Reduce Globally

Okay, for today's video, I've tried to set my recording settings to be a little higher quality. So hopefully this turned out to be higher quality than my previous video. But in this video, I want to talk about reduce globally and what that actually means. Now, long story short, a few days ago, my roommate mentioned the phrase reduce globally. And when he said that, I kind of, I kind of understood what he meant. But it was bugging me about what the actual definition was of, of that phrase and what it actually meant and what that looked like in real life. So I'm going to show you some examples of reducing globally after I explain what it actually means. Now, the next morning after he had said that, I woke up. I had had a shit sleep according to my Oura Ring, and I was in a bit of a mood. So I sat down whilst he was eating breakfast and I just started asking him what it meant and asking him why it meant that and if he could give me examples and just bugging him and frustrating him basically at like 7 a.m. in the morning. So I don't think he appreciated that. But in doing so, it allowed me to start to get a better understanding of what that concept was. And because really it is a concept. So I'm going to try my best to actually explain how I understand this concept and how I think everybody, every single one of us applies this in our daily lives. But it's nice to actually have a word for it now. So reducing globally essentially means reducing or removing inefficiencies in a process. So if you look at everything that you do in your daily life, you could technically create steps for, for everything that you do, from brushing your teeth to getting changed in the morning to going to sleep. Or even the steps that you take in your, in your, like across your day, like getting out of bed, then getting dressed, then eating, then going and doing some work, then doing a workout or whatever it is. You can make macro steps and you can make micro steps of everything. And the concept reduce globally really means getting to the end results of something, getting to the ultimate goal of something in as little steps as possible. So if I am brushing my teeth, you first have to apply first principles. If you're familiar with first principles, it— and if you're not familiar with first principles, it simply means thinking back down to the ultimate purpose or the reason behind doing something in the first place. So the reason that you brush your teeth is probably to have healthier gums. It's probably to have whiter teeth. And the reason that you have— you want to have healthier gums and whiter teeth is probably so that you can eat better and that you can actually chew your food whilst you're eating it. And so that you can look more attractive, let's say, which in turn gives you more status, which means that you're more likely to attract a mate, which means you're more likely to reproduce, which is probably the ultimate goal of life. So you can go all the way down. That's what first principles is, is thinking all the way down the process of, or thinking through all of the steps and the reasons behind something. Now, when you're reducing globally, you want to understand what the actual purpose of the activity is and then look at all of the steps you're doing and try to take as few actions as possible to get to that ultimate step. So I'll give you an example. When, when my company makes videos, we make videos for a few different cases. We make videos for YouTubers. We also make ad creatives, a ton of creatives for e-commerce brands. So that we can run them on advertising platforms. Now, typically what happens in most cases right now is when a video is filmed, it is then saved onto some sort of camera and that camera SD card is then plugged into a computer. The video is uploaded into a drive like a Google Drive folder. That Google Drive folder link is then copied and pasted and sent to us in a Slack channel and said, hey, here's some new content. We then take that, that content, we download it and we upload it into our editing software just so that we can edit the video. Now, an example of reducing globally is, is starting with the purpose. So the why behind all of that is we're, well, we're a, we're making ad creatives, so we need videos. And the purpose of all of those steps to get the video into the video editing software is so that it can be edited. So if the purpose is to get the video ready to be edited, then I can look at all of those steps and say, what can I remove to get the same result? Now, as an example, what I have set up with this recording setup is when I start— when I hit start recording, the video is recording in the background and it is automatically connected to a Google Drive folder already. And it's the same Google Drive folder every time. So I have a Google Drive folder called Raw YouTube Videos or something like that. And all of the videos that I film on this recording software are automatically created within that Google Drive folder. So I don't need to download and upload something. I'm still getting the same result of that micro step, which is getting it into Google Drive in the first place. Now, for these YouTube videos, currently I'm skipping the step of editing because my goal is just to get into the habit of posting YouTube videos and I'm going to improve everything after that. But it's something to consider in your life in general as you're going about work tasks or whatever you may be doing. You might be working out is thinking, firstly, applying first principles. So thinking back to the ultimate process or the ultimate purpose or goal of whatever, whatever activity it is that you're doing, and then looking at all of the steps you are taking to get there and figuring out what you can remove to get the same result. And there's excellent quote from Elon Musk that says— when we're— he was referencing where he was literally standing next to one of their, their SpaceX rockets, and he was referencing this kind of concept where he said, our goal is to— the goal is to actually remove more steps than we add, and then if something breaks, we add it back in. So an experiment that you can take, and there's extremities to this, is you can remove things in your life and if they don't actually affect the ultimate purpose, then you don't need to add them back in. Now, worst case scenario, if you stop getting the end result that you're looking for, then you can add it back in. I'll give a really extreme example of something that I did. I, I shower every morning before I start work and I was like, well, hang on a second. Well, why do I shower? Well, it's to stay clean. I'm like, well, I think I'm a decently clean person overall and I, I don't really get super sweaty, so what if I just shower every other day? And then I discovered by removing my daily shower and doing it every other day that there are actually other reasons that I shower. One is just to wake myself up in the morning and feel good about myself. And I stopped getting those purposes or those end results when I started showering every other day. So I realized how stupid that was and I started doing it again daily. Also, people said to me, ew, like, you're disgusting. Why are you, why are you doing that every other day? So I started doing it daily again, and there's probably a bit of an insecurity attached to that as well from other people criticizing me for it. But that is an example of how you can look at your life and start reducing globally and overall an explanation of the concept. Now, if you watch this video to the end, I want to know what parts of this video you stopped losing focus at, because I want to go back and analyze these videos and figure out how I can explain these concepts better as I'm going to be posting tons of concepts like this on YouTube now so that I can communicate it in a way that is more interesting to you so that you're more likely to actually remember them and then go and do that with your life. So I'd love to know where you lost engagement and what you think I can do to make these videos more engaging. And I'll see you in the next one.