![[CODE Method in Obsidian Callout]] > Get the right kind of music going B) ## Brainstorming %% Let the ideas flow %% ### Topic %%What is the big idea you're writing about?%% ### Braindump %%Write out everything that comes to mind. A summary that can branch off into its related branches and sub-ideas %% #### Why distill? - The point of this stage is to distill your notes to serve your future self - You need to distill the content you consume into notes you can easily look back upon in the future #### Progressive Summarization - Tiago recommends doing this using progressive summarization: bold, highlight, make a summary - Bold - Try to highlight only 10% of the material you initially highlighted - When you find yourself revisiting a piece of content, bold the main points - Highlight - In Obsidian, you can use the different markdown formatting styles to do so - Use **bold** for first round, then ==highlight== for next round - This helps connect far away texts and ideas from your highlights - If you want to take your highlighting to the next level, you can download the `Highlightr` plugin, which will let you highlight in different colors for different use cases - Create a summary - I have a summary header in my input - For articles or videos it can be a few sentences, but for longer form content books, i create a separate note for it - you can learn about here - Round up most memorable quotes, summarize the book in three sentences, extract action items I can perform But what if I told you there was a new paradigm-shifting way of extracting the essence from your notes? - In school you were taught to take notes sequentially, organizing it by classes and writing down the information in the same structure as the teacher presents it - But with Obsidian, you can grow a web of ideas to compound your knowledge as you learn more - To do so, you need to learn how to create [[Conceptual notes]] To take effective conceptual notes, you need to follow these three principles: - Atomicity - Connectivity #### Atomicity - Atomicity means two things: - Notes should be small - Makes it easier to reuse - When you do connect, you're relating it to a specific idea, not just a general topic - Notes should focus on one idea - If we add too much in an atomic note, we're pretty much just creating a document again - If a piece of content has insights for a certain concept scattered throughout, you can create an atomic note to combine the information all into one place - By making atomic notes, we can use it as a foundation when consuming future content - we won't be prone to highlighting the same thing over and over again, since we'll already have the knowledge in our conceptual note Practice - To turn your linear notes like your highlights into atomic notes, I recommend using the bolded or highlighted parts as inspiration - Use the key term or point as a new note title, and brain dump your understandings and learnings - I can't really give any specific guidelines as what you want to turn into notes is highly subjective, but #### Connectivity - The point of connecting your notes is to understand and add nuance by building off of what you already know - Whether you make connections to things you know in your primary brain, or are stored in your second brain, you are critically putting in effort to understand the essence of the idea - As you link your notes together, you start to see relationships and patterns emerge that you usually wouldn't have been able to with linear note taking as you let ideas interact with each other - Actively connecting ideas mimic how our brain understands and consolidates information Application - I like Fei-Ling Tseng's idea compass framework, where each direction is a type of link you can make from a note - North links try to find the source or parent of the note - West links find similar notes - East links are for transformation, for finding constrasting ideas and challenging the note - South links are for what it causes To help prompt your own connection-making, ask yourself (or ChatGPT) the following questions: ``` NORTH: “Where does X come from?” what are its origin? what group/category does X belong to? what exists an order of magnitude higher? zoom out. what gave birth to X? what causes X WEST: “What is similar to X?” what other disciplines could X already exist in? what other disciplines could benefit from X? what are other ways to say/do X? SOUTH: “Where can X lead to?” what does X contribute to? what group/category could X be the headline of? what exists an order of magnitude lower? zoom in. what does X nurture? EAST: “What competes with X?” what is the opposite of X? what is X missing? its disadvantage? what could supercharge X? ``` #### Examples - If you'd prefer examples on how I turn my highlights into conceptual notes - Turn book into conceptual notes - I also have all my inputs published online https://notes.johnmavrick.com/my-inputs/my-inputs/ - Go to the "Finished" header to find notes I made conceptual notes with - Sometimes they will have nothing because I didn't feel a need to add it to my second brain though #### Action Items - Choose a piece of content you've recently made highlights for (bonus points if it was automatically transferred into Obsidian via your Capture system from the first lesson!) - Go through the highlights and follow Tiago Forte's progressive summarization method on the highlights - One round bold - One round highlight - Based off your highlights, create at least one conceptual note you can create - In your input note, link the new conceptual note you made - In your new conceptual note, use the note-making compass to think of connections you can make to other ideas and notes in your vault ### Conceptual notemaking - Two principles - atomic - [[Think in ideas, not documents]] - connected - Making connections between notes - Use compass method to organize them ### References %%Are there any notes, quotes, books, or other content that comes to mind that relate to the above?%% ## Organized Ideas %% Add structure and collaboration between the above ideas, turning them into an outline or actual notes %% ## Potential Outputs %% What can I use these notes for? %%