Doing It Right Means Doing What Is Right

DIR diving has always stood on a rather uncomfortable truth. It wasn’t built to be flashy. It wasn’t intended to be TikTok-able.
It was built for reality. 
 
I know you see people post perfect trim reels every day on Instagram, but that’s not it. 
Sure… big, clean, powerful open water back-kicks look sweet but that doesn’t mean anything in real life. Much less in a delicate and restricted environment.
Yes, Rule-6 (always look cool) might sound flashy to the uninitiated, but it runs much deeper than that. DIR isn’t a card you buy, it isn’t an agency, it isn’t just a class you took that one weekend a couple years ago. 
 
There’s a kind of diver who gets this.
And a kind who doesn’t.
 
For a lot of people, there seems to be something more to diving that they are still waiting for. Something that often feels like it’s always missing. Regardless of their collection of certification cards.
 
It’s easy to clip on a GoPro and call yourself an explorer nowadays. You paid your money and got your Advanced Deep Technical Solo Pony Procedures card. You’re certified.
 
It’s harder to spend the rest of your life… every single time you get in the water, without exception, doing the right thing. Regardless of how cold it is, or how rushed you are because it’s hot and you just want to cool off in the water, or because deep air is cheaper, or because you’re with other divers who don’t care.
It's hard doing the right thing. Every single time.
 
The diver’s path, especially the DIR diver, isn’t about what’s easy.
It’s about what’s necessary… not just for you, but for your teammates, for the dive, and for the thousands of decisions you don’t know you’ll have to make until you must make them. And that decision will come at the worst possible time.
 
No pause button.
No, wait a second.
No, “Mommy, I don’t want to play anymore.”
 
I remember very well, the time when DIR was hated by the entire scuba industry and the rest of the scuba community also. Then it slowly started to get adopted by the diving community and word spread via the internet… and when that happened, it became a threat to the industry. Many of us were told by shop owners to get it out of their stores.
 
By the time SCUBA hit the millennium and we entered the 2000’s, Doing It Right, meant something. But most of the industry didn’t care. They just wanted to sell equipment. DIR was labeled as arrogant, elitist, unattainable. DIR was the enemy.

DIR is not arrogant. It never was. It doesn’t mean “perfect.” It never has.
It means intentional.
It means accountable.
It means you put the training in, even when no one’s watching, and especially when it’s inconvenient.
 
Because you are the redundancy.
You are the system.
You are the backup plan.
  
The industry slowly began to adopt some of the jargon and bullet points that we had been using for decades. Eventually, all the major training agencies began to add some DIR filler to their training materials. But never calling it DIR.
 
Buoyancy, suddenly became more than just balancing on your fin tips. Gas planning became more than, “Be on the boat with 500psi.” Decompression became more than ascend slower than your bubbles.
  
Neutral buoyancy, horizontal trim and the DIR equipment configuration became normal. But that’s not all there is to it. In fact, none of that is strictly DIR, it’s just diving. DIR just made it relevant in the late 1990’s. The early pillars of DIR; Gas Selection (No Deep Air), Diver Preparedness, The Unified Team, and Situational Awareness… were not completely foreign to scuba, however they were often ignored for economy and convenience.
 
Eventually new trends would come into the game. New colors of “DIR-style” gear. Rebreathers. Sidemount. Self-Reliant. Carbon fiber. Hand mirrors and automatic trim-adjusting, buoyancy-correcting, “Do It For You” gadgets to sell the unsuspecting diver/customer. 

New ways to distract them from what the point of it all really was.
What the purpose was supposed to be. 
 
All of it, engineered in a board room to take you off the path. To reprogram you buy your status and ability instead of work hard for it.
 
And then Instagram hit. And reels, and tic-toks, and youtube.
 
But DIR wasn’t built for today’s social media.
 
It was built to stop people from dying in a place where they didn’t belong. 
It was built to remind people that another diver’s life was counting on them to be 100% aware, 100% of the time.
And it was built to make anyone able to be that diver. Anyone who cared.
Not just the legends.
 
And that is what makes DIR harder. Too hard for most. 
But if you put in the work… the continuous work… it will make you better. 
 
What really happens when you are underwater… When you really need to preform and not make things worse?
That is the reality that you want to chase, not a card. 
 
Quiet commitment, not loud validation.
Honest work, not cosmetic c-cards.
 
 If you’re chasing growth as a diver, look for challenges, not convenience. Look for truth, not trophies. Look for competence, not credentials.
 
DIR is a hard path.
It demands patience. Humility. Teamwork. And those rarely come easy, especially the latter. 
Teamwork is the hardest.
That is exactly why everyone falls for the Solo card! 
 
But it’s the discomfort that changes you.
It’s the struggle that sharpens you.
You are forging the steel of understanding. An understanding of what you do when it matters most, when you don’t know for sure what will come out of you. 
 
You’re becoming a diver. 
Not just another human with a collection of certification cards who swims underwater. 
You’re becoming a real diver.
 
Caring about a team, just as much as yourself.
 
And… you’re doing it with purpose. 
You’re doing it with values. 
 
You’re Doing It Right. 

-James Mott