Obsidian Won't Make You Smarter (This Will)  So, in response to my recent video andpost about slow note taking, why Itake slow notes and why I usehandwritten notes for my books,Robert asked me in the blog post, whichwill be linked in the video along withall that stuff. If I likethat so much, what do I think of thenote card system that is touted byRobert Greene, Ryan Holiday, and a fewother authors? If some friction isgood in your notes, then why isn’t morefriction good in your notes? And today,that’s what we’re going to talk aboutbecause I do believe that there is an undeniable forcing factor to havinga note card where you have to grab a newnote and you have to go through someof your other notes to even figure outwhat it is you aregoing to talk about and where you’re going toput it in your notes. You have to dothat. But I don’t think that even thoughdigital systems don’t requirethis of you, I don’t think that it meansthat there isno way that this can’t happen, that youcan’t do these types of processes inyour digital notes. So, one of the first issues that peopleWhat people hit on when they talk about their digitalnotes is that they think there's goingto be some sort of magical forcing, likea forcing factor or forcing thing wherejust because they're using Zettelkasten orPKM or whatever, that because theyhave that, they're going to suddenly puta bunch of information in and good stuff'sgoing to come out. And it's just nottrue. It's just not true. You cannotdump a bunch of stuff into Obsidian, intowhatever other tool there is. There are so many out there, but you can't just dumpstuff in and expect to get good resultsout. Even with AI, I think a lot ofpeople do this where they think, "I'm going to dump a bunch ofinformation in, and I'm going to ask my AI assistanta question." I've seen this happen on Obsidian afew times where they say they're goingto ask an AI assistant a question andthey're going to get all this amazing insight, but you're not. You're only going to get some predictivetext based on your existing notes. Now, Ithink there's a place for AI withsome of your vaults, with some of yournotes, but we'll talk about that at somepoint in the future. So, what happens isAfter people have this magical thinking,you see this in the ObsidianReddit or in Obsidian forums. They say,"I got all these notes, and this isterrible. How do people even usethis?" And it's not good. Whatreally happens is the same with taskmanagers when people abandon taskmanagers and say whatever their newtool or their choice is. Right? They're onThings 3 if they're in the Macecosystem, and they go to OmniFocus. OmniFocus is so much better, and then,like a year later, like no way to do isthe better one. And then a year later,what is it? It's TickTick, and thenthey're back to Things 3. Honestly,Things 3 hasn'tchanged in years. There is noappreciable change they've made inThings 3 that makes it suddenly a betterchoice than when you were on it a coupleyears ago. But there was magicalthinking. You thought that because youpicked a new tool, suddenly it wouldmake everything better. That yourprocess would be better. But yourprocess is the problem in the firstplace. You had a bunch of crap you putinto your task manager you were neverWhat you're going to do in the first place. So whenyou do it to the next one, you'reoverloaded. You never prune. You neverthrow out all those things. I've talkedabout this a whole bunch of times. Andthe same thing happens with your notes. Just because you throw a bunch of contentin does not mean you're going to getmagical unicorns and rainbows out.Insert one of my favorite videosabout the Squatty Potty here.Introducingthe Squatty Potty. Yes, it will give youthe best poop of your life. Guaranteed.I don't just mean you bloated lords andhemorrhoidal ladies. And how do we take yourdigital notes from just pushing them tolike just a dumping ground intosomething that's actually worthwhile?And this is not the first time I'vetalked about it. I've talked about random notes. I’vetalked about it a bunch of different times.I'm going to link to a bunch of blogposts in the post that is linked inthis video where you can look at. I'lllink it. If there are videos,I'll try to have them up abovethroughout this video as well. One of the first and easiest strategies Idid was to take my notes and make surethat my open note is the same as mycreate new note. So, let’s show youhow we do that. I’m going to go superShift + 7. All right. And then we canbring it up.So you can see right here if I hitControl + O, I’m going to create a new note andhow do we do that? Command + Comma to getin here. We can come into our hotkeysand we can go. Quick switcher is Control + O andControl + N for new note is also in thequick switcher. That’s it! I don’t have aautomatically create a new note. Right? New note, create new note, blank. There isnothing there. There is no create newnote in the current tab. Everything is tiedinto the quick switcher. So, witheverything in the quick switcher,new note, right, open note,everything there. I’ve definitely foundtimes where I start typing a new note,and very rarely do I not take it.Do I go, "Oh, wait. I already hadsomething on this." But I often go,"Ooh, this other thing," and I open upanother note first, and I openup a second note first, and a third. Note, and then I add my new note, andthen I look at all the ideas together,and I cross-reference them all. So,that's one way. It kind of mimics theway you would do it with note cardsbecause you actually have to see yournotes as you go through them. Anothergreat way to do it is the smart randomnote plugin. We can look at that. Smartrandom note. Let's get me in the rightspot because I don't know everythingchanged on my cameras. So the smartrandom note plugin that is command commaand then we go to community plugins andwe can go to browse, and we go randomsmart random note right there. Okay. Sowhat does this do? This allows me to hitthis dice over here. Where is it? Did they change it?I don't even see it now. Of course, nowthat we're looking here. So what if wego to here, random open random note. Sothis is faded sunrandom.There you go. Pcam weekly random. Now Idon't actually do it in this format.Usually I actually have a workspace loadworkspace layout, and I have a randomnote one. This is going to take my mainnote off my other screen that I'm using. As reference. And this actually has thissearch. So, this actually means that inhere it takes my random note. Here'sthe dice. Now, the dice shows up and ittakes it and it only shows it if itmatches in these, right? If it's in mypath of notes, right there. If itmatches my tags or if it's in mysources, right? So, I shouldremember from my folders. So, that meansit's got to be in my tags folder. So, itexcludes some of my writing Ibelieve. It excludes a few thingsin here. So, I just don't see it. But itdoes show meanything in my sources, which is rightall my books, clippings, omnivore, readwise articles, and any other stuffI have in there. It shows me all ofthat. All right, so we've done the smartrandom notes, but there are still a fewother things I do. I haveshown a lot of this in myvideo on my Obsidian setup. We can lookat a little bit of it again, right? Igo in and we can hit over here and wecan see my citations if there are anyfor this. So, what is related to it? Right.This is the graph analysis plugin. I've been having trouble sometimes, andsometimes it's been working totallyfine. So I'm not exactly sure what'sbeen going on with it. We can do that rightthen. Something else we've looked at,Strange New Worlds can be a plugin thatyou use to show you how everythinglinks together.I've been playing withsome of the AI plugins lately to seehow they work and if they're actuallygoing to be useful for me. Although I haven't found them to be that usefulyet, because what I want to be able to do— like today, I was trying to figureout for my writing for the newsletter onSunday for the book club. I thought I had read aboutpolice being used to surveil the actionsof specifically Black people in the caseof this book that I was trying toremember, and that they get todecide what is activism and what isterrorism. I suppose is not the word thatDesmond Cole uses, because the book wasThe Skin We're In. But they're using it to police Black lives to make surethat they do, and Indigenous lives tomake sure that they don't. Things outside that would challengepower. And I couldn't remember it. Icouldn't remember it. And I was tryingto use an AI chatbot to say, "Ithink I've read this book. I know I havethis note." I tried a few differentways and I tried to get somethinglocally. It just didn't work. I ended upthinking about it when I went on my walkwith the dog after walking the kids toschool, whichis going to lead into mynext point: one of thebig things to do is to stop and taketime. One of the pitfalls of focusing on output,which is good, is that youshould be focusing on output with yourvault, not on input. Things you can get outof it, things you can develop from it. But one of the pitfalls can be that youfocus on fast output. You might think, "I got to get morethings out." If I haven’t gotten enough out,then I have a problem. And that's notsomething you should do. That’s not apitfall you should fall into becausefalling into the fast output pitfallmeans not knowing if it's good. You don’t even knowyet. You've got to make sure it's goodoutput. Primary good output. If it'sgood and it's fast, fine. Good, right? I'd rather see, you know,if you're writing, I'd rather see onething, one thing a month, one thing ayear, one really good thing a yearrather than six terrible things ina week. Like put out one good thing, andthat's it. That's far more important. Sotaking time is an important thing. Sowriting this post took me about40 minutes to outline. It took meanother 45 minutes to write. ThenI went through an editing process. Ithought about it. That'show I found all the links that you'llfind in the blog post version of thiswhen I'm linking to my notes on smartrandom notes. I'm talking about the besttools for connection, a whole bunchof other videos. I found a whole bunchof other blog posts that I wrote aboutthis. I only found that because I tookthe time. My first pass at this, when I had some headings and some ideasin there, did not have all this extrastuff. All it had was like, here's theidea. Here's why I think this mightwork. And then my second pass also didn't haveeverything I have. So remember, it's notabout speed, it's about stopping andThinking. If you're not going to stopand think, then yeah, you're justnot going to get goodwork. So yes, while I think that RobertGreene, Ryan Holiday, whoever uses note cards, there issomething to it. I don't think thatit's a magical solution. I think it's agood system and you can develop a goodsystem, a good way to use your digitalvault so that you get a lot of thesame benefits that they see out of theirphysical note card, where it forces thesystem on you because you have to touchstuff. So you have to be intentional. I keep coming back to that at the end of last year and this year.When you are suddenly intentional,it's amazing how good things turn out assoon as you get intentional with it. Sobe intentional with it. Be intentionalwith honestly everything. If you'regoing to listen to music, listen tomusic. Pick something you're going tolisten to and enjoy it. Take thetime if you're going to really write. Ifyou want to look through yournotes, look through your vault anddevelop some good ideas, stop. Take thetime to do that. Just do that. Don’t doSix other things at the same time. Justfocus on that. That's it. If you likethe video, thumbs up below. Subscribe, all that YouTube stuff.You know where it is. You want tojoin, get this in emailnewsletter format. If you preferthat for some reason, you can get thatat curtismale.ca,which is the number-reads, or you canpick up the book newsletter,curtismale.ca/book club. I do not talkabout book club books on YouTube, sothat's the only way to get that. Three,four posts pretty much every week.That's it. Have an awesome day., Obsidian Won't Make You Smarter (This Will), YouTube, 01kf907fx8njngeagaf30dmbvw.