*Estimated reading time: 10 minutes* %% Welcome to Weekly Wonderings, a newsletter exploring Digital Self-Actualization: > Systematically realize your full potential in the digital age through the practical mix of digital tools, life management systems, and humanistic philosophies 🌌 In the upcoming weeks I'll be sharing some cool new ideas and updates related to my complete Obsidian overview tour and I wouldn't want you to miss out on it 🥺 I've spent the past 30 days obsessively clarifying my philosophy and systems to start sharing it with you, but there's been one problem… I found my last email in spam on my alternate Gmail account 😭 I'm assuming its because of all the frequent links to notes in my digital galaxy, so I would greatly appreciate it if you could take 10 seconds to add [email protected] as a contact and mark this email as not spam to make sure it doesn't happen when it matters most :) Thanks in advance 🫡 %% ## Galactic Overview 🌌 - PUBLIC documentation for the Ultimate Starter Vault 🤯 - Understanding the purpose and practicality of PKM 🤔 - Finding your strongest idea 💪 - 2-hour video of my 2024-Q1 review and planning 😳 - My new shining stars 🌟 You can read the full edition with links to all the related notes in my digital galaxy here. ## PUBLIC documentation for the Ultimate Starter Vault 🤯 The founding principles of my Obsidian setup I use on a daily basis are not my own. The plugins I use are not made by my own labor. So what would make it fair for me to paywall it? Just greed and ego? As I've been pondering the morality on creator monetization, I realized I want to try and not be a [[Capitalist Creator]]. Instead, I want to find a balance of monetization and accessibility. This led to me adding documentation for my main digital product, the [[Ultimate Starter Vault]] 👀 If you want a detailed explanation on the philosophies, features, and workflows of my Obsidian setup, you can visit [[USV Documentation]] 🥳 So far the biggest public-facing documentation has been related to [[My Alignment Philosophy]], but eventually this will be the go-to place people who purchase the USV will go to understand how to use the vault so it's only a matter of time until it's all explained. I've also been playing around with [[Excalidraw Plugin]] to see if I can set up diagrams in my digital galaxy and it seems to work surprisingly well with links being supported 🤯 You can see a horrendously rough example below: ![[Digital Galaxy.excalidraw.svg]] If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to let me know :) ## Understanding the purpose and practicality of PKM 🤔 As I prepare to work on [[Ultimate Starter Vault V2.0]], my upcoming [[My Second Brain Setup for 2024]] video, and figuring out how I can convince the average gamer to adopt something as obscure as personal knowledge management, there was a big question shadowing over all of them: **How do I comprehensively explain what I use Obsidian and PKM for and how I use it for each use case? 😅** Despite using the app on a daily basis and making countless videos and resources, I don't know how to best answer this 😭 So as with any other existential dilemma, this led me to use my [[Brainstorms]] template in the vault with a dedicated space to answer this question: [[Understanding PKM]]. When putting [[My brainstorming workflow in action]], I came to the main 3 use cases: - Understanding the world to cultivate [[Wisdom]] - Generating new insights through self-expression and creativity - Productivity through action and effective knowledge retrieval If you want to see how I achieve each benefit, you can visit my note on [[USV and Personal Knowledge Management]]. I think this is a good start, but I'm still grappling with the definition of "creativity" as I feel that the emphasis on introspection can be separated into its own use case for personal growth, and creativity can be fully for artistic manifestation and expression. If you have any suggestions I'm open to hear 😎 ## Finding your strongest idea 💪 What is your strongest idea in Obsidian? By strongest, I mean: - Most mentioned by other notes (backlinks) - Most developed (outgoing links) I created a query to list my notes by most total links, here's mine with 146 (plus some other cool statistics and how you can check yourself) 👇 https://twitter.com/johnmavrick_yt/status/1779463256974770422 (I would just link to the note equivalent in my published notes if I could… but with X recently making their API pay-to-use I haven't found a convenient way to do so 🥲)  ## My 3 hour 2024-Q1 review and planning 😳 The first quarter of 2024 has been a monumental yet welcoming lifestyle change. Wandering off the default path from my secure journey as as software developer to instead fully explore what it means to live as an intrinsically-driven creator. So far it's led me to be less productive and robotic, letting me adopt a humanistic mindset for connecting with family and friends before I say goodbye from the bustling urban city of Vancouver and back into my childhood city. It's given me ample time to reflect and contemplate on what an ideal life would look like given such autonomy, and how I can actualize it through my work with the sudden calling to become an educational Vtuber. But to work towards such a vague and ambitious vision, I need some clarity through tangible actions I can slowly take within. Fortunately [[My quarterly review workflow]] has helped with that tremendously 😁 After 3 straight hours of comprehensive review, elaborate reflection, and systematic planning, I felt immense appreciation for the past and clarity for the future. Thanks to [[My Alignment Philosophy]] system, I loosely followed the [[The 12 Week Year]] and came up with the following quarterly breakdown: My Q2 goal is to create a conceptual and practical skeleton for [[Digital Self-Actualization]]. It's going to be a bit of a stretch on top of having to move and making time for social events as I leave Vancouver, but I'm aiming for it with the hopes that in Q3 I'll be fully ready to start streaming and going all-in on this new brand direction with the systems to support me 🤞 One of these key goals was to have a comprehensive **digital** system to help support a clear path to **self-actualization**. I broke down the first goal into two parts: - Release Ultimate Starter Vault 2.0 alongside a comprehensive Obsidian video tour showcasing the key areas of productivity, life design, and personal knowledge management - Create publishable videos on each of the 8 stages in [[The Deep Life Stack V2]] to use as a vague framework for helping people achieve self-actualization. This will be used as the foundation for my curriculum when I do lecture streams or make a video series. Following the 12-week year, I broke down the quarter into, well, 12 weeks duh 🙄 First I knew that I had to give myself ample time to work on each of the eight stages, so I just set those to be one week each. This meant I had four weeks to release version 2.0. I initially wanted to have to iterations, one for functional updates and one for improving the documentation, so I thought of the following: 1. Finish making 1.8 changes 2. Upload Obsidian video 3. Finish 2.0 changes 4. Update marketing material (emails, landing pages, etc.) So now that my 12 weeks were planned, it was time to set up systems and actions to help me actually make progress 😅 But things can change, and expecting things to be fully in your control is delusional. This is why I [[Keep goals adjustable and short-term]], and mostly use these weeks and goals for a higher-order understanding on whether the plan is feasible. By only planning my future week ahead of me, I create detailed and probable tasks for the upcoming days, which are then organized and clarified with my [[Projects]] note. This gives me information I can look back upon at the end of the week to help me better estimate the pace and required work for the remaining part of my goal, and the nature of the [[Projects#Weekly Progress]] iteration helps me be mindful of making those adjustments. So instead of focusing on the tasks, I focused on the systems. To keep it simple and streamlined, I clarified what this finished weekly result would look like through the [[Deep Life Stack Phase Writing Outline]], and I imagined assigned a certain checkpoint for each day of the week: 1. Brainstorm for outline 2. Why (Point) 3. Personal experiences (story) 4. Mindset shifts (metaphor) 5. Strategies + homework (USV or digital tools implementation) 6. Revision after feedback from [[Writing Group]] 7. Share amongst socials like newsletter Now, to remind myself to do this on a daily basis, I'll be repurposing my existing habit for my yearly goal [[Elaborate on DSA through philosophy and workflows]], which was [[My Habits/Writing|Writing]] for 2 hours on a daily basis as the foundation for my content. If you want to see the video, I have an unfiltered 2-hour video on my Patreon where I go over: - An overview of my quarterly reflection - A demonstration of how I used the principles of [[The 12 Week Year]] inside my [[Ultimate Starter Vault]] to create the [[My Quarterly Goals]] and smaller objective you see above If you're interested, you can see the preview [here](https://www.patreon.com/posts/obsidian-2024-q1-101654126?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=join_link). So far it's been 14 days since the quarterly review, and I'd like to think it's been holding up 😎 Like most future plans I did have to shift my expectations by combining V1.8 and V2.0 into just one update, but I feel like I'm still on track to complete it by this month. ## My new shining stars 🌟 *A place to share the new stars and constellations inside my digital galaxy* *These were mostly resurfaced thanks to viewing my [[Weekly Reviews#New notes|query to show all new notes from the week]] as part of my [[My weekly review workflow]].* ### Inputs I finished reading [[Range Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World]], and found it to be confirmation bias for not continuing my post-secondary education and falling deeper into the personal knowledge management rabbit hole 😎 In the book it claims that in a wicked world of uncertainty, the rote memorization and specialization school trains you for will be useless as those are dependent on established environments with little change. Instead, [[Generalist|generalists]] with multi-domain knowledge have a broader toolset and trained capacity for generating solutions. With emerging technology like AI and opportunities like the creator economy, I'm curious to see how wicked this world will continue to be 🤔 I still have yet to process the notes though, but will probably mention it in a future edition when I do! ### Quotes ![[My Inputs/My Books/The Pathless Path#^ti2u7x]] I've been reading posts on subreddits containing people's reactions to the amount of marketing and AI-generated content online nowadays, but I never fully understood until I took a step back and observed the digital environment around me. I disabled AdBlock once and realized how much I'd been taking my distraction-free environment completely for granted. Majority of artistic creator revenue comes from sponsorships since they don't want to monetize their creativity. If they do end up monetizing it, they end up just constantly promoting their own products. There's no escape to being sold to on the internet. I'm definitely guilty as I market my [[Ultimate Starter Vault]] in the start of my videos so it does have that lingering undertone, so it's been an interesting dilemma on how to navigate between self-promoting to try and grow as an entrepreneur but also preserving the internet of its purity. I think I agree with the article [[Are We Watching the Internet Die]] where we need to not focus so much on growth but also just focus on the qualitative impact as well, which I did manage to come to when reading [[The Pathless Path Application]] and my personal reflections. In reality, information is free. [[Give the solution, sell the implementation]]. %% ### Notes On a similar vein, I've been questioning what the line is between someone overly optimistic about human potential and being an [[Online Creator Frauds]]. I've been binging a lot of content on people critiquing any type of motivational speaker: - Tony Robbins - Brendon Burchard - Even creators like Ali Abdaal selling the Part Time Youtuber Academy as "false dreams" From what I know as long as you don't ask for a stupid amount of money it should be fine %% ## Upgrade your personal knowledge management system If you want to collect cool ideas and create things like I try to, you can learn from any of my free email courses below: 🧠 [Organize your life and knowledge with your own second brain in Obsidian](https://free.johnmavrick.com/code-method) 📃 [Get my 4-day Obsidian beginner course with 20+ templates](https://free.johnmavrick.com/obsidian-templates) 👩‍🏫 [3 Days to Lecture Note Taking Mastery](https://course.aidanhelfant.com/3daystolecturenotetakingmastery?ref=JohnMavrickYT) 🤖 [Get the Ultimate Guide to using AI for PKM with 15+ prompts and AI search](https://free.johnmavrick.com/ai-pkm) Anyways if you managed to read (or skip to) this far, I didn't realize I wrote 2200 words in one sitting without any use of AI 😭 I hope there was food for thought and I am always open to hear from you :) This has been John Mavrick, stay mindful ✌️