🌌 Weekly Wondering 2023-W20

Obsidian YouTuber writes about Obsidian and PKM, crazy 🤯

Welcome to another edition of Weekly Wondering, a sacred time where I share the resonating links, reflections and learnings from my past week to influence your next one ;)

If you’re new, you can learn more about me on my work-in-progress digital garden.

This newsletter is my version of learning and thinking in public, giving me time to expand on ideas that may turn into more refined content in the future.

✨ In My Life

I'm restarting my personal Obsidian vault!?!? 🤯

The series would be about me starting a new notes base from scratch, which would also announce the publishing of my notes :3

This gives me accountability as an obsidian content creator to apply my practices and showcase my personal interpretation of PKM through newsletters, input notes, etc

It’s a huge decision to make considering two years of my learning and personal experiences are in those 5000 notes, but after thinking it through I’ve came to the following factors:

The positives

• I think a problem with personal knowledge management tutorials (or at least for mine) is the lack of in-depth, raw examples not just made for the camera. I don't mind forgoing a bit of privacy so I can share the majority of what I take notes on, which can maybe help people with their own. This leads me into...

• Publishing my notes online! My only concern with my current vault is I'm not sure where some overly personal notes can be hidden, and I can't be bothered to look through 5000 notes, so at least this new vault will have publishing in mind from the start. For future videos where I end up learning something new, I can link viewers to the related area within my notes.

• This will keep my content evergreen. Newsletters and videos can continue to grow outside of their mould when published and will connect with already existing notes in my vault.

• Can give more examples of how to use the Ultimate Starter Vault, which lets me establish a highly opinionated use case combining everything I've learned. My current system can't keep up with my product since it's hard to update systems for an already existing large knowledge base 😭

• I'm not that happy with my current note-taking practices. For a while now, I've been collecting highlights more than I have been connecting notes or doing my own thinking and linking. It's a constant struggle since in some ways I think it's okay to do so as long as you can find it when you need to use it, but in other ways, it’s deteriorating my capacity for critical thinking and the introspection I highly admire about myself. And as I want to make the switch to more intrinsically driven content creation like my initial videos, having a strong sense of myself and my experiences is more important than ever. Additionally, not processing your notes prevents the main value of note taking which is being able to compound your knowledge across different sources.

• By starting fresh, I can map out a second brain philosophy to enforce practices and mindsets that keep the vault maintained over time, and carve out my own understanding of PKM. Inspired by Nick Milo, one of these core principles will be to focus on my own thoughts, rather than just having a generic Wikipedia of copy-pasted highlights and dulling paraphrasing. I'll put in the extra time to add my own personal reactions, adding my unique perspective and understanding to what I consume. But of course, this could just be a transient phase, and who knows when I might be perfectly okay with my generic thing.

The negatives

• Two years of notes will be archived. I know Tiago Forte recommends you to archive your notes when moving to a new system and move them in one by one as you need (which I might do).

• It feels kind of disappointing knowing that this all could have been preventable if I had put in the consistent effort to maintain my vault. All the lost sparks of ideas are laid to rest forever, and my old notes will be treated as a diary to look back upon.

• I will have to set my custom settings again that are in my vault (note templates, hotkeys, etc), but that's probably the least of my worries

This doesn't seem right, I feel like there should be much more negatives of discarding two years worth of notes 😭

🔗 Links to Thinks

Is summarizing with AI worth it?

During my phase of learning AI and seeing its potential from an idealistic perspective, it's nice to see some practical examples of it not living up to what I had imagined. In this article, Tiago tries to use ChatGPT to make a book summary for a book he read years ago, even feeding it his own highlights and giving it overly specific prompts, just to realize that doing it himself is not only more effective but efficient.

I conclude that reading books is still worthwhile, even in an age of Artificial Intelligence. Besides the personal enrichment from the experience of reading, there are key details, subtle distinctions, and gestalts of meaning that come from reading and notetaking that can’t (yet) be reproduced by even the latest language models

Considering the fact that these large language models are trained off of data from the internet, all nuance and outliers from extensive research papers have been drowned out by whatever writings and ideas are most common like the average blog post.

And so, it's even more important to have our own unique collection of notes full of personality and creativity.

Taking notes won't be replaced, but will be even more sacred and valuable.

Philosophical, introspective writing

Part of my sudden inspiration to get back into introspective content has been thanks to Lawrence Yeo's email series on philosophical writing. He has a similar style to Tim Urban's Wait But Why, taking complex life questions and conversationally breaking them down using silly analogies and diagrams.

I really like how he encourages philosophical writing to be purely for yourself - you aren't writing to consciously solve the problems of others, you're just using it as a more structured journal to help yourself understand the world.

Each piece that answers a certain question is another part of your overarching perspective of the world.

But if we were to write for the sake of others, we need to remember to...

Use fewer quotes as people want to hear your unique perspective

Using quotes is a form of impostor syndrome - we are unsure of our own ideas so we try to validate them by crediting someone else

People can easily search for what different important figures said about certain topics, and there's nothing novel to these ideas being brought up. What matters is being able to vividly describe your own understanding of it. Why would you turn to someone for an encyclopedia of quotes?

Reframe ideas in a way that feels fresh
In an age of ChatGPT-driven content, being creative has never been more important.

Much like how you create your own niche through the intersection of your interests, we need to connect things in unique ways (hmm, sound similar to a certain note-taking principle I follow...)

This can be done by thinking of the overarching implications of ideas, like how our fear of death is because of the constraints it gives us.

Create your own train of thought and personal revelations take over your writing, overcoming cliches to best illustrate your thought process.

🚀 Actionable Tingz

LYT Conference

Experiences like these reignite my passion and obsession with personal knowledge management and productivity.

Out of the conference, there were two that really woke me up to reflect upon my current PKM practices.

First was Nick Milo's note making session.

What is note making?

• Sensemaking is the natural way we understand the world, while note making is deliberately doing so during sessions or carved-out times.

• Instead of letting others think of "why" for us, think of it ourselves

• Use "because" to prompt ourselves to think more critically

• If we only continue highlighting, our own sparks will fade. Instead, we should capture those magical moments and start fleshing them out if we have the time. Notes serve the purpose of capturing a snapshot of our thinking, and if we wait until the end of the day to recall these revelations, who knows how much we'll actually be able to articulate.

• The structure should be earned - do not quickly go about making structures, do it after you take notes

Some prompts while note making include (add because after each prompt):

• It's a part of

• It's different to

• It's similar to

• That reminds me

• That's interesting

• It's important

• It's good

• It's bad

I highly recommend checking out the video and partaking in the sensemaking sessions :) If you're interested, this is what I came up with using the prompts:

Kintsugi

• Important since it can relate to the idea of antifragile, how things benefit from chaos

• Reminds me of just writing in general or anything content-related, in the sense when you add that gold patch it becomes something new and unique

• It's good because you are retaining the previous history

AI

• AI is interesting since we can offload dull and repetitive tasks

• Different to critical thinking since the AI will think about what is average

• It's important because it will only heighten the importance of good thinkers that can think outside the box and the norm

• It's bad because people might turn to these as truth and will neglect their own critical thinking

• Similar to asking people for advice and for herd mentality as we follow the norm

Anyways, the second presentation I found insightful was Bianca's on Why Linked Knowledge Doesn't Work

Some insights included:

What should a note contain?

• Instead of saying that notes should only contain one thing, notes should only focus on one idea

  • It's okay if there are other ideas in it as different or else it might be too restricting and you won’t be able to support the idea

  • Treat it like a photo, you know what is the focus and what isn't

  • Other ideas are present but turned down

    • Them being washed out only makes the focus more emphasized

Write in ideas, not documents

• When writing in documents (ex. literature notes with lots of ideas in the same note), it's hard to free it from the existing structure and retrieve it.

• Even idea notes can turn into documents if they become too big

Doing a dopamine detox

My attention span has been deteriorating to the point where I start doom-scrolling and procrastinating to chase dopamine under the disguise of "catching up on my no-life productivity grind" days 😭

As I'm writing this, there's a heartfelt relationship apology happening with a guy bawling his eyes out in front of me, why did I think it was a good idea to write on the train again (this is also a perfect example of the attention span I mentioned above)

And so, after indulging in this for way too long, it's time to incorporate some good old self-help advice from James Clear on habit formation B)

The main habits I want to break are:

• Doomscrolling short-form content on Instagram and Tiktok

• Consistently choosing entertainment content over educational content

And so, I'm going to make my ideal habits more appealing, and my bad habits less so.

Doomscrolling

1. Make it invisible

   • I installed both apps, no longer making it a default option when wanting to be stimulated on my phone

2. Make it unattractive

   • Usually, I am turned off by wasting my time because of all the things I have to do, but I've been neglecting my deliberate goal-setting and don't have much clarity in my vision 😅

3. Make it difficult

   • If I really need to use it, I'll be able to open it up on my desktop (I don't have a history of doing so for leisure so I'll be fine hehe)

4. Make it not satisfying

   • This one is a bit harder because of the personalized nature of algorithms, I'm hoping the other 3 will be enough

Consistently choosing entertainment over educational content
I've recently

1. Make it invisible

   • I have recently been watching everything on my main account since it has YouTube Premium and my old player app no longer works

   • Instead, I'm going to continue separating my algorithms across channels so one is more on learning and the other is more on entertainment and gaming so I don't get distracted

2. Make it unattractive

   • I think just a constant reminder to correct our bias for immediate gratification is enough to keep me on track - it would take away time for more fulfilling leisure or content consumption so it's just not the best decision to make

   • Instead, I'll make Readwise reader my default option, as I want to focus more on improving my attention span again

3. Make it difficult

   • Having to make the conscious decision to switch to a new account is enough friction for me to not do it mindlessly

4. Make it not satisfying

   • Since I don't have YouTube Premium on my other account, I'll have to watch ads which I absolutely despite 😭

So yeah, I'm going to follow through on this plan and give an update for next week :)

🤔 Food For Thought

My reflections after 2 years of PKM
I'm too lazy to organize this brain dump

• I have not been the best at practicing what I preach

  • I've been lazy with my zettelkasten as I focus on productivity over the joy of learning and writing

    • Lately, I've been feeling directionless, and since I haven't consistently been giving myself the time at the end of the day or throughout the week to wind down and reflect, it's been hard for me to have a solid foundation

      • So my plan is to learn in public, which is why I'm setting up my vault

        • I just want to solve my problems and share my experiences so other people can learn

• I never thought I would have gotten an audience for something I was still learning for myself

  • I kind of documented by entire learning process from start to the never-ending finish, and it's something I want to continue doing as I get back into content creation

    • I am still learning things about obsidian, but now I want to branch into new ventures like my personal life and answer my own questions

  • It's just hard for me to get back into the groove as my first videos were purely intrinsic, but now with my products and need for financial stability it's a constant struggle

    • I think my mind has been brought back to a more personal and introspective content style thanks to people like Paul Millerd and Lawrence Yeo

      • It's refreshing to know that people who are so authentic and sincere are discovered and spread through word of mouth rather than algorithms

    • I should probably start using polls, and set the options to things I want to do so it's a healthy mix of what I want and what my audience wants

      • I was reading through my friend Aidan Helfant's digital garden and saw his competitor analysis for Nicole

        • One of his critiques was how she doesn't have much of a personality for her channel, which can make her fragile if she decides to switch niches

        • When I compare his channel with Nicole's or my own (which I'd argue has been more commodified in comparison to my previous videos), there is a clear contrast in personality between the channels, but it seems like those who focus on optimization come out on top

• Okay those were reflections on YouTube, not PKM bruh

• I think my biggest problem has been note making vs notetaking

  • As mentioned prior, I have a stupidly large backlog of content to process, from books to articles to videos

  • I need to Write in ideas, not documents

    3

    so I can compound my learning and not re-highlight the same generic stuff 24/7

  • I'll take a more active approach to content consumption where I have my notes near me as well, so I end up seeing whether I already cover what I'm about to highlight, or if I can actually use it to build off of what is already existing

• The biggest use I found was my daily and periodic reviews

  • Just having such clear intentions paired with deep work made me unstoppable towards reaching my goals and working towards them. better self, but lately I've been neglecting it and it's been showing in how I spend my day to day

    • It just feels so weird to go with the flow and not have some overarching vision, as it allows for lots of distractions to occupy my mind which in turn makes it harder to focus

• I tend to not revisit my notes - which I'm sure the principles of LYT will help me solve

• To be fair, I've been focusing more on Obsidian systems than I have been too much on the mindset

• By holding myself accountable and making my journey public, I'm excited about where it can take me :)

My Tools for Learning and Growth

I write and collect my newsletter content all inside Obsidian, my favourite note-taking and productivity app.

Want to aggregate the valuable gems from your week like this, or need a place to store your ideas and highlights? Set up your own second brain.

Are you a student wanting to take better notes in school? Check out Obsidian University.

If you want the most densely packed and actionable book summaries, try out Shortform for free here.

If you want to make reading and highlighting easier, check out Readwise (affiliate link) and sign up for their Reader app!