Just discovered the doc.new shortcut, and it’s lifechanging. 

All you do? Go to Chrome, and type in “doc.new” into the address bar, and poof – here you are, with a brand new Google Document.

Why do I even know this? Because I use Google documents every day, and I like to make things just a little easier for myself so I don’t get the excuse of saying that I didn’t do things because they were too cumbersome or too difficult. 

Here, I was trying to get a shortcut to create a new document and I was looking for the easiest possible way to do it – a way of enabling me to do things more easily, in more refined a fashion, in more simple a way to make things happen and develop.

Docs.new is one of the most elegant things I’ve discovered this entire year, and it’s a shock that that realization came in nothing more than a single search for the shortcut and a single phrase typed into a keyboard.

It makes me wonder how many other instances of this exist out there in our strange universe.

Lately, I’ve become a lot more consistent with making YouTube content, but it’s not because of any sort of planning or anything – it’s because I’ve become a lot more stubborn, dogged, and just don’t really care as much what people think.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten a little older now, maybe it’s because I no longer care, or maybe it was a skill issue – I won’t really know until I do my self-analysis, which I hope to do progressively as I compare my scripts to what I’ve done along the way, which I would like to do and hopefully will succeed at some time soon.

Anyway, I thought this would be a fun post to think about what I’m putting out there and why, which kind of extends to the question of what I’m doing with social media anyway.

But first…

Why Even YouTube?

YouTube to me is one of the best art forms that I have access to, and it’s one of the most enjoyable pastimes to me. It’s not even a pastime that I’m particularly good at, but it’s something that gives me meaning in a whole bunch of different ways because it’s enjoyable – something that blends together my feelings at any moment with that wish somehow to craft things for this world.

You see, YouTube is about videos, and videos are an immersive experience and a recorded section of reality.

The thing is (and we could go deep philosophical into this but this really isn’t the point of this blog post) videos don’t even have to be about the tangible and the everyday – they can just be selections or samplings of experiences that narrow down that experience into a single channel; a collection of moments seen, created, formed – a targeted crafting of reality that is very different from say, writing a blog post like this.

Don’t get me wrong – I love writing.

Think about it – I dedicate time towards making these posts here, without any real expectation of profit or otherwise – it’s just because I enjoy putting the words together, have fun bringing together the sentences – I wouldn’t be doing this if all there was to it was just earning some money or otherwise.

But creating videos is just so much more of a multi-modal thing, in which writing is just a single component; indeed, the creator of any video that another person watches is creating what I could most accurately describe as a ‘shared reality’ constructed out of different component parts, which I’ll talk about more in another blog post perhaps.

Back to writing – I could be making clips where I’m just doing stupid stunt after stupid stunt with no writing involved whatsoever: No writing involved.

But 99% of other things still definitely require writing, from my experience, to script, to decide how the vibe will be, to structure, to plan – none of which are things that I’m particularly good at but am trying to get better at.

But the more I think about it, I feel that YouTube is both one of the most freeing pastimes but also one of the most difficult ones – freeing in the sense that you can bring together ideas in whatever form that you want, but also super difficult because what you deem coherent is dependent on your personal standards – and I have some pretty high standards.

Maybe that’s why I feel that frankly, sometimes creating YouTube videos feels like building an aeroplane while riding the plane itself.

Creating videos involves so many things, though, that depend upon one another – Maybe it’s because I’m not great at doing this yet, but I often find myself struggling in the zone of stringing clips together to make sure they’re logical, looking at the individual clips to see if they’re visually appealing and they tell the story effectively, and seeing the pacing… Then going back, realizing that what I conveyed was not what I wanted to convey at all in the first place, choosing to reset, refresh, and creating a brand new video and doubling all the effort that I made before.

To say the very least, I’m not very efficient at creating them – but then, nobody ever said that constructing a shareable reality should be easy, but then also nobody ever said that there was an authority that was supposed to divinely arbitrate the universal good or bad apart from the amorphous market of human preferences and choices as attuned to the modern content sharing and advertising ecosystem in which we are all cogs.

Whatever capitalistic implications there are in this ecosystem though (which I won’t deny exist), I’d just say that there is this joy that comes about when I make clips, say things that make sense, tell jokes that sometimes flop, other times pull through and dominate an entire video, when I share things that shape, reframe, and remold how people think – something that almost inevitably requires me to sit down, reflect my thoughts through hundreds of mirrors, and then bring out the very best.

My morning began with the voice of David Brooks tearing down the elite class – it was a voice that I hadn’t heard for the longest of times, after procrastinating on replying a text message from someone for the longest of times.

I think that it is worth a watch.

Beyond what’s implied by the title of the video, Brooks discusses the evolution of merit, how the ‘elite’ was once defined and redefined in America as the Mayflower class transitioned into classes at Harvard and Stanford – how behaviors designated as desirable for our future leaders evolved through time as the generation took a turn and the world evolved.

Midway through the video, I realized that I was distracted and thinking of something else – I began thinking about things that weren’t really related to what I was reading – but somehow through the pathway of internal reflections, a part of my conscience led me to read his “How The Ivy League Broke America” in its full 10871 word glory.

Many thoughts went through my head at that point and still are at the moment – but Brooks expressed it better in that piece than I can, and I suggest that you read it.

For what it’s worth though, here’s what I’ll say:

His thoughts made me tap into an intuition that I’ve been having for a while – that intelligence isn’t really the primary determinant of life outcomes, and that there are other qualities and characteristics that I need as a person to continue pushing forward to have a fuller life, fuller existence, and everything else.

Even now, my thoughts are evolving, and who I am as a person is changing – and it is fascinating to see that process take place, even if I’m not constantly watching every single detail of it – but that’s a story for another day – and here is the real one.

What I will say is that it was nice to have someone I met in Malaysia send this to me though, to care about what I had thought, and to continue investing in that bond and in my growth, my development, and my onward progress, and I would like to honor that by doing even better in this end of the year that I ever have before.

Thanks for sending me this, and sorry for procrastinating on replying you.