## Progress Packaging - [x] Think of possible titles and thumbnail, run through thumbnail principles and checklist - [x] Think of a pair as you create the video Video outline - [ ] Hook satisfies title and thumbnail - [ ] Structure planned out Video editing - [ ] Recut to trim for Descript - [ ] Descript - [ ] Video Edit - [ ] Watched through it once - [ ] Thumbnail - [ ] Description - [ ] Share on YouTube post, Twitter, and Discord - [ ] Share on next newsletter ## Weekly Progress ```button name Add New Weekly Progress type command action QuickAdd: Insert Project Weekly Progress Addon ``` %% Weekly Progress Start %% ### [[2024-W19]] #### W19 Plan `INPUT[textArea(placeholder(Plan)):P-W19]` #### W19 Reflection `INPUT[textArea(placeholder(Reflection)):R-W19]` ### [[2024-W18]] #### W18 Plan `INPUT[textArea(placeholder(Plan)):P-W18]` #### W18 Reflection `INPUT[textArea(placeholder(Reflection)):R-W18]` ## Details - [[Critiquing Odysseas Obsidian Video Slides]] ### Packaging - My problem with Odysseas - Psychology of click - Curiosity - Should I include his name? ### Title #### Old Odysseas: Learning genius or fraud? (Critiquing his Obsidian and Zettelkasten setup) Odysseas: Learning genius or creator fraud? (Critiquing his Obsidian and Zettelkasten setup) Odysseas: The truth about self-learning gurus & advice (Critiquing his Obsidian and Zettelkasten setup) **What emotion are you trying to convey?** - critical thinking #### New Enhance your self-learning with this Obsidan zettelkasten setup? My in-depth Obsidian Zettelkasten critique for self-learning The true power of self-learning in Obsidian The potential of Obsidian for self-learning What makes Obsidian special for the zettelkasten method? but then the question is, if i get rid of the idea of self-education, i might as well get rid of the parts related to criticism? The true power of self-learning in Obsidian The true power of Obsidian for self-learning with the zettelkasten method The unique power of Obsidian for self-learning (Zettelkasten setup guide) Unleash the power of Obsidian for self-learning with the zettelkasten method (Full setup + download) Creating a powerful zettelkasten setup using Obsidian ### Thumbnail #### New - Usual thumbnails - What is my focus? - Self-learning - Transition thumbnail - Show notion, physical notes, apple notes - Obsidian logo on the right #### Old Simple highlighted text (maybe red): text is either all top with use multiple passions dude thumbnail at bottom, or mimics lines in text and then has his thumbnails / profile pictures? background is red zettelkasten overlay images of obsidian after, back-up is "The dark truth of the zettelkasten method" Odysseas: Zettelkasten genius or learning fraud? A measured response alternative words: - obsidian - polymath "full guide and setup" background is red zettelkasten overlay ### Description 🤩 Download the enhanced Obsidian zettelkasten setup https://free.johnmavrick.com/zettelkasten Odysseas has had a meteoric rise showcasing the power of self-education to become a modern renaissance man. His secret weapon has been to learn and write using obsidian, which is the app he's personally crowned as the king of learning tools. But I question: Is his advice also fit for the throne? This is because of two major criticisms i have: First is his credibility. is he really staying true to promoting proper self-education, or is he actually hindering it? Second, from my 3 years of experience with using Obsidian for the same reason, i feel like his advice is outdated, oversimplified, and doesn't showcase obsidian's true potential as a learning tool. so instead, i'll also be critiquing and improving his learning setup later in the video. Credits: BlockBuster 🎥 No Copyright Lofi Hip Hop & Chillhop Mix 2021 \_ Chill lofi beats to study / relax to Websites and creators were mentioned in the slides Extra resources I mention in the video can be found in my zettelkasten vault or published notes Critiquing a lack of sources and potential credibility is inspired by Hbomberguy's plaigarism video, Coffeezilla's exploration of online creators, and Danny Hatcher's usual contrarian views on PKM Youtubers 00:50 - My experience with self-education 02:19 - Crticism 1 - Credibility 07:23 - I do not think his setup is good 08:21 - My suggestions + free download SETUP CRITICISMS AND SUGGESTIONS 09:23 - Folders suggestions 11:02 - Fixing templates 17:38 - Improving Log notes 20:53 - Improving Source notes 28:58 - Improving Tag notes 34:50 - Improving Index notes 43:00 - On growing notes ### Tags ## Planning https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTy_BInQs8 ### Five W's **Details:** **Reason for success:** bandwagoning off of his success lol **What is my audience and how can I cater towards them?** people who watch odyseas, starting to get into obsidian **Personal/Channel Benefits:** awareness **Main ideas/messages:** ### How **Extra preparation/research needed:** **Presentation style:** %% What kind of video will it be?%% **Contents of script:** %% What are the main categories and key takeaways? %% **Contents of visuals:** **Helpful resources and materials:** ## Outline - [ ] Intro less predatory - [ ] Something else ### Intro **Hook** - %% but i don't think his video proves why the app is fit for the throne %% Odysseas has had a meteoric rise showcasing the power of linked note-taking in Obsidian. Recently he's even crowned it the king of learning tools, %%but I question if his advice is also fit for the throne%%. This is because of two main reasons: - First is the setup itself, which he showed in this video. It is helpful for beginners starting and shares important principles, but I think it's shallow, outdated, and doesn't use Obsidian to its full potential. The truth is, there are simple but powerful changes that can be made to his setup, which I will show later in this video. - Second is his credibility. He is just sharing what he's personally found helpful for other people to follow, and that's okay. But coming from a fellow creator, when you have thousands listening to your advice and you establish authority with these extreme statements, i feel transparency is crucial by showing your work or sources. But from what I know, the things he's advocating for like atomic notes aren't published anywhere except his videos telling you how to do the same. He deserves privacy and it is for his own learning, but there are existing solutions to publish your notes, and I feel doing so can help people further learn from his writings, gain real-life examples of his use cases, and prove critics like me wrong. There are free ways to do so like Quartz, but it also doesn't hurt to take some of that ad revenue and pay for obsidian publish to also support the creators of the app :) **Brief outline of topics covered:** - So in this video I'll be dissecting his setup to show my recommended changes for enhancing the vault, which you can download for free in the description. - I'm not some - I live and breathe Obsidian. I've been using it for 3 years and have a similar journey as Odysseas. Reading how to take smart notes transformed my relationship with learning and has been an indespensable part of my daily life. Throughout this time I've taken over 7000 notes for learning and personal growth, which I share publicly in my published notes https://notes.johnmavrick.com - I'm also currently a product manager for linking your thinking, the pioneering movement for a modern zettelkasten - Also created 2 products of my own to help people use obsidian for use cases like school and managing their life - Lastly, at the end of the day I'm not trying to promote negativity. I respect his efforts to spread awareness, I just want to do Obsidian justice. - But that's enough of me rambling, let's first dissect his intro: ### Content #### Guide critique - One of major points is instant feedback - Don't you already have instant feedback when taking traditional notes? I don't think it's anything magic compared to Obsidian #### Folders - 15:25 - The first thing he talks about is his folder structure, so let's start and see how we can refine that. - %%First, let's see how durable his folder structure is.%% - in his case, uses these 6 folders to organize the different types of notes in his vault, instead of using them to organize notes by what idea it is related to like having all notes related to learning in one folder - this makes sense, since a note can only be of one type - However, i think his first folder for rough notes could be further broken down since it seems like he stores two types of notes inside: - temporary notes - logs for upcoming resources, writing count - but as you have more logs or rough notes, how can you know which are temporary? - for temporary notes, you can keep them top of mind by making another folder, 0 - fleeting notes - and as for his logs, i feel the usage falls under the same trap as folders. by keeping your writing logs contained within the date you wrote them and by keeping in plain text, you don't get to visualize your writing consistency or progress from a higher-order view - if you wanted to actually put the information to use, you can level up logs by adding trackers and graphs to actually visualize this progress - For example, I track the amount I write on a daily basis, and using the obsidian charts plugin i can visualize it to see my consistency - If you're interested in setting that up yourself, I have a note and video on my published note for this, `My habit tracking workflow` - %% Side note, I respect it, high impact writing by kieran drew. i'm excited to read your copyrwiting in future emails %% - Anyways, now that we have a base structure for our notes, now we can see if there's any we can enhance #### Tags - In this video, he talks about how instead of using literal tags to organize his notes by larger topics - like `#learning` - he instead creates links to notes that act as tags for the larger topics - this lets notes have 1 to many connections - [17:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTy_BInQs8&t=1023s) On a side note (haha), when he quickly showcased his tags I had a small nitpick where he prefixes the title with "better", like better family. if you have to explicitly make a separate note, what does that say about the usefulness of the notes in the not better family note? what is the point of keeping those if a zettelkasten gives you a choice on what you put into your notes? - [17:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSTy_BInQs8&t=1072s) Also, when he creates a tag note he moves it to a folder by using the right click menu at the top, but you can make this process more efficient by making this a hotkey. #### Settings Now, before I continue on with the other enhancements, I have to go against one of his core philosophies for using Obsidian. He mentions how he only uses two community plugins to not overcomplicate his vault, and to be fair, it works for his use case. But by doing so, you're missing out on one of the most powerful aspects of Obsidian... the extra capabilities and personalization made possible from plugins. And so, from here on out I'll be showcasing some easy to understand plugins that feel like they should be part of the core obsidian experience. And the first one I want to introduce is... Strange New Worlds, from TfT hacker With traditional tag notes, you have to create the note before you see what notes it is related to, which can lead to a lot of tag notes with only 1 or 2. What if you wanted to just view them, and only create them when there's enough links? Fortunately, strange new worlds improves these tag notes by letting you see what notes are linked to it right beside the link itself You can get a preview of the note's backlinks without creating AND leaving your current note if i create new notes that are then linked to learning, you can now see them by hovering over the badge. and unlike normal backlinks where it is tied to the note you're on, strange new worlds will keep it open until you click on a new one And once we have enough links to create a tag note, we can then create it and level it up to his next note type, which is indexes. #### Indexes - From what I understand, tags become indexes when you start to write inside the tag note - In these indexes, he organizes the notes linked to it into headers - (do it) but this is simply a table of content and is nothing revolutionary - the power of obsidian is that beyond these links you can add text as context for why you decided to make the link - this helps emphasize the meaningful relationship between the index you're on and the new note you're linking to. - otherwise, when revisiting it later down the road you won't remember why you made a link to it in the first place - so in this example, we can say something like - To easily understand difficult ideas, remember that [[Learn something new by connecting it to something that you already know]] - this also enhances the note you're linking to because now if you look at backlinks you can see WHY you linked this note to the original note - in personal knowledge management terms this is most known as maps of content, as it helps us navigate all the notes related to this idea from a higher-order perspective - if you want to learn more about this i recommend learning more from nick milo at linkingyourthinking.com as he created this - %% and if you want to take it one step further, there's another dimension, 4d note-taking with visuals %% - %% Take it one step further, use excalidraw for non-linearity %% - %% I won't go into it, so you can watch zsolt's video instead %% - Anyways, you #### Templates - 22:33 - Odysseas uses the core templates plugin and this default note template. - This is where I feel his setup is most "outdated", which is what motivated me to make this video in the first place. Do you have a guess at what it could be? - It's actually almost everything 😅 - First i'll go over the problem with all these fields. - Obsidian notes are at its core, markdown files. - And with markdown files, they can have special fields which are called properties in Obsidian. Instead of putting these properties like time and status and tag in the content, we can put it in as categorized properties for better organization. Beyond just visual aesthetics, you'll see why this is important soon. - Create a new property with command palette or hotkey - set a Created date - when we choose a created date it ends up as iso format, so we will follow the same by adding the T in between the variables - set a status field, just a text property - I would set tags, but tags field reserved for actual tags, so i will just use links - You can also auto add your template - Instead of importing and moving, if you are using the folder system like he is you can set templates to folders - I don't understand the need for the inline title if you have the visible one, so I would get rid of it - And while we're at it, let's also fix up templates for the other notes - add status - add tags - can't name it tags since it's reserved for actual tags, so i'm going to call it links - Add url property - Now, if we add a status, tags to this note - And go to another note, we are given a suggestion for already existing values so we don't have to retype - There's further enhancements like metadata menu plugin where you can then have custom dropdowns based on the type of note it is, but i feel that's a bit more complex. - _check my vault_ - Now #### Managing - Now, as we continue to read and learn more, we'll end up with more tag and index notes that we have to manage. And when you have as many as I do in my own notes - show notes - only being able to see them in alphabetical order can be restricting - more problems can begin to emerge like: - How can we see have more options for sorting and displaying these notes like based on queries made - How can i organize these notes in a more dynamic way, that also lets me show these properties? - if you want a simple solution, check out file tree alternative plugin - can search within folders, do more organizing, etc - but if you're ready to go deep, we can start making custom views - this is where we can use the dataview plugin - the possibilities are endless, but i'll just share the two most relevant use cases for his setup - first are creating custom views for the different note types - for each type of note, you can create a view note to act as an index for these types of notes - "My Tags" - One fun example can be to sort your tags based on how many links it has, to let you know which notes are ready to be turned into tags - I'll be copy pasting the code I have from my own vault - Next is sorting your notes, like seeing the most recent - Third, if you're developing an index with a lot of backlinks, how are you supposed to know which links are already included in the vault? - Fortunately, you can create a query to list out all the notes that are part - list, from folder sort created - Can add this in your index note instead of his backlinks view to customize the way they are listed - As you add these links, they will automatically be removed from the query - 28:20 i don't prefer his tagging of baby, child, adult, i don't want to be a teen dad 💀 i find the evergreen notes metaphor to be more intuitive and be more informational when trying to search it up since it's a common idea in personal knowledge management - I also question him saying it's not important - In my own vault, these tags are crucial for letting me know what i can do with a certain note - if i go to my input notes, i have different stages that help me keep track of whether it's one i haven't started, etc - and since i know what stage it's in, i know what i can do with it - when it comes to idea based notes, if i feel like developing some ideas i can just go to my greenhouse that shows which seedling notes i can continue to grow - there's a lot more suggestions I have since I do have a complex system myself, but i believe that it's important you grow into the system based on your use cases and needs ### Conclusion What are some relevant references or links? - If you want to download the link to the new vault with some of my own relevant notes and resources can be seen in the description - If you're curious about what else Obsidian can be used for aside from learning, like designing your life and productivity, you can check out my own published notes where i share my entire obsidian setup - If you found this video helpful, feel free to like and subscribe for more content like this. This has been john mavrick, stay mindful ## Reflection **Satisfied?** - Scripting took a long time as I tried to find the best structure **Improvements and solutions learned for the future** - Don't do another sensational thumbnail that criticizes, only focus on what i usually do - continue trying out this educational form of video and create for myself as a result of byproduct - that's all the pkm methods done now right? zettelkasten, para, GG