beginner. Hi, I'm Nick Milo, and welcome to linking your thinking, where we talk about

the how and why of making meaningful notes. Let's get started. Okay, let's start by downloading

Obsidian. Go to Safari, type in Obsidian.md and just download the latest version. Allow

that to download, close this. Once it's done, open it up and simply drag it into applications.

So I've already done that, and I've put it into my doc here. So let's open it up first

time, it should look like this for you. And it's saying open folder as vault, create a

new vault what's a vault vault is simply a folder that obsidian is looking at for its

files. So let's create a new vault and let's just call it folder and browsing location.

Let's put that folder on the desktop. And let's create it. Here it is. So what we see

is it just it's right here. That's all it is. Simple folder. Okay, so this is obsidian

we're in, this is what it looks like, a little intimidating. I want you just to focus on

this button, a new note. That's the most important note right now. So let's click on that. gonna

blow it up a little bit. Right away. It allows us to change the title up here. Let's call

this guy note star. Our very first note, I hit Tab puts my cursor here, and I'm just

going to say hi, I'm a new note. That's all No sir is just saying I'm a new note. So what

we want to see here is that if we go back to the desktop in this folder, this is note

star. That's it. the.md file. markdown, which is the same as a plain text file that you

can open up with TextEdit, which is on any Mac in the world. It's plain text is a type

of format that as long as there are computers, there will be computers that can read plain

text. And that's what we mean by different term future proofing that we'll get to later.

Now going back to obsidian, we've made a note but what happens when we want to make a second

note, remember this new note, new note, Okay, and let's call this one.

Never note.

No one likes me. Pay only like, this is the first magical moment in a software that can

make links. I'm gonna hit bracket bracket which pulls up a list of all my notes and

I'm going to select note star. They only Like note star. Now if I do a click on note star,

it takes me back to that original note.

That is a huge, huge game changer. I mean, I'm getting goosebumps here. Because once

we start linking our thinking, it opens up a whole new avenue of thinking, honestly,

it kind of reopens at the avenue of how our brains actually work. So we're kind of getting

closer to what feels natural. bliss. Let's use like a real situation on this. Imagine

you have a favorite movie, we all have our favorite movies. For me, one of my favorite

movies is the matrix. It comes up all the time in conversations. I'm thinking about

the red pill and the blue pill and choices. So why not kind of externalize that in this

piece of software. So let's go back to New No, MC and say the matrix and I have pre written

one sentence So, first off, what am I trying to do here? I'm not trying to make a critique

of the movie, I could, I absolutely could. But for my purposes, what I like are the ideas,

the concepts that I that I glean from different sources such as movies like The Matrix, and

Morpheus presents Neil with this choice, the infamous red pill, blue pill. And so what

I'm going to do is just highlight this, I'm actually just going to hit the bracket, and

then bracket button again. And so I've created a potential new note. Now once I click on

it, now it's a new note over here, here it is, right? That's pretty cool. That's really

powerful. That's awesome. So what's so cool about red pill blue pill? Well, it's really

about choices and the willingness to to have one's beliefs challenged. And you know, the

more I thought about this concept I threw in a second sentence, which is perhaps it's

so difficult to take the red pill Because we lose that sense of control, right? And

sense of control, it's definitely something that's integral to a lot of my thinking about

when I, you know, feel in charge of what I'm trying to accomplish. And other times when

I feel like chaos is taking over. So I know that's a note in the future that I want to

create. But here's the thing, right? Now, I can just add these brackets, and it won't

create the new note until I click on it. So it's just kind of a placeholder, it's a reminder

for myself. Here's the other thing though, this reminds me of something. So I might type

here. Related, and let's call this adversity paradox. Cool. Now let's click on it to create

the new note. adversity paradox. And so the adversity paradox is this crazy idea that

we're never really seeking out adversity in our lives. But when we find it, we tend to

grow from it. So it's the idea that we get Stronger from the stressors in our lives.

I mean, that's pretty fascinating to me. So I'm thinking about this idea. And it makes

me think immediately to a book that I had to read in high school and I fell in love

with actually is by Viktor Frankl and is Man's Search for Meaning. And he makes the argument,

he's a Holocaust survivor. He was, and he makes the argument that it's not sex that

brings us meaning, like Freud would say, it's not power that brings us meaning, like Adler

said, it's suffering that brings us meaning. Now, like, nowhere in the adversity paradox,

is the concept of Viktor Frankl. But because of how our brains work from our own personal

experiences, in this case, mine, I was able to make this connection. And to me, this is

really powerful. And this is the power of linking your thinking is because you can create

these thoughts over time and they start to grow and build which we'll get into more.

So I'm just going to make the victor from Note I'm not going to touch it right now.

And I'm going to go back to the adversity paradox.

What else? What else? What else?

Maybe

never note could learn a thing or two from this concept. Alright, so now we tied Evernote

back into this. And this takes us to the next really cool aspect of linking your thinking

which is backlinks also known as linked mentions. So right now check this out. We're in this

note called adversity paradox. And it has a link mentioned to red pill blue pill. Let's

click back to that. Now what does that mean? on red pill blue pill it links to the adversity

paradox. So going back to the adversity paradox, here's the link mentioned right Now that we're

at red pill blue pill, we have that the matrix links to it, right. And we can even read in

context that it says Morpheus presents Neo with the choice. So we can click on that.

And now we're back to the matrix now. So that's how these linked mentions work. And it's a

great way, as you look at OneNote, to see all of the different connections that you've

made, which takes us to the last point, the last part of this demo, which is the graph

view.

Now check this out. This is pretty cool.

This is what we made in the program today. We started with note star, basically never

note didn't like note star, and was jealous of note star. And so when we linked the two

we formed a new relationship. And now these two notes are linked. And we can we can build

context through that link. And then never note. Well, we didn't go in this order, but

now it's connected to the adversity paradox. Which is connected to Viktor Frankl. adversity

paradox is also connected to red pill blue pill, which is connected to the matrix. So

in this way we have created all sorts of contextual goodness. So let's take a step back in a short

amount of time. We've made all sorts of new connections. We've externalized them in a

program like obsidian, and we started to grow them and cultivate them. And the magic is,

let's go back in because let's say a year passes, and I get back to this red pill, blue

pill, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, this reminds me of something that just happened

yesterday to me and I and I write this in. This reminds me of something that just happened,

etc, etc. And so do we see what's happening here? This note doesn't lose its value over

time. Its value actually grows in time as I have more experiences and I externalized

experiences, the connections grow. Why is this important? First and foremost, when you

link your thinking, you improve your ability to recall those memories, those those thoughts,

those ideas. And that's the most important thing. We want to be able to have confidence

that we can find what we're looking for when we want to find it. That is first and foremost.

And when we link we have a better chance of remembering. Secondly, it allows us to build

things as we're seeing here. So we might not start with the perfect, Michelangelo sculpted

out of marble, but we can get there slowly over time, right? And that's just through

our own experiences that we're adding value to our existing collection of thoughts. But

practically, you might be thinking, why is this important? Well, it depends. I mean,

if you're somebody who is a creator, this is the perfect way to create a new article,

or make a new speech, because you've already done 80% of the work. Now is just crafting

it and honing it for whatever particular medium that you hope to deploy it in. But I find

that a lot of value just comes from having conversations with other people. And and having

this in the back of my mind, I'm making all sorts of leaps of insights across genres and

domains. And it just makes every conversation that you enter that much more interesting

and fun and engaging. Because now when you're listening, you're more actively engaged because

you're trying to, you know, understand, whatever that person is saying, in some other concepts

that you've taken some time to really flesh out. And this is where newness and novelty

comes from. And that's going to wrap up our first video on the basics of obsidian. We

didn't just cover the how but we really dove into the why. And I hope you can start to

see why this is so exciting. Hey, if you like this video, it's the first in a series of

videos on covering the note making up obsidian as if you are a complete beginner. If you

liked it, please subscribe below because there will be Many more. If you liked it also, hey,

give it a thumbs up, make a comment down below. I'll do my best to answer. I'm so thankful

that you watch and look forward to seeing you in the next video.