How I Really Use Obsidian

Hello friends um Scott novas here and what this is a video I've been reluctant to make for a long time but after um sharing information with a number of users I thought I really need to do this and bite the bullet um and so here's the deal what I want to share with you is the real way that I work with this obsidian um second brain every day and the real reason I got into obsidian wasn't be more productive it wasn't to do projects and areas and all that stuff the real reason I got into

it was because 10 years ago uh almost uh 12 years ago I was um had a horrible family vacation um everybody else was fine I was the problem um work was stressing me out of my gour being an entrepreneur is extremely challenging and I just it was a the year before I joined the entrepreneurs organization and I just didn't have the tools to deal with everything I was dealing with and I wanted to get better um and I started down the path of self-improvement um you know listen to Classics from Zig Ziggler Jack Canfield and

um I just got into that process of okay let me learn let me learn how can I get better and what I noticed was that I was beginning to absorb a lot of content but I wasn't applying very much and I was afraid grade that I was turning into learning as entertainment and it wasn't really helping me progress and I wanted a better way of managing and tracking and integrating what I was learning and that was in 2017 um uh uh zanke orens arens Zan arens published a book called taking smarter notes um I in

2018 came across that book so 5 years into my self-improvement journey and five great years into EO or seven years however you do the math um I thought oh wow this matters um this could make a big difference and up until that point all the way through college I've been a huge Note Taker and my theory on notes was that if something went in my ear and out my fingers onto a piece of paper I was going to remember it and so I have Reams and Reams and reams of notebooks that are filled with notes

from talks learning sessions ideas just like like boxes of um amazing notebooks um that I literally have in boxes over here but I never ever went back and looked at anything I never cross referenced anything I never used it again I just chewed up a lot of ink and paper and the idea that I could actually play with my ideas that I could do something more productive with my ideas really appealed to me and that's what started me on this path of building a new kind of notetaking system instead of one where it was just

me dumping stuff into something I never looked at it was really about me creating links and associations the way the brain does is I was beginning to work with information in a completely new way so for me it all started with learning the productivity systems were add-ons they came later um so I'm going to go back to the beginning and what I use absolutely the most um I'll create separate videos to show you how all these pieces work but I'm just going to give you a run through of what like what my literal daily routine

is when I'm reading and absorbing content so um part one where do I begin um I'm a huge Kindle fan so I will buy a book um on Kindle um and I will let me make sure that I'm actually interacting with my software um and so I'll take book like let's say book yourself solid and you can see there's a little um right there's that little headphone I'll buy the Kindle book and I will get the audio book to go with it why so that I'm listening to the audio book while it's playing um and

then when something really interesting happens I will pause the audio book um let's take a look at this book platform um and what you'll see is boy something he's got a list love lists um you know how do you create a better uh about page so he's like okay here's your tips I'm G to go ahead I'm going to highlight that and then I'll go back and let him play and if he comes up with another idea I'll let him continue to go so I'm absorbing and I'm highlighting and I can do that on the

go I can do all I'm walking the dogs um frequently if I'm in line it's it's about the simp way for me to grab information and hook it so one of my top ways of consuming information is through audiobooks um with the Kindle beside it so that I can get that text and the content that's associated with it why does that matter because all of my Kindle highlights I use an application called readwise there's other ones out there omnivore is a pretty popular open source one that allow me to import all of my highlights off

Kindle into another usable form and you can see there's 363 books worth of highlights it's over 15,000 highlights and you can see right there is platform by Michael hot is the highlights that I've made in the book now I don't know if the most recent one is in there yet uh let's take a quick look um but it just tells me there's another feature they have about resurfacing highlights and I'll go go into that later but the idea is if I listen to it I highlight it then what's really really cool is when I come

back to obsidian in my I have a readwise folder and in the readwise folder it will export all the highlights from all of my books and so let's see if yep there it is platform made it in there and so what it does is it gives me a little bit of short information and then it gives me the highlights they're automatically imported right into my system now what do I do with that well I'm a bit of a nudge um or I'm a detail learn in my own way the details I care about I will

go to Great length to protect the ones I don't care about sorry um so one of the things that I do is I use another application called zoto and it is a bibliography tool why do you want that in a world of fake news and people making up stuff it is super important to me to be able to site my sources I want to know where I learned it and so one of the things I use is a plugin that comes with uh zoto that's compatible that lets me go to Amazon because you can see

there's some information here but not all the information about that book and so what I'll do is I'll go to amazon.com Tada and up here is a little plugin you can get it's the zoto book plugin so let's go to platform um the book let's see if it there it is okay I will click on Kindle and now if you look at this little um icon up here once it turns blue it has grabbed all the information about this book and it is ready to put into zoto and so if I pop into zoto that

book is not in here yet so let's grab it so I'll come over here it will say hey do you want it to be a book um absolutely it's not an article I have a whole separate database for web articles and and now that I have grabbed that book there it is one more plugin this might seem like a lot of work but I only have to do this stuff one time and then I have it forever there's a neat little plugin called MD note it will take that information about this book and it will

allow me to export it into my library remember I said an obsidian note base second brain is just text files on your hard drive so all I have to do is save that file now I've got all that information pulled out I didn't have to do any cutting copy and pasting and if I pull this forward pull it up uh I can say platform now I have Library here's the information pulled in from zoto with links to my bibliography and it includes a little bit of additional information um I'm going to tell you there's a

couple other things I do I clean up um the title so it's easier for me to reference I will create a Alias um using a macro called uh book Alias so it says book and the name and you're going to see how can to use that in a second um this last little bit I've got some other macros so I can put in my own book meta and that means what format do I own this book I have it in Kindle I have it in audible So within obsidian I can pull up my entire library

of what is that book in and where is it at and one of the thing I like to do because if I'm going to share a book with somebody I'm going to refer it to them I want them to be able to get access to the book um and so I will grab a copy of the link directly to that Kindle book um and then I will save it here um and then I can write I give myself some tags it's about speaking and business um and and that's pretty good and I'll come back and

rate it later oh one other small thing I will do is I will link it to its um readwise highlights so that they're cross- link so now they're all connected so what do I do with that how does that work well one of the things that I would do is is since this for me has to do about speaking um and building up my speaking thing um in my speaking area you put this wherever you want this is how I use it is I'll talk about resources so one of the resources will be platform book

notes okay so I'm gonna have book notes on this book and I'm going to use another macro sorry I just have tons of these things and it's I'm going to take a selection and I want to make a new link note out of it and it's the beginning of a thought train so it's a start card click on it and boom I have a perfectly formatted note that links back to what I was talking about so one of the ideas of the way I link notes is it's one idea per note um that creates sort

of more Atomic ideas and it's easier to cross link things when it's not just some giant blob of text um I'm going to put in my overview what is this book about this book is about about um building up your social media uh following your your platform um sounds great and now what I would I tend to do is sometimes I can't always remember this stuff is I'll go back and uh remember the author Michael hayatt okay um this book was written by uh uh Michael Patt okay Ah that's because I'm misspelling his name constantly

uh there he is I just saw him there we go Michael H in the pop-up list um the book platform so I do it this way because it immediately identifies what kind of resource it is so I put it in this way deliberately when I'm linking content is I like to write it into the sentences um so that the information isn't like some odd thing off to the side where footnotes I have to go look at it's embedded in the the notes I'm giving my future self I'm writing notes to My Future Self that if

I have to come back and look at this um uh was is recommended by um Kindle uh suggestions where did I get it from now one of the other things manually I can do is I could say executive summary I'm not there yet because I'm not finished with the book but in the executive summary one of the things I'll often do is put in like what was my number one takeaway out of this book what is one of the things that I that I wanted to get and now that I have this sort of book

note as I'm reading um I'm often going back maybe in the evening or maybe later the week and I'll grab the highlights um from the Highlight page and I can also connect it here so I can put in platform from readwise um and I've got just all the assets relative to this idea are at my fingertips and this particular book um what I would probably end up doing is if I I started thinking about it I would think what else is like it um and so one of those associations is um I've been doing a

lot of work on storytelling and so what I might be able to do is connect to U books like uh storyworthy uh great book um and again um I can't remember Matthew dicks that's the author so I go back um okay um uh and there's more but okay so what you've seen now is a whole bunch of stuff right you've seeing I let me recap this I'm listening on Audible I highlight on Kindle um once I pick up a book whenever I need to do it maybe not right away like you just saw when I

get to OB in I will then create um the library link for that book so it's in my library um and then I'll start my own booknotes page about that book and readwise will automatically take any highlights I have and import them into obsidian for me so when I use the metaphor of a kitchen what I'm trying to have is all the ingredients for me to think about and make notes about this book are at my fingertips why do I want that because because the best way I have found to really learn and work with

ideas is the find Men summary technique I'm going to write and resmar for my own benefit what I'm learning from this book and it will give me the clarity of which practices or habits I want to take away from this book so that I get at least one nugget if I'm going to invest time to listen to and read a book I want to make darn sure I get a takeaway and the more I connect ideas the more I um work with ideas that way I find I put more of those ideas into practice so

the number one reason I use obsidian the number one reason I use it this way is that it is about improving my knowledge and comprehension of topics that are going to make my life better and that's not just my life personally but the lives of the people around me making them better and uh I'll show you a more mature note um so let's take a look at wonder drug booknotes um this is a more mature note that I had done last January um and right away I was like hey this is super tightly linked with

another book uh called positivity by Barbara frickson so I immediately have a connection and if I went to that book it would backlink into this one so I could see how the ideas reciprocate with each other um I wrote my summary I came out with my key takeaway and I really highlighted this you know like for me give a but become a live to Giver um I copy the table of contents out of the Kindle and drop it in here so it's easy for me to navigate but one of the things that I frequently do

is this idea of next card this is an idea here's the summary of the book when I start breaking it down into little Atomic pieces I will then create a new note about just this idea and so these are the notes I have on how to put into practice becoming a Liv to giver and sure enough you can see here's another great book that's associated David Brooks how to know a person man if you're going to really make a difference in people's lives getting to know them is an integral part these two ideas complement each

other so guess what I've done I've Blended them together I'm not just practicing helping others I'm also PR practice and getting to know them better so I could be more effective when I help them those two ideas du tail together for me this is how I use this system so exactly the mechanics of the macros exactly where they're at how all the plugins work I'll go through each of those in separate videos so it's not so totally overwhelming but what you're looking at is the real reason I got into using a second brain and what

I discovered is that when I have all the information in one place it became logical to use that same set of tools to manage my projects to manage the areas of my life where I have my heart roles where do I want to show up and how do I want to show up and who do I want to show up for um and really this is what the resources are this is like all the other information that's in my life that I'm like oh I might as well stick it here because this is the best

tool I've ever found found for keeping and holding information that I'm actually going to do something with and revisit and connect with and reuse so what it's really done for me is it's 10x the value of any book I read any learning event I go to um or any seminar I take it has been hugely effective for me and I hope it could be hugely effective for you