“One of the best uses for a Second Brain is to collect and save the scraps on the cutting-room floor in case they can be used elsewhere.” – Tiago Forte
Ever had a fleeting idea that later becomes a game-changer? Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking (LYT) workshop equips writers, students, and creative professionals with a powerful framework for capturing, developing, and ultimately communicating their ideas.
A core concept in LYT is the Ideaverse, a personal repository for all your captured ideas, thoughts, and insights. Whether it’s a scribbled note, a website URL, or an overheard conversation, the Ideaverse encourages you to collect these sparks of inspiration. Tiago Forte uses the term “Second Brain” for the same idea as the Ideaverse. Forte has taught a similar workshop for years and has also published a book on the subject.
The LYT framework, built on the Add-Relate-Communicate (ARC) approach, guides you through the process of nurturing those sparks. Adding involves capturing the initial idea in any format that works for you. Relating encourages you to explore connections, ask questions, and build upon the original idea. Finally, Communicating involves sharing your developed thought through writing, presentations, or simply internalizing it for future use. (Note: I have been using Obsidian as my tool of choice for my personal Ideaverse. I’ve found it second to no other applications when it comes to linking ideas and notes together, helping me to discover new insights in often surprising ways.)
The key lies in maintaining a balance. LYT helps you avoid the trap of over-collecting ideas. By establishing criteria for capture and prioritizing based on potential impact, you can focus your energy on the ideas most likely to bear fruit. How often have you had a brilliant idea or stumbled across an interesting tidbit, only for it to slip away into the ether, forgotten and lost? Our minds are fertile gardens, constantly sprouting seeds of inspiration and insight. But without a system to capture and cultivate those seeds, so many wither on the vine before they can fully blossom.
By cultivating a robust personal knowledge management system, we create a repository to gather up all those little scraps – the half-formed thoughts, the kernels of concepts, the raw materials of creativity. Much like a compost bin nourishes a garden, our Ideaverse provides a rich bed of inspiration where our intellectual and artistic seeds can germinate and grow.
What makes this approach so powerful is the emphasis on saving “the scraps on the cutting-room floor.” We’re all familiar with those fleeting moments of genius – the clever turn of phrase that comes to mind in the shower, the spontaneous creative spark while commuting, the “Aha!” revelation in the weekly meeting that peters out before we can fully explore it. Our Ideaverse becomes the catcher’s mitt for those vagabond thoughts, preventing them from drifting off into the ether of distraction.
And those scraps, when collected and cross-pollinated as we relate to them, have extraordinary emergent potential. A stray joke becomes the seed for a new creative project. An intriguing book quote plants the roots for an original philosophy. An overheard conversation germinates into a novel perspective to share with the world. Our Ideaverse is both archive and icebox, preserving the perishable flashes of brilliance to be leveraged and recombined in novel ways.
The creative process is so often portrayed as one of passionate inspiration and Eureka moments. But any prolific artist or thinker will tell you that their masterworks are built from a million little scraps – the unfinished thoughts, the faint impressions, the whispers of ideas that gradually coalesce into a cohesive whole. By giving those fleeting intellections a dedicated space to live and mingle, our Ideaverse transforms from a mere repository into a fertile idea nursery.
So embrace the scraps, the snippets, the clippings and fragments. Let your Ideaverse or your Second Brain be the garden bed where those discarded trimmings are collected and composted into the rich soil for your creative progeny to take root and thrive. Don’t leave those forgotten gems scattered on the cutting-room floor when they could be the seeds of your next breakthrough.
Note: see also my earlier post from last summer that I wrote after attending my first cohort of the Linking Your Thinking workshop.
I recently finished the five week Linking Your Thinking Workshop run by Nick Milo and his excellent team of associates. The workshop (I was in cohort 11 – LYT 11) provides a process for helping foster and sustain an advanced personal knowledge management (PKM in the current vernacular). I first learned about Nick from discovering his excellent YouTube videos.
LYT 11 was a very valuable and enjoyable experience for me. Nick has done an excellent job of organizing the workshop, crafting the curriculum and being open and interactive with participants every step of the way. The interactive exercises captivated participants and facilitated a profound introspective process. Collaborating with Nick’s mentors further nurtured our growth by providing insightful feedback, reinforcing the ethos of capturing less, reflecting more, and amplifying our cognitive faculties.
While Nick terms it “linking your thinking,” I prefer to envision it as “looping your thinking,” for the process manifests as a rhythmic cycle of reflection, revisitation, and revision, employing notes as our cerebral canvases.
Through a dynamic blend of interactive lectures, hands-on tutorials and engaging sharing sessions, we immersed ourselves in Nick’s methodology to cultivating and curating your own personal system. Although Nick champions the use of Obsidian as the PKM tool of choice, he’s also quick to point out that other tools – as long as they support linking between notes – can be used as well. Obsidian is definitely an acquired taste – but it’s free for personal use making it easy to play with initially. Obsidian is built in such a way that it’s very extensible with a large set of add-on plug-ins from the user community that extend its basic functionality.
Nick’s framework, aptly named ARC (Add / Relate / Communicate) illustrates the workflow underlying the art of crafting and curating a robust PKM. From the outset, he masterfully distinguishes between mere note-taking and the transformative process of note-making, wherein the true value of learning from our discoveries becomes evident.
Similar to fellow participants, my inclination has long been to avidly capture intriguing internet findings during my daily browsing endeavors. Engaging in extensive skimming, I often save numerous items in a read-it-later service, intending to delve into them at a later date (though regrettably, such intentions are often left unrealized).
This captures the essence of the “add” phase within Nick’s ARC framework. He emphatically highlights our tendency to overindulge in this phase, succumbing to the allure of over-collecting. Alas, such behavior diminishes the time available for genuine learning, impeding our ability to effectively relate to and internalize the knowledge we encounter. Consequently, we may unintentionally neglect the final step of communicating our learnings. Instead of fostering an environment conducive to learning, we inadvertently immerse ourselves in a cycle of ceaseless capture and accumulation, devoid of meaningful contemplation.
Once we learn to recalibrate our time allocation, diminishing our emphasis on relentless accumulation, we unlock the gateway to one of the most invaluable aspects of a robust PKM system: the emergence of ideas.
Nick recommends we think of this initially as going from “spark” to “remark” – having the spark of an idea as we read something but then taking the small incremental step to actually remark on that spark. What thoughts does it ignite? Ask the questions and capture what we’re thinking – without worrying about perfection. Wherever possible, we establish interconnections with related ideas, thereby embarking on the creation of an expansive “ideaverse.”
This intricate dance becomes the process of sensemaking – a foundational pillar of Nick’s LYT approach. As we encounter a spark of inspiration, a cascade of questions ensues: What does it remind me of? How does it relate? What distinguishes it? Why does it resonate with me? To what can I connect it?
Out of that process can come concise “statement notes” which are short, to the point notes about a particular subject. These statement notes diverge from “thing notes,” which adopt a descriptive tone, avoiding undue bias. Statement notes become the realm of personal opinions. Furthermore, the concept of “evergreen notes” may evolve – originally described by Andy Matuschak as “written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects.”
An invaluable lesson from LYT 11 lies in the relative insignificance of folders. When I first started using Obsidian I anxiously sought out a folder structure that would make sense for me. But as you use this tool you come to realize that folders are relatively unimportant. Instead, links between notes transcend any folder structure. If you put a note in a folder and later move it all of any links associated with that note will be updated automatically to point to it in the new location. This liberating realization alleviates the burden of pursuing an elusive perfect folder structure.
In lieu of folders, a far superior concept emerges: the notion of content maps. A content map, represented by an MOC (Map of Content), serves as a note that expertly organizes interlinking pathways to other notes. Resembling an index or table of contents, the MOC boasts dynamism, continuously evolving and adapting as concepts progress.
Nick uses the notion of mental squeeze points to signal the opportune moment for creating a new MOC, enabling thoughts to crystallize. A mental squeeze point is that feeling your have when you realize you’re not quite understanding whatever it is you’re working on – you’ve done research, read a lot, collected some highlights but now it’s a bit of a jumble – that’s a mental squeeze point. And that’s the trigger for pulling back a bit and organizing – employing an MOC may be the best way to work on that process fostering clarity and organization around whatever you’ve been working on.
The pinnacle of our PKM note hierarchy can be your home note – a note that provides an outline of ways into your knowledge base. Like all notes, your home note can be dynamic – it’s not a static document but can evolve and change as often as you like as your needs and interests evolve. Your home note might also be a place to anchor yourself with a daily motivational quote, a favorite image, etc. that acts as a beacon guiding our initial forays into knowledge exploration.
Complementing the home note, daily notes can be used to capture the essence of each day. Often used as a place for “interstitial journaling” – capturing and logging our thoughts as they occur throughout the day. Moreover, daily notes can be used to enable the monitoring of habits to reinforce, list tasks to complete, and describe plans for the present and future.
I’ve now been using Obsidian for over a year and have enough experience with it to appreciate its power and the advantages it brings to this kind of a system – unmatched in my view by other tools I’ve tried. Along the way, I benefited a lot from LYT Kit – a sample Obsidian vault that Nick makes freely available separately and which I really recommend for coming up the learning curve and seeing some “best practices” applied. But I’ve also learned that it can be a place where I become too “fiddly” – wasting time playing around with the application itself, installing new plugins to try, etc. I’ve come to appreciate the importance of keeping it simple, using just enough of the full range of capabilities it offers to get the job that is most important for me to do. That said, I’m glad I was familiar with Obsidian before taking the course as it really adding on to my existing skills without starting from scratch.
In this specific cohort of the LYT Workshop, Nick introduced an exciting “AI Week” where we delved into the application of AI chatbot techniques to enhance our personal knowledge management (PKM) practices. These sessions focused on advanced techniques that truly expanded my understanding of the potential applications of AI chatbots, especially as invaluable assistants for brainstorming. Inspired by Ethen Mollick’s concept of considering AI chatbots as “interns,” we applied this perspective throughout our exercises in LYT 11, which added an intriguing dynamic to our interactions with AI technology.
We had three outside experts during LYT 11 – all were LYT alums from earlier cohorts. They provided additional insights based on their experiences applying PKM techniques and added a lot of value.
Moreover, the showcase sessions held the last week of LYT 11 were incredibly insightful. During these sessions, participants had the opportunity to share their experiences and insights, dedicating 10 minutes each to discuss how they have been applying the knowledge gained in the workshop. The discussions sparked numerous thoughts and ideas, motivating further exploration.
All in all, LYT 11 provided me a comprehensive view on constructing and, more importantly, using a personal knowledge management system every day. Nick and his team have done an exceptional job in delivering the course content and providing support to all participants. If you’re seeking a valuable approach to constructing a genuinely beneficial personal knowledge management system, just as I was, I highly recommend Nick’s course.
How I Used Obsidian to Build a Personal Knowledge Base
I’ve been using Obsidian as a tool for learning for the past year. I got serious about using it in May 2022 after exploring it earlier for a few months. I like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way about how this powerful tool can be effectively used (at least for me) – and where it might be less useful and, in fact, can end up wasting time instead of helping accelerate thinking and learning.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is the power of Obsidian to literally be able to do almost anything you might want a computer to do. It’s such a powerful and flexible platform – with so many others writing community plug-ins that help them accomplish specific tasks – that it’s way too easy to end up creating a “monstrosity.”
By that I mean an almost Rube Goldberg-like creation that can do what you need but is built on a variety of frameworks, plug-ins, scripts, Dataview queries, etc. I began to head down those paths early on in my explorations with Obsidian – it’s almost addictive in providing fun ways to do the things you think you need it to do.
However, I’ve come to realize that the best way to use Obsidian for learning is to keep it simple. Don’t get caught up in the endless possibilities of what you can do with it. Instead, focus on using it to capture your thoughts and ideas, organize your notes, and create links between them.
Based on my experience, here are a few tips for using Obsidian effectively for learning:
Start by creating a simple note-taking system. This could be as simple as creating a new note for each topic you’re learning about. You can then use tags and links to organize your notes.
Use Obsidian’s backlinks feature to connect your notes. This is a powerful way to see how your different ideas are related. As you investigate a particular topic and collect notes, you may find it help to create a high level “map of content” which links to those specific notes. Popularized by Nick Milo, the map of content idea provides a very useful organizational tool for helping add some structure to your notes – without trying to use a more rigid folder structure for example.
Learn the most important Hotkey shortcuts – in particular ⌘-o which allows you to quickly go to any note in your vault and ⌘-p (Command Palette) which is a quick way to invoke any of Obsidian’s commands.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different plug-ins. There are a lot of great plug-ins available that can make Obsidian even more powerful. However, don’t get caught up in the endless possibilities of what you can do with them. Focus on using the plug-ins that will help you learn more effectively. Try to use now more than 10 community plug-ins – some of which (like Dataview) are really esssential.
Most importantly, keep it simple. Obsidian is a powerful tool, but it’s easy to get bogged down in the details. Remember that the goal is to use it to learn, not to build a complex system. Be careful about trying to, for example, use Obsidian for task management or journaling. Both of those areas have excellent purpose-built tools that are available and which work much more effectively in my experience rather than trying to build that capability in Obsidian. Some folks seem to delight in using Obsidian as kind of a “Swiss Army knife” – I don’t and don’t recommend that approach.
There are some incredible resources available for learning more about using Obsidian – and about how to apply its tools for learning and thinking. I particularly recommend the many YouTube videos by Nick Milo and Nicole van den Hoeven. Both have made great contributions to the Obsidian community – and both offer paid workshops and courses as well. Mike Schmitz has also just announced his Obsidian University which begins its first cohort in June.
Experiment and play with the LYT Kit “vault” which Nick Milo has made available. It’s a great way to get started and learn. With Obsidian, you can have multiple vaults open – so you could open your personal vault and then also open LYT Kit and flip between them as you learn and explore.
I hope these tips help you use Obsidian effectively for learning. I’ve found it to be a wonderful tool with pretty amazing capabilities. But do try to keep your usage simple!
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