Welcome to Weekly Wonderings, a newsletter exploring the journey towards Digital **Self-Actualization**: > *realizing our meaningful potential through the synthesis of digital tools, life management systems, and humanistic philosophies* Here's a quick galactic overview of this edition: - [[#An app to augment your short-term memory 🧠]] - [[#On rekindling old passions 🔥]] - [[#The series that has been intellectually and behaviorally challenging me 🤯]] - [[#A new podcast episode 🎧]] - [[#Obsidian for executives 💼]] ## In My Life I know I've been inconsistent with following through on some of my recent announcements, but you can always expect the unexpected 😅 ### An app to augment your short-term memory 🧠 Obsidian has been a powerful tool for augmenting my long-term memory. It helps me deeply encode knowledge and experiences through [[Note-making]], manage my life with productivity systems, and store essential ideas I’ll need to return to in the future. But is there a similar tool for our short-term memory? Unfortunately, my ADHD symptoms of inattentiveness, impulsivity, and poor working memory only amplify my need for external tools to accommodate my biological limitations. When ideas are most fleeting, like on walks, I can’t just pull out my phone, open Obsidian, wait for it to load, look for the note I wanted to write, and then finally type my thoughts. The initial spark would’ve been gone, smothered by many distractions and related ideas. Instead, could this be as frictionless as conversing with your phone or smartwatch? I can already achieve this by using the native text-to-speech typing option on my keyboard, but if the text is a long ramble with lots of filler words, it will take me extra time to clean it up. What if your thoughts could be automatically refined into an ideal format with respect to what you said? Automatic titles, formatting, and transcription cleaning while still preserving the way you think. Unlike most capture or voice-first note-taking apps, which require you to manually format and clean your notes after you dump them, what if the app were truly intelligent and could automatically do this for you based on the content of your thoughts? It’s almost 2025; technology has horrifically failed us if we still have to spend our precious seconds in life fixing our punctuation and grammar 😵‍ Furthermore, what if these ideas in our short-term memory could be automatically moved into the appropriate parts of your "long-term memory" in Obsidian, like creating new notes or adding them to existing notes like your daily journal? I can begin speaking to my phone about a specific task or experience. From there, it can be automatically formatted into my ideal nested bullet lists while preserving my introspective tone. Then, the next time I open Obsidian, I can see it inside my daily note for that day, ready for revisiting during my end-of-day reflections. When I voice tasks I must complete for a project, the app automatically organizes them into an actionable task list. It imports them into the tasks header in my project note. If I start brainstorming an idea for a YouTube video, I can organize the content to follow the structure of my YouTube script template for me to continue fleshing out. When I open it, I can suggest related thoughts with similar ideas to use as further food for thought when refining the script. These use cases I mentioned have been the rough visions of the app I've been developing for the past month in a small team alongside an old coworker: Goldfish Notes — the first app made specifically for the poor fish with even poorer memory 🥲 We've been able to create an MVP for the auto-formatting part of the app and shared it with some friends and family, but it's going to be a pretty long way to go until it'll be available for use 😅 However, if you're interested in an app like this, I'd love to hear from you. :) There are already a lot of voice-first note-taking or quick-capture apps out there, but I haven’t found one that pairs modern technologies with neuroscience the way I would prefer with my personal experiences with personal knowledge management, Obsidian, and ADHD. But beyond this new spark of a vision, working on this app has also rekindled an old fire within. ### On rekindling old passions 🔥 In February, I quit my programming internship because the work felt more like a repetitive chore than the intrinsic passion I've naturally obsessed over. On the other hand, my friend Matthew always gives his absolute focus and determination to whatever he works on, which seems like an enigma. How could you be so hyper-fixated on working on coding or startups, where you'd have to use the logical side of your brain for 10+ hours a day? Do you not feel mentally exhausted by the end? But before my relationship with coding drifted apart, there was always something intrinsically motivating about the activity that kept me in a prolonged state of flow. Fortunately, I've been able to tap into that magic again while building this app. Maybe for you, it’s the niche topic you were curiously exploring and taking notes on but is now collecting dust. Or an old hobby that slowly faded away as other responsibilities took over. For me, using AI to self-learn new topics like current AI capabilities and mobile development has been super fun! Seeing it all visually come to fruition through an MVP of the app in 3 days has been fulfilling. It’s been a while since I’d willingly spent 30ish hours in 3 days on such an intellectually challenging task without any regrets. The constant growth from this self-learning and applied learning is the epitome of [[Freedom|Autonomy]] and [[My Resources/My MOCs/Mastery|Competence]]  from [[Self-determination theory]]. Experiencing synergized collaboration with other passionate and skilled people has helped me compensate for my lack of design skills while picking up where the team needs me, whether on the front end, back end, operations, etc. It's the extreme filter to prevent “productivity porn” — instead of mindlessly consuming information without it not having any practical or meaningful value, project-based learning has helped me better internalize concepts and practices better than my school lectures ever did. Beyond [[Propositional knowing]] and more into [[Non-propositional knowing]]. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by everything I have to learn and the unexpected coding challenges I have to overcome, having AI as my programming assistant has been monumental for keeping me in these engaging states of flow and growth. Being able to combine my diverse interests—tools for thought, entrepreneurship, product management, front-end development, and harnessing the power of AI—into this unique blend has made me remember the unparalleled fulfillment of being a generalist and pursuing a pathless path. This mindset brings me back to the start of my self-improvement journey: my senior year of high school, a time when I was writing scholarship essays and applications with an ambitious hope for the future — to stretch myself beyond my limits and figure out a unique path of purpose during my journey of self-actualization. But as much as I enjoy all of this, it's also suddenly amplified by my ADHD tendencies. Since quitting my job, my main priority has been attending to all the areas of my life. When I get into these coding states, I neglect the balanced life I've been cultivating, causing chaos in my habit trackers and [[Wheel of life]] ratings… Fortunately, my life design systems have been helping me stay grounded and aware, making this hyper-fixation a conscious activity I accept rather than an unregulated compulsion. I have still committed to enough time to feel satisfied, but not to the level of my ideal balanced days. The idea that this might not work out is also concerning. Startups are statistically unprofitable, and putting so much time and commitment into something makes me feel even more uncertain, in addition to my efforts toward my creator journey. A part of me questions whether it would be wiser to apply these programming skills to something with greater job security, but I know that would be acting out of survival and limiting my growth. I wouldn’t want to lose this passion once more. This has also made me think about my relationship with hyper-fixation. Is it a signal for meaning and fulfillment of our values, or is it just a disguised form of hedonism that only distracts us from living a balanced life? I guess that’ll be for another writing 😅 ## My new shining stars 🌟 _A place to share the new stars and constellations inside my digital galaxy_ ### Inputs #### The series that has been intellectually and behaviorally challenging me 🤯 I haven't been reading much as most of my focus has been understanding and applying the 24-episode lecture series I mentioned in last newsletter, [[After Socrates]]. This is the slowest I've gone through a YouTube video or any piece of media, but I've found this effortful note-making to be worth it. As I've progressed through the lectures alongside Aidan, I'm increasingly finding it more difficult to internalize the ideas and intended experiences from the practices. To better understand, I've also been using a bit of [[NotebookLM]] to meet my level of comprehension by continuously asking it to break it down. Any new insights I come across are added to my existing conceptual notes on the topics to help me better grasp the ideas. Unfortunately, I can't do the same for internalizing the practices 🥲 The meditations require a deep conceptual and experiential form of engagement, one that I have yet to cultivate. And If you're interested in some of the notes, you can visit any of my input notes on the lectures, but I highly recommend that you watch the lectures yourself. ### A new podcast episode 🎧 In a new episode of [[My Podcast]] with my best friend Aidan Helfant, we explore the topic of self-learning — how it relates to self-actualization, our favorite strategies, and tools for doing so, as well as what we've been recently self-learning like the app I've been working on! If you enjoyed my reflection above, this could be a relevant episode. ### Obsidian for executives 💼 On top of my coding adventures, I've also been doing contract work to help create an Obsidian dashboard specifically designed for executives and business owners. It's intriguing to see the parallels between a robust productivity system like my [[Ultimate Starter Vault]] and the operations of a business. This has stolen the bandwidth for working on a new update for the USV as I had planned for this quarter, but it's been fun exploring the different use cases beyond personal productivity and PKM! ## My Free Resources Thank you for being a part of this journey :) If you want to level up your productivity or personal knowledge management, you can check out the following free resources: 🧠 [Organize your life and knowledge by building your second brain](https://free.johnmavrick.com/code-method) 📃 [Get my FREE 4-part Obsidian beginner course with 20+ templates](https://free.johnmavrick.com/obsidian-templates) 🕸️ [Set up a powerful zettelkasten in Obsidian for learning](https://free.johnmavrick.com/zettelkasten) 👩‍🏫 [3 Days to Lecture Note Taking Mastery](https://course.aidanhelfant.com/3daystolecturenotetakingmastery?ref=JohnMavrickYT): 🤖 [Get my FREE Ultimate Guide to using AI for PKM with 15+ prompts](https://free.johnmavrick.com/ai-pkm)