🌌 Weekly Wondering 2023-W32

Obsidian University Giveaway, new content direction

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 ;)

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. If you want to see more of my ideas (or to learn about who I am if you're new here), you can head to my digital notes garden.

✨ In My Life

Before you read this newsletter, I have two important announcements! 🚨

Obsidian University Giveaway 🤩

Fellow YouTuber Aidan Helfant and I are doing a raffle for one student to get Obsidian University: Your Secret Weapon At School for free 🤩

Obsidian University is a premade student vault with a tag-along video course. It helps students learn to take effective notes and study using Obsidian.

In addition, all students who enter the raffle will receive an upgrade code for $25 off Obsidian University, valid through August 18th. All it takes is a simple click of the link below and you have a chance to win the raffle 👇

​To enter the raffle to get the course for free, click this interest link.

My new channel and content pursuits 🤯

As much as I love my Ultimate Starter Vault product, I feel like it's only actualized a fraction of my vision and intention for the product.

The truth is, I want to create a life operating system that does so much more.

I want to build a fully fleshed-out philosophy for productivity and life design that directly aligns with the features in the vault.

I want to share in-depth tutorials and workflows for all the other apps I use with Obsidian like Todoist, Toggl Track, Readwise Reader, and more to help people build robust productivity systems.

It's been a nice 39 posts so far on Substack, but after some contemplation, I'll be fully switching to ConvertKit to keep all my email subscribers in one place.

After my free 4-day Obsidian email course in ConvertKit, I just disappear and don't continue helping all these people starting their second brain journey.

Instead, I want to start sharing weekly insights from the content I consume related to this new vision.

Unfortunately, my current Weekly Wonderings newsletter might not be the best fit for that audience, so I'm changing the niche of my newsletter into something that better encompasses my YouTube content and next big pursuit...

Introducing, Digital Self-Actualization (name subject to change).

I will still continue re-posting this update on Substack for a few more newsletters, but eventually, I might stop and will fully focus on my ConvertKit newsletter.

I'm still considering whether it's sustainable and/or worth having one personal and one learning-oriented 🤔

If you want to join me in this new adventure and receive weekly emails related to productivity systems, digital tools, and high-performance philosophies, click here to sign up.

The Rewards of My Hiatus

I can't believe it's been 5 weeks already 🤯

To keep it short, as my last newsletter hinted at, I've been spending lots of time socializing with family and friends 😊

Although it's led to some missed objectives like my weekly content creation, it's helped me self-reflect a LOT on my character towards the people that I hold close to in my life.

The truth is, my heavy emphasis on productivity and goals over the past 2 years has stained the empathy I once highly respected about myself.

Pair that with having my emotions suppressed and discouraged by someone I held close to in my life, I just didn't feel in tune with my INFJ character.

This showed itself in many ways like responding with condescendence when people came to me for help, but I think my most apparent sign was with socializing with fellow interns during my current internship at SAP.

Initially, I used to think with self-centeredness, assuming that there wouldn't be any people to meet with the same values and interests as me that I would actually be willing to maintain a connection with long-term.

Whenever I would attend socializing events, I would just stick with the two team members I was closest to, and not bother getting to know anyone else.

But as I've been spending the past month improving in this area of my life, I have been really appreciating the personal transformations from my efforts.

I'm starting to be more grateful, I'm starting to show my listening much more during conversations, and I've been better at articulating my inner thoughts about the people I cherish.

Instead of keeping to myself in fear of "wasting time" talking to people, I approached others as my authentic self with a deep curiosity towards getting to know them.

And as a result, I've had some stupidly meaningful conversations with people I've just met, not being afraid to dive into the looming questions we're trying to figure out as we navigate young adult life.

I've been able to connect deeply with people on vulnerable topics like romantic flaws, financial anxiety and my personal mission to give back to my parents as an immigrant, as well as knowing what career to take.

I've been told this many times already whenever I talked about this dilemma of mine, but I think it's important to believe that everyone has that special uniqueness inside of them, and you can converse just for the sake of trying to find it without any expectations.

Be kind in a world where people are starved of encouragement due to competition and insecurities.

My Tools and Resources for Learning and Growth

I write and collect my newsletter content all inside Obsidian, my favourite note-taking and productivity app. If you want to try using it for yourself, you can get my free beginner templates and 4-day email course. If you want to further enhance your system, you can also check out my ultimate guide to using AI for PKM.

If you want to aggregate the valuable gems from your week like this, or need a place to store your ideas and highlights, you can start building your second brain

Alternatively, if you're a student and want to use Obsidian for school, you can check out Obsidian University.

If you want an efficient content consumption system, I HIGHLY reocmmend Readwise Reader. You can learn about how I use it to save and read articles, books, and newsletters here.