel or doing 1:1 buddy dives in Bonaire, I think most would choose the latter. At a certain point, it’s about who’s in the water with you.

Good luck on dialing in whatever MS metaphor for diving you’re working on this week.

Kusikisa!

Pictured: When the RATs come for a diving churner