Focused - 122: Linking Your Thinking with Nick Milo

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Nick Milo from *Linking Your Thinking* joins this week to consider the role of focus in idea development and knowledge management.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? I'm doing well. It's just, you know, I was just telling a friend recently, I have this weird sense of optimism. I know it's been a long year for everybody,

but I feel like things are starting to get better, and I'm feeling it in my bones. And I'm really excited about our guest this week. Welcome to the show, Nick Milo. Happy to be here. Nick has got a YouTube website called Linking Your Thinking, and it is, in my opinion, the best YouTube producer covering Obsidian right now. But Nick does a lot more than that. He's really got some ideas about ways to use focus and pull all your thoughts together in a linked system. And both Mike and I are fans, and we thought, hey, man, we got to get this guy on the show. In fact,

Mike, you took Nick's course, didn't you? I did. So therein lies a short tale. Killer Whale on the Mac Power Users Forum mentioned the Linking Your Thinking workshop. And that was the first time it came on my radar. I checked it out and I thought, this looks like exactly what I want. So I signed up for it and had a little bit of confusion regarding how long the self-study was going to be versus the guided thing. And Nick graciously offered to upgrade me so I was able to attend the live versions, which made all the difference. I mean, we don't have an affiliate deal here. I invited Nick on just because I am that impressed with the course that you've put together. But I will say that I wholeheartedly recommend this Linking Your Thinking workshop

that you do, and especially walking through it with you and a bunch of other people who are kind of building out their PKMs live and you're learning from other people and seeing how they're doing things. That really was a great way to do it. I guess you would call it kind of like a cohort-based class, but it's really well done. Well, thank you. It was a pleasure. I mean, it was a pleasure having you and seeing your presentation at the end

inspired so many people. And shout out to Killer Whale, Lionel, who's this amazing advocate in all sorts of communities. And it's just been so great to have his presence around as well. So Nick, in addition to making courses about personal knowledge management, you actually do quite a bit. You're an actor, filmmaker, and I know an editor as well in the Hollywood scene right now. And having friends that are in your racket, I know how hard they work.

So it's kind of remarkable you're able to put all this together at the same time you're doing this other thing. It's not easy because you're right. The entertainment industry, it's kind of a mix between the military and politics. But both, they require long hours and they require knowing the chain of command to a large degree. And yeah, it is pretty difficult, but I love what I'm doing. And right now, I haven't really spoken too loudly about this, but I'm working on Better Call Saul Season 6, which is a fantastic show. I was actually laughing this morning as I was looking through the dailies. actually laughing this morning as I was looking through the dailies. You know, Bob Odenkirk is an Emmy award-winning actor on the show, and he is hilarious along with just the writing in general. So it's a real pleasure to be on, but it does require being able to kind of switch contexts a

lot. I think that for people that are trying to focus, one of the most common bits of advice that's given to them is the idea of, hey, why don't I just pick one thing? If you really want to get good at something, you really want to focus on something, you have to focus on that and you can't have two things. And I get the sentiment of that, but I also understand that for a lot of us, that's not so easy because we still have to pay for our shoes. And a lot of us have ongoing commitments. And maybe the thing we're doing to pay the bills isn't the thing that's really making us jump out of bed in the morning, but we still have to do it. And I'm always interested in someone like you who has two things going at once, two things that are very time consuming and how you kind of hold it all together.

Sure. Well, I think to start with, I just kind of want to dispel an idea that I had definitely in my 20s, which was just that, you know, nine to five suck and don't do nine to fives because they're bad news and you have to just go your own way and become an influencer. And I just kind of want to put that idea to not to rest because I know the conversation will continue, but just that there are so many jobs and careers that provide a lot of fulfillment and we shouldn't just so quickly poo-poo those things. For instance, what I'm doing right now, I really love. I'm an assistant editor mainly in the entertainment industry. But at the same time, there's this thing linking your thinking that's really taken off. And I'm enjoying and loving this so so much too. So you know, being able to have a side hustle and work on something, you don't have to make things exclusive. There is a way to kind of do both. It just depends on your situation, but there's certainly a way.

I like that. I think that's a limiting belief a lot of people have is like, well, I have to choose this thing or this thing. And a long time ago, I started to ask myself, how do I do both? And maybe it's not the gold standard. This is, you know, if I had 40 hours a week to devote to linking your thinking, what could I do with this? But you continue to just move that thing forward because it's important to you. And that was one of the things I got out of one of those sessions that I attended the capstone projects. I forget the person's name. They had went through it the year before, but they were running like seven companies and three nonprofits out of obsidian. And they had these pages for each one of their businesses. And their goal was to go

to each one of those pages and do one thing for each of those businesses every single day. And when you break it down like that, and you're not trying to bite off like a huge thing, every single time you interact with that particular project, you might be surprised at the amount of progress you can make over a lengthy period of time. Absolutely. You're referring to Francisco Briceo. I hope I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. Very inspirational. And I think after his presentation, well, I know a few people decided, oh, wait, I can do GTD in linked-based applications like Obsidian or whatever it is. And they completely decided, oh, I'm going to add this to my personal knowledge management system. So definitely very inspirational to see everyone's presentation that way. Something that stands out to me with your ability to do two things is that you enjoy and

get fulfillment out of both of them. And I've got the same experience in my life with my multiple things. But I do think that is a key component. If you want to do more than one thing at once, if you're doing one thing and it's just misery for you, you probably should be planning your exit from that. Not necessarily mean you just stop, but plan another way to find something that does make you bring a little more passion to the, to the activity. But, but when I meet people like you that are able to pull off very time-intensive careers at the same time, I'm always impressed. I'd like to add to that point, David, is that

I started as a civil engineer. That was my undergraduate. And I was a civil engineer working mainly in water and wastewater treatment. And at the same time, I was coaching college football at my alma mater. And so I was doing one of those splits again. And at that time, I was miserable because it was just a little bit too much. And what I have tried to do this time that I didn't do that time was, I guess, not allow myself to be miserable because there's that thing that gets you more excited out of the two. And it might switch from time to time. Like right now, linking your thinking is, well, it's quite exciting, but it would be easy. And I think there's probably some human natural response here to then start to almost vilify that other thing. And that's not appropriate. That's not right. And that's kind of what I did with civil engineering at the time is I was like, oh, I hate this. I'm miserable. I can't stand it.

But there was nothing inherently wrong with the work. And I enjoyed it. It's, you know, solving problems. It was more of my, I know it's cliche, but it was my attitude towards the work. The real interesting thing was it was fine until I took on another thing that I was more excited about. And then I allowed my attitude to sour. And so this time, even though linking your thinking has so much momentum going with it right now, I'm making sure like I'm telling myself, Nick, you can't sour working on this amazing show. You have to really just, you know, mentally make sure that you appreciate and are always grateful for all those things. So definitely trying to take that mindset to this time.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the new Seth Godin book, The Craft, and a lot of the theme, it's a strange book, I would recommend reading it, but it's just like, it's got a lot of kind of micro themes that kind of play throughout the the book it's a it's a series of short essays and one of them that really stood out to me was the idea that no matter what you're doing you do need to bring your passion to it and you know the idea that you can only work on something that is your bliss to begin with isn't necessarily right that the trick is to not go to your bliss but more like bring your bliss to what you do and i've thought a lot about that and i know mike you have thoughts on that well as well but like how do you incorporate that into your life and you know how do you hold on to

that and one of the exercises i've been doing after reading the book is I'm literally writing down what I'm passionate about, about being a lawyer and being a Max Barkey. And kind of by putting it into words, I think it really helps me. How are you dealing with that, Mike? Well, the whole idea of passion, just to back up a second before I answer that question. The thing that was kind of transformational for me was when I read, I think it was Die Empty by Todd Henry, and he talks about how the root word of passion is petit. In Latin, it literally means to suffer. So following your passion, a lot of people feel is doing what you love, you know, love what you do and you never work a day in your life, that sort of thing.

That's completely untrue. It's really just what do you care so much about that you're willing to put up with a bunch of junk in order to see it come to fruition. When it comes to me balancing the things that I am passionate about, I think that's a very important element to recognize that it's not always going to be easy. It's not always going to be fun. Because if you go to the activity expecting an immediate gratification, it's not going to be there and you're going to burn out and you're not going to want to do it after very long. One of the most recent, I guess, passion projects for me, I was talking to a buddy of ours that we met at Maxstock and he convinced me last summer to start doing these like sermon sketchnote videos. I do these sketchnotes

anyways. And he's like, you should just make these quick videos and explain your thought process. And I was like, no one is going to pay attention to these. But I just started doing it. And it's actually gotten a little bit of an audience over time because I've been consistent with it. But the thing that really made it worthwhile to me was as I was doing these things, I got a text message from my pastor. He stumbled on them. And he's like, these are really cool. And it's really encouraging to me because I get up and I preach these messages. And sometimes you're not even sure if anybody gets anything. And it can be really discouraging as a pastor because you're not sure anyone's really benefiting from what you're trying to help them with.

And at that moment, I'm like, okay, I'm all in on this. I'm going to do this every single week because even if nobody else benefits from it, it's worth it to me. It's a little bit of extra work when I come back from service on a Sunday morning to put this together. But I know that it's worth it. And this is the reason why it's worth it. I guess for me, that's the big thing is why am I doing this project? Why am I recording the Focus podcast? Because I really hate the idea of the life hacks. And I think there's too much of that noise out there. And Focus is a superpower and people need to understand. Like I think there's too much of that noise out there and focus is a

superpower and people need to understand. Like, I know I'm just one small voice out of all the people who are championing this, but if I can help somebody somewhere overcome the resistance, as Seth Godin would put it, and do something that matters to them and to the world, like that's, that's worth it. So finding your why for everything that you're committed to, that's worth it. So finding your why for everything that you're committed to, I think is really, really important. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's so interesting hearing, listening to you two. It's very inspiring because, you know, it makes me think of, you know, there's all that research about listing out what you're grateful for and all the benefits that that can lead to. And it seems to me that something here is maybe listing out why you're passionate about the things you are or

finding that it almost seems like, well, we should just know, but I don't think that's the case. In fact, a lot of what this whole thing is about from my perspective is giving ourselves the reminders because there's so much information out there that it's easy to be overloaded let's remind ourselves let's explicitly make a note of this so we can come back to it well i think it's always your brain is going to be attracted by the new and shiny and like right now linking your thinking is the new and shiny in your life and it really is making a difference. Um, but you know, the editing work you're doing is really important too. And it's easy to lose track of that because of the new and shiny. Um, for me, I think about it in terms of how I help

people. Um, as a lawyer, I help people, I call them big them big touches you know the people who come to me with problems um i help them in a big way i had a client call yesterday at like 4 p.m it's a client that's nearly lost their business throughout this pandemic and suddenly an amazing opportunity came through but they had to have a contract signed in like by this morning at 8 a.m so it was like a 16 hour turnaround through the night and me staying up and helping them through that helped their business substantially so it's a big touch where someone listening to this podcast may take away a little something that helps them and i think that is little touches but by being able to keep that reference, it's why I feel energized to do both. Very nice.

Yeah. The problem comes when there's always something new and shiny because you can't just keep adding things on. I think another thing that has helped me over the years, I've talked about this with the personal retreats. I have my three questions. What should I start doing? What should I stop doing?

What should I keep doing? I force myself every three months to pick one thing to stop doing so that I create the space to say yes to something that I really am excited about that I want to be doing. Cause I've also been in that place where you just keep adding one more thing. You convince yourself in the moment, Oh, I could totally squeeze this one thing. And it's only a couple more hours, you know, and then you add that in and then you assume when you're planning that everything is going to go perfectly, but never, nothing ever goes perfectly. So then something happens and you get distracted and you got to deal with an emergency. And now that's the straw that broke the camel's back. So I do think it's

really important that you have some sort of system to maintain that margin. If you consistently fill that margin, you will end up kind of where you were talking about, Nick, where you're stressed out about things. document why you do them you know what what what is the difference you're making in the world what's the dent you're making in the universe why is it that you want to be doing this and going back and reading those when new opportunities come up and you may find that the new opportunity gives you more of a reason than the old thing and it's something you may want to pursue but um also you know writing down why it's important to you and then going back and reading a lot of time will remind you oh wait this is a big deal i can't squander this that i already have yeah absolutely um and and to the point of of the priority list becoming too long and it reminds me it just makes me think about like how much

confidence i have in my future self that it doesn't pan out it's like i if there's anyone i believe in the most it's my future self and i mean we all do and it's it's not good because then our future self we think is some ideal person who gets everything done when they're supposed to get it done without without any mistakes it just never happens that way or you look at it like the inverse. Past self is a super jerk and has always screwed over present self. That's right, yeah.

I just did that. I agreed to, there was something, somebody asked me to speak somewhere and I really don't have time for it. So I told them six months ago, well, I can't do it for six months. And they're like, great. So now I'm getting ready to do this speaking thing. And i'm like you know i still don't have time for it what

what was i thinking you know exactly that's hilarious what do you do when you find yourself in that situation uh david i'd like to hear from you but also you nick like were you were you noticed that you overextended yourself? Do you just make a note that when you review next time you do something like a personal retreat, like, hey, don't do this again? Do you just beat yourself up in the moment? That's the thing I struggle with is I look back on some wrong decisions that I've made and I can instantly lose all motivation to do anything for the day because I get so upset. Like I resent the fact that I have to deal with this thing now. And it's some, I'm just telling on myself, I guess, but like, that's one of the things that

can really derail me in terms of productivity and actually doing the work that I need to do is resenting the fact that there's this thing that I have to do that I shouldn't have agreed to do in the first place. For me, I can tell you that I will fulfill the commitment, and I'm not going to let someone down if I agree to do it. But I also try to take steps then to make sure it doesn't happen. I mean, Mike and I are in a mastermind group, and I just made a public statement in the group about a certain type of work that I said I will never do again. And now I've given everybody in the group, the ability to shame me if,

if I ever accept that work again. In fact, what I thought about writing was if I ever agree to do this again, you guys get to pick the charity and I have to give all the money I earned from it to the charity. Um, just to stop myself from accepting, you know, not that I don't like charity, but, you know, usually when I take on some of that work, it's because, you know, college tuitions, blah, blah, blah, just trying to make some extra money. And it just ends up in torpedoing myself.

So maybe if I take away the incentive, uh, then I, then I'll be more inclined not to take the work but yeah I try to figure out a way around it recently I've started making a no checklist where like before I say yes to something I go through the no checklist one of the questions is will this matter in five years if I do this now you know how does this fit with the other stuff I'm doing and reading that helps me as well, not get myself into those problems.

Those are great prompts. Yeah, I don't know if I can add too much to that because I have overbooked myself. You know, it's always trying to be on that edge of what's possible and what's not. But just trying to give myself the ability when I've been successful, just trying to give myself the ability when, when I've been successful, just trying to give myself the ability to say no to things or, you know, like try to frame it from a wider perspective than just the immediate guilt of disappointing someone socially because they, they're asking for something. And I, I don't know. I always feel like I want to deliver, but just because someone asks something,

especially in today's age where everyone's an email away, it's a little bit easier to say no. I think just based on that, I don't know. I have no expert there though. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Timing. Go to timingapp.com slash focus to get the automatic time tracking app for Mac OS. Use that link to save 10% off your purchase. So let's talk about why you should be tracking your time.

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maybe a little bit further like how did you decide that this is something you want to continue to build and chase? What's your why behind this project? Sure. Um, that it's so difficult to answer that, but, but I'll do my best. I think it kind of segues nicely from what we're talking about of trying to do multiple things at the same time. And, you know, so when I was a civil engineer, I was also coaching football, um, at the college level. And then right after that, I gave up civil engineering to pursue this develop this business in Helena, Montana, which is, you know, not the epicenter of, you know, fitness workout crazes. And so I gave up the well-paying job to do this thing. And we just started to build it. But that meant keeping track of information. And especially this fitness system, it's actually quite complex. It's kind of like the martial arts, where there are different tiers that you accomplish and you have to

get the combos right. And well, as a member, that means going up the tiers. Now to support the members, you need trainers who can then teach those tiers. And to support the trainers, of course, you need the coaches to train the trainers. So there's this whole system with all these moving parts and it was really important to keep track of that. I think the engineering background helped, but also just the part of the problem was, oh, there's all this information and it's coming at me from different areas in my life. How can I keep track of that? So at the time it was in Evernote and I'd create maps, just a table of contents, basically annotated with, with some,

you know, in all those table of contents would be links to other notes, but it's a, it's a clunky cumbersome process to try to accomplish that. And in the apps that were around during that timeframe, so like 2008 to 2000, let's say 15. And then, you know, I ended up moving to New York, getting involved in entertainment over there, along with, before that, I guess I made a

few films in Montana as well with my friends. So being very busy, doing a lot of different things. But what was nice about that is it allowed me to kind of understand what are the different use cases and demands of knowledge management, which is a very broad thing. How can we keep track of all this? externalized knowledge became just that, a place where I could go to calm myself and to kind of reground myself to what was important. We've been talking about prompts on this call, like the questions that we ask, the checklist that we go through. And so for me, this personal knowledge management system is a place where I can go to kind of reground myself and make sure I don't go insane, but kind of keep mental clarity that way. So I ended up using it for all these different things, eventually moved to LA, and then really had to use it for working my way up the different ladders of the entertainment industry. And one really neat use,

and you saw this a little bit, Mike, used for cohort two of Linking Your Thinking, was the example of relationship management and how you could link people to tags. And after a while, you could have this graph that shows who's related to who and how. So basically a personalized IMDB is what I did to kind of help my career and know who to contact. And so I was just using knowledge management and all these different ways, fitness, boxing, engineering, I lost track filmmaking, and then trying to grow in the entertainment industry. And just to keep sanity at the end of the long day. That just kind of led to where I am now, which is feeling pretty comfortable

and confident with personal knowledge management, but also just really excited because the tools have come along to such a degree. So with knowledge management, are you, I mean, I know with Linking, you're thinking the primary thing I got out of that was managing ideas, but it kind of sounds like you got into this because you were managing probably not just relationships, but it sounds like there's some tasks sprinkled in there as well. well, what exactly were you doing with this at the beginning? Were you keeping track of, oh, I should call this person about this project?

Or was it simply you had an idea and you threw it in there so you could make those connections in the future? Yeah, I think at the start it was everything. There were tasks mixed with projects, mixed with brainstorms, meeting notes, even a little bit of tracking of if workouts were done, basically throwing everything in there to mixed effect. I think there's a real OCD tendency to capture everything, the quantified self-movement, and there's a lot of benefit to targeted applications of that, but people can take it way too far and they're tracking everything. And the more that you're tracking, the less that you're actively thinking, the less that you're engaged with the world around

you. And so there's a trade-off, but people don't see it. And so they waste a lot of time tracking information that's less valuable to them. So transitioning over to when the Subsidian beta came out, which basically the last couple of years, and it could be any tool, but essentially the linked-based ecosystem of tools allowing us to link knowledge easily has really exploded. I'm sure we'll talk more about that, but it's allowing us to think and connect thoughts

in such a way that we've never really had available before. What that means is idea management becomes able to work almost as fast as we can think. And we haven't had that before. So that's a really kind of a profound thing and makes me like that's where I most gravitate towards. But yeah, yeah so in the past i kind of do a mixture of everything um now i'm trying very hard to minimize the tasks and projects that i have to externalize so i can maximize the time that i spend focused on ideas and connecting and developing them like with technology i think it's an important point to make here because linking your thinking and these link-based tools are so new. But if you go back, you know, Nick works in the film industry.

When they first started making movies, all the movies were shot of people on a stage just like as if you were sitting in a theater, right? That was the angle for the original movies. And it wasn't until much later that people thought, well, wait a second, what if we put the camera on the stage? And so suddenly you get different angles. And you think in a different context because the medium has changed. I feel like computers, until very recently, still had the camera in the audience and that like note

apps were basically digital versions of a yellow pad where in fact, a lot of note apps like the ones Apple make has the yellow icon, I think reminiscent of the yellow pad. And, you know, you've got a digital piece of paper that you write on from top to bottom, and then you make another one. And while they do have some like limited tagging and different tools, they really weren't taking full advantage of the platform. And now all of a sudden, we've had this explosion in the last couple of years. And I know there's other apps that were kind of leading the way, but it seems like it's really gone mainstream in the last couple of years with the idea of, hey, wait a second, what if notes can be aware of each other? And what if they can link back and forth? And all of a sudden, the user can have connections made by the computer

links that the user didn't even occur to the user, where before we'd had to do everything manually. And that's the reason I'm frankly so excited about this because as a, as a computer enthusiast, um, when you see a ground shift like this, it's exciting. And I feel like we're finally figuring out how to manage data on these computers in ways that can enhance our focus. And, um, I just think that's a key point. And frankly, that's the reason you're here today, Nick, because I feel like you're at the front edge of this. And a lot of the ideas you're talking about

are ones that people should be paying attention to. That's a great metaphor. That really stuck with me, that taking the camera from, I'm going to butcher it, but isn't like mise en place or whatever it is. The idea that the camera is just staring at the stage and now it's interactive and think like a Christopher Nolan movie and the camera's rotating and people are running on the walls and the ceilings. Yeah. Now we're kind of at that stage finally with what we can do personally with the knowledge that we encounter, the ideas that we encounter, the information, what do we do with all this stuff? And instead of thinking in the only ways that we had available, there are actually these tools out there and we can do things that, so it's really, I mean, it's game changing. That's an overused word already, but it truly is.

It changes how we can interact with information and how we can think our thinking patterns. And it does so in ways that get me quite excited. Now, we're going to break down in the deep focus episode today today some of our thoughts on the specific tools but i don't really want to get hung up on that because um you know there's a bunch of tools out there roam research obsidian is the one all three of us use so that tells you something what we think about obsidian um craft and there's others kind of in the in the environment but regardless of tool kind of give an overview of kind of how you see these tools working that's different than a traditional notes app. Yeah. Well, just to take it back. So everyone likes to point to Niklas Luhmann,

who is a sociologist in Germany who had slip boxes upon slip boxes, all these notes on index cards. had slip boxes upon slip boxes, all these notes on index cards. And in the upper right, there would be little analog links to other notes in the collection. And then he could go from one note to another. And so fast forward to today's age. Now we can make a digital link with just a little bit of text and it goes to another note. That way of thinking, where you connect ideas, just like these atomic ideas, to one another, is in direct opposition to the way that we've all used computers our entire lives, which is a top-down, folder-based, hierarchical perspective, where it's like, you don't start with the idea,

you start with where should this idea live and where should that thing live within another thing. And so we get so caught up in the mechanisms of structure that any idea gets ground to a pulp and it's never born to begin with. So the promise of bottom-up thinking, where we're just linking smaller ideas together over time, is that something beautiful can emerge over time. Niklas Luhmann would call it a conversation partner. Some people call it a second brain. It feels a little sterile to me, but it definitely also fits the bill. I'm not quite sure what to call it, but it's this entity that you can interact with over time. And that's great.

So a little bit of the history with bottom-up thinking is that eventually you have, let's say, thousands, hundreds of notes, maybe a thousand. And it gets really hard to find or make sense of these notes. It's like you're playing one of those really old, I shouldn't say really old, but 1980s video games, online games, where it's like, you see two doors, one to the left and one to the right. There's a goblin in front of the door to the left. You decide to enter the door on the right, and that takes you to a different note. And so the idea there is that with bottom-up thinking, where you're doing these links from note to note,

you're in the weeds. You're at eye level, and you can't see the big picture. So one of the beauties of that is to create something that might resemble a table of contents in the past, but now it's more of a map. Think that you're zooming out, you're gaining elevation, and now you can make out the forest from the individual trees. That gives you perspective.

But now, instead of starting from that high, top-down perspective, that's what we're doing, think top-down is folders. But now, we're viewing the notes below, not from a folder, but from a special sort of note that has a lot of links to other notes. And that's the hardest thing to wrap one's head around, but that is the map of content in MOC. So we have all these bottom-up notes, that's bottom-up thinking where we have atomic notes. Over time, they bubble up into structure that we form into these maps. And these maps are places

where we can make meaning and make sense and actually generate new thoughts. And that's what's pretty wonderful about those, but they're not limited. Some of these technical details are the hardest to describe just through a podcast, but it is revolutionary. And that's what gets me so excited. So I probably lost the exact question, but I hope that gives some perspective to where we're going. No, that's great.

And the map making, I'm glad you brought that up again. It's kind of been a recurring theme. So I think we should talk about this a little bit because this was a big thing for me when I went through the course. You had talked about the power of the cartographer in creating these maps of content. And I know several people who cringe whenever they hear that term, map of content. But for me, I get it. It makes a lot of sense because about the same time I'm reading The Great Mental Models, Volume 1 by Shane Parrish, I forget the other author, they talk about the map is not the territory. So even with the best map, you're getting somebody's opinion of what are the important characteristics of the territory. It's a representation and it's an opinionated representation of the actual facts that are there. And when you think about that, it totally changes the game when it comes to note-taking because a lot of people will, especially if they're analytical people like myself, you read a book and you feel pressure to jot down everything the author is saying because

I don't want to miss anything that's really important. And I had to break free of that and realize that, no, the stuff that stands out to me when I read the book, that's really the value that I'm going to derive from it. And that was kind of an aha moment for me when I realized that, okay, so these mind maps that I create of the books that I read, I read physical books and I create these mind maps in my note on my iPhone as I go. That is my map of the territory. And it's the things that are important in this book, but it is completely opinionated and it is completely through my own perspective. But the more books that I read, the more reference I have, and I can bring in ideas from other places.

And I knew that was happening in my brain already. But then when I went through the Linking Your Thinking course, I kind of realized that I can connect these things in an intentional way. So I don't just have to be okay with the output of these things bouncing around inside of my brain. That was a big tipping point in the first place when I realized that like Austin Kleon, steal like an artist, you collect better dots, and then the outputs, they kind of just happen. And so linking your thinking and structuring these apps in a particular way, an opinionated way, so that these dots can be made into a map in the future to facilitate future thinking and future

focus. I think that's super exciting. How do people do that, though? How do you use something like this? Because on the surface, you think about, well, I can link all these things. I can connect all these things. That's great. And that was the mistake I made at first with Roam is I dumped everything in there and I had all of these links. And then I would go and look at my links and I would see a whole bunch of noise and it really didn't mean anything. So what sort of advice do you have for making these maps in a way that actually facilitates focus going forward so you can use them in the future? Sure. Well, what you talked about and what I have suffered from and talked about at great length is over collecting. And it's easy

for in Evernote, I mean, their tagline, I think was capture everything, or that was kind of the, the, the parlance capture everything. And that's how we were dealing with knowledge because we were the kid in the candy store and we could just capture anything we want. All of a sudden, we just had to click the button and we could clip it into our knowledge management system. And there it was. So it was so easy. We allowed the bright and shiny to be the easiest thing we could possibly do. But then over time, we have all this noise in our knowledge management systems and it's actually burying the other stuff. And I know people say, well, you can just search and immediately find what you're looking for. No, you can't. Because

when you have 100 false positive results from that search, you can't find that really, really important item of yours that you wrote and it meant so much to you. And by the time you find it, several minutes have passed and you've lost momentum. Try multiplying that by however many times that you do it in the course of a day, a week, a month, and it's horrible. So the first most important thing is to get away from over-collecting. What happens when we over-collect? We under-think. We spend all this time collecting things. We spend no time actually processing it, actively engaged with it, thinking with it. And that's where these tools, if used correctly, actually provide this environment that forces, almost forces you to think more actively about the information that you encounter. So instead of just clipping and collecting, now we're creating, we're connecting, we're thinking critically about what we encounter

while we're thinking creatively about it. And it's forcing us like a pressure cooker to generate newness, to make connections, and to your point there, Mike, to make opinionated conjectures and statements. I mean, that is the beauty of these linked-based applications and they work so fast now. And one of the, I just meant to, wanted to mention this earlier. One of the tweaks that allowed all this to happen for us in the past couple of years is that now any note, you can change what that note is titled and it will automatically update and all of the other notes where it has ever been mentioned. That seems like a small thing, but it is totally not because now you can change your thoughts. You can change your opinion on something. Hey, we're allowed to have different opinions on things. So you might say, you know, the golden rule is great. And then years

later, you might say like, I like, you can change that note title. That's your note title. The golden rule is great. And then you can say, well, I'd like to be a little bit more specific. The golden rule is great because it teaches kindness. Now that becomes your file name. Hey, be comfortable with long file names. There's nothing wrong with it. It's being more specific. And when you click, you know, save to that file name, it auto-populates in the other, you know, 100 notes that you may have linked it to. And so this ability to evolve with your thinking over time, to evolve with your thinking over time along with being encouraged to actively engage and to generate new thoughts it is it's it's really just ground shaking that you use the term they're actively engaged and i think that is the key takeaway because the historic way we did this

the evernote model where you you create a library and you just pour tons of resources into it, it's a passive process. You're putting things in there, you really aren't interacting with them. With these new tools, it does, if you use them properly, in my opinion, it forces you to become active with the material. When you read a book, what is the important parts you took out of the book? How does that link to thoughts on religion or some other thing that you've got in your head and other notes that you've added to this database? How do they tie together? And suddenly, like the sums are greater than the parts, but it only happens if you trigger that

gray matter between your ears and become active with it. Yes. Yeah. Collecting it is not enough. Just having it in your system is not enough. Being able to go top down and find it later is not enough, or at least for people who really want to get the maximum value out of the ideas that they collect, it's not enough just to know that it's there in case you need it. But we've all been there and it's like a narcotic. I mean, it's like, hey, look at me. I've collected all of this stuff. And then like you go on the internet and you download even more stuff and your treasure chest becomes even more full, but you're not interacting with it. Exactly. I've read all these books, but what was the point? What did it actually do?

And so there is a place for that. It's like, you know, read great science fiction, great fiction in general. It's not like we have to be obsessives and actively extract whatever means something to us. A lot of these things hit us on this deep level. Who knows? Five years later, somehow we're able to still emotionally feel whatever that message was. There is a place to extract some things, though. Absolutely.

I've been going back to Isaac Asimov's Foundation, which I've just read all the books in the past few years. And Selden Crisis, Harry Selden as a character, Second Foundation, First Foundation, The Mule. These are terms that if you haven't read it, it won't mean anything to you. But to me, they are symbols that I can connect other ideas to because they're so powerful and they transcend the material itself. So that stuff is the stuff that I do want to extract and save and be actively building with. Yeah. I'm so tempted to go back and read this guy. I read those as a kid and I loved them, but I don't remember hardly anything of it. And I know they're making, I think Apple is making a series on it now. I was like, I know they're making, I think Apple is making a series

on it now. I was like, I wonder if there's enough time for me to read it between now and the time they released the series. I would, I would totally check it out. I know the main editor on it, um, who, who I love and adore. And, uh, I'm hearing pretty good things, you know, pretty good things. Like getting back to the point, even from fiction, there's, there's lessons to learn and thoughts to link. And I just think this stuff, if you're, I know Mike and I've been banging on about this now for like a year on the show. And if you roll your eyes, every time the subject comes up, one of the reasons why, you know, we had Nick on the show is because I think this stuff can really make a difference in your life.

And there's a real connection to focus with this. Bringing these ideas, becoming active about the way you think and store your ideas can change your life. I think this is something people need to consider. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Spokes, a communications agency. Got a brilliant idea that will change the world? Spokes knows that whether you are pitching investors or selling products or services, a compelling story is the difference between your business struggling or thriving. In a crowded market, the best story wins, or thriving. In a crowded market, the best story wins, and Spokes helps you tell your best story.

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So we have all these powerful tools which allow us to connect things in new ways. But it also occurs to me that with great power comes great responsibility. If you just dump more things in and make all these connections, you quickly end up with a lot of noise and it's really not the focus tool that you thought it was going to be. focus tool that you thought it was going to be. I also know that there's always something new. And myself, personally, I see this in the productivity space and I fall into it myself of like, oh, that new app over there, that's the thing that's going to solve a problem that I have in a way no other app has ever done before. So I better go move all of my tasks into that thing. So how do you balance then or where's the line in your mind between being open to the new ideas and collecting new dots, new information and saying, no, that's enough. I need to process what I've already got and making those connections so you can use them in the future. already got and making those connections so you can use them in the future. Sure. Well, I think as a society, it's time for us to like an AA meeting, admit that we've had a problem of over-collecting. And if we zoom out and we say, it's fine. It's like, you know, let's show some self-compassion. We were part of this great experiment. We're like little Guinea pigs. And the powers that could be, that be above us said, let's give them the intranet and let's see what happens. And so, you know, a few decades later, you know, here we are and we're trying to finally figure it all out. And I think we've reached a threshold.

the lowest levels to ones where we're at least semi-aware of what's happening and choosing how we want to interact with information. So point being is we can note take or we can note make, and we need both. But where we've been is we've been massively note taking, taking consuming in consuming information and if you think about a spectrum of 100 100 percent of our time like you know you only have this much time what do you do with it and that note-taking aspect for some people it's 100 it's seriously it's taking up everything or you could say 95 and what we need to do now with these tools and just overall is to fight back, to push back and have more focus. But how do we do that with these tools? Well, we can push back into the note-taking territory. Say, no, you don't get to have this much percentage of my attention. It's too much. And what do we fill it with? We fill it in with note making, which in another generation, generations in the past, we would just call thinking, note making, thinking, active thinking, they kind of go together. But the beauty of the note making with these digital tools is that we can externalize, capture, evolve, grow with this stuff. And those are all some of the benefits of it so it's about

finding that ratio of what's appropriate for you between note taking and note making um is it 80 80 20 no i don't think so i think it if you go more in the 50 50 then you're probably going to be in the right spot but again as as i think mike that you can attest to from going through the workshop, we have an idea of how we use our information, how we have chosen, you and I, how we each handle information that we encounter. But we're not the end-all be-all. And there's somebody else who's using it for something completely different and completely valid.

And they'll have a different relationship and ratio of ingesting, taking in new information versus creating, crafting, and doing something with that information. But step one is awareness. And that's the hard part, right? Because there's no system for you to follow now. There's no simple formula. You got to figure it out for yourself. Absolutely. And I've been using the word system like personal knowledge management system, but the frameworks are what we talk about in linking your thinking is that there are some fundamental frameworks when you move from folder-based thinking into link-based thinking that also uses tags and folders. And when you do that, there are some fundamental frameworks that you can use to customize,

you know, your knowledge management experience, your own, you know, personal system. And so that's what we're trying to get at. But there is no one size fits all system in that way. So if anyone's trying to give you a system, think about it. I'd almost argue that a system is almost equivalent to handcuffs. I mean, in order to make this work, you just have to go through and figure it out for yourself. Completely agree. Another thing I would add with the personal knowledge management, I wrote an article for this on the suite setup and that PKM term is being thrown

around a lot. So the way my brain works, I wanted to know what does personal knowledge management system even mean? Like according to Wikipedia, what's the definition? It's a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in their daily activities. And I feel like that's the missing piece for a lot of people. When you note take, you've got all this inflow. You have all these things coming into your system. But there has to be an outflow too. And some people push back on that when I share this idea with them because they're not in a position like I am. They don't have podcasts that they do. They don't have a place that they write publicly. And so they feel like they don't have

an outlet for that creative process. But what you're talking about with developing these maps of content and making these connections, that's really the output. If that's all that comes from this, that's totally valid. And that's going to provide a huge benefit in my opinion. So glad you mentioned that, Mike, because it is valuable just to develop ideas that you encounter. It enriches your understanding of the world, you know, sense-making. You're making sense of the world and the concepts and the people and the ideas around you. That is wonderful.

And if you spend more time doing that, you enrich your life. And even if you don't make one blog article or one podcast or whatever it is outside in the online world, you still have conversations on a daily basis with people. And they are better enriched because of this, this work that you've done, um, you know, working and grinding and wrestling with these interesting ideas, ideas that you find interesting, um, and that you've connected to other ideas in a completely different subject, uh, relating, you know, cellular biology to, to something in, um, economics to something in what you just ate in the kitchen.

And, you know, you made those connections, um, and that's valuable. And now it enriches every single conversation that you enter. And that's an output that's sharing, even if it's not in a, you know, crystallized artifacts type of form, but it's definitely not worth, um, um, underestimating because it's, it's there every single day that we live. in your personal knowledge management system, I would argue that is exponentially of greater value to you than one more additional input. Even if it's the greatest idea anybody has ever had from the best-selling book of all time, you know, you can read that and it's just that one dot and you don't even know what you have until you fully developed it. And I would add to that, that not only is it useful for your conversations with other people, it's useful for your conversations with yourself, you know, figuring out where you think about and

where you tie these things together, I think is probably the biggest benefit that I've experienced. Absolutely. To that point as well, it's kind of flipping the expectation that we have. So Mike, you shared the PKM definition from Wikipedia, which is really nice to hear. And I think it's a pretty good definition. For me, I've been trying to wrestle with this term because it is pretty nebulous. But I think starting with asking everyone, including myself, you know, what is your relationship to information? Like just what is it? And then, you know, think about that for a little bit. What should it be? You know, do you like what you're doing with the ideas that you encounter? Or are you completely passive about the information that

you're being fed? You know, what is your relate? You have a relationship to information. What is it like figured out a little bit? And, you know, maybe we can through PKM improve upon it, develop these ideas and kind of flip that relationship from one of almost dread or like, oh no, back to the task manager to whip me into shape into one that's more like, oh, it's so joyful to re-encounter these thoughts and connect them, build something out of them and kind of change that relationship that we have with information, with knowledge that we encounter.

I know we're going to talk about a lot of the workflow stuff in the deep focus thing, but do you have any tips or suggestions for people? Like how do you personally discern which information is worth paying attention to? Kind of where are the rough lines that you draw? Like one that stands out to me, for example, is maybe I'm not getting a whole lot of value following the news. It's just making me angry. Or same could be said about social media, right? So I disconnect from those and I pick a more positive source of information like reading a book where I know that's sort of benefit I'm looking to get from that instead of just mindlessly consuming information, being intentional about the information that you consume. How do you do that? Yeah, totally. Well, I think with news, I kind of just will glance over it and try to stay at least informed. I know a lot of people would say like, don't focus on, don't pay attention to it at all. And that's fine. I've gone through those stages, but I've tried to find like a middle ground, but with the news, there's nothing there that I'm saving or collecting. And so if I find something that is interesting, what I'll do is I'll throw it into

an app, an intermediary between my main system of notes and everything and the whole world. And for me, I use an app on the phone and on the computer called Drafts, just because it's so simple. You can capture really fast and I'm not copying and pasting whole articles. I'll just find something interesting. And if time allows, I might add a comment in as I go and I'll just leave it there. And actually I practice something called radical idea. Emergence idea. Emergence is allowing things to bubble up from the nothingness to the somethingness. And you know,

the nothingness is your nothingness. Like it's all from the perspective that you have with the information that you're, you're dealing with. So in this case, drafts is this place where they can just sit there and then I might forget about it completely forever. And that's cool. I'm fine with that. Or it might come up again.

There was that Italian art concept, sfumato, which is about the gray areas kind of give things. It's hard, basically shades of gray. It's hard to discern what we're supposed to be looking at. It is not clear. It's not black and white. That was in relationship to a book I was reading on art. And they're talking about the Mona Lisa.

Is she smiling? Is she frowning? That's Fumato because we don't know. And that's what draws us in and so that that was such a cool concept but it stayed in in my drafts app for months and months and I was still like encountering Fumato and talking about it to people until one day I just decided you know what let me throw it in and make it official put it into the knowledge management system. So, you know, I'm actually happy if I forget something. It's only by repeatedly being reminded of it that I'm of outside concepts, not my own experiences, but when I'm reminded of outside concepts, am I

happy to bring it into the library if I'm reminded because I'm like, okay, it's earned its place to grow into the somethingness and connect to other ideas. That's interesting. So it's almost like a, you know, like a, an on deck, you know, segment for ideas, like a, a holding area. Yeah. And they're all like, you know, clamoring, like pick me, pick me. And, um, some of them just get buried over time, but then the ones that make it in, that can start to develop and grow with and do all that good stuff. I think this is a really powerful idea. And this is one of the things that has made Obsidian work

for me this time around, is forcing a quality control cut for the things that get in there. So I'm not just leaving things in there and eventually maybe I'll move them. I'm processing my inbox and I'm deleting everything or archiving everything, moving it all out pretty much every week. But then if it comes up again, I'll jot it down again and I'll notice like, hey, I've seen this before. Maybe it's time to bring things over. But the majority of the stuff that I capture in the moment doesn't make it over to Obsidian, which I think is an important practice if you really want to improve your signal to noise ratio, because everything is really important the moment that you get inspired. What's that quote?

Like the most dangerous idea is the only one you have. So in the moment when you're inspired, you're like, oh, this thing is amazing. This is going to completely change my life. It's probably not going to, but you can't really see it for what it is until you get some, some space. So I'll jot it down. And then later on, I'll look at it and be like, oh yeah, that was a great idea. I'm going to bring that over. Or, you know, I don't know what I was thinking when I captured that. I'm just going to delete that and not worry about it. Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. I use Obsidian in a slightly different way. I mean, I do use it for idea thinking and ideation and linking and all that, but I also use it as a log for work because

I need a reliable system and a backlink system actually helps a great deal for that. So my obsidian library is a little bit foggier. I've thought about because one of the things you can do is create separate vaults, separating the vaults for this. And I probably will eventually, but for the beginning, at least I just wanted to keep everything in one place. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what's so radical, and I was thinking about this, is we all grew up with folders, and in the past few years it's been the great folder rebellion.

You have apps like Roam who have completely abolished the folder. But what's interesting in Obsidian or other apps that still allow you to use folders is that you can actually start to use them for what they do so well at doing, which is easy exclusion, um, where you can, you can keep everything in one major vault, but if there's a sub folder, you can open up that sub folder separately and still have, you know, curated folder's worth of information in there, which is just kind of like, wow, wait, that's what folders can do.

It's kind of neat. Yeah. It gives you a way to segment your vault. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. Indeed is the number one job site in the world with more total visits than any other job site

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Terms and conditions apply. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So let's get into the weeds a bit about use of tools like Obsidian. And this is, you know, in the context of Obsidian, because that's the app the three of us use. But I believe that we can give advice that would work across multiple platforms here. But I believe that we can give advice that would work across multiple platforms here. What are some of the practices that we're putting in place to make this work for us? And maybe let's have Mike go first, since he's the one that just went through Nick's course. Sure. Well, I think the best thing I can give people in terms of advice of setting this stuff up,

because we have talked a lot about how you got to kind of find your own system, figure out what works for you, is have a specific use case that you want to accomplish going into using the tool, whether that be Roam, Obsidian, Craft, whatever. tool, whether that be Rome, Obsidian, Craft, whatever. So for me, it was I wanted to create a cross-linked reference library of all of the sermon notes that I've taken. I've taken these sketch notes inside of GoodNotes since September of 2017. So I had them all just sitting there, and then I took, with the help of my buddy Joe Buleg, exploded a King James Version of the Bible into individual text files, dumped all 30,000 of those into Obsidian, and then I would create pages for my sermon notes and link them together. What that allowed me to do is in Obsidian they have that graph view.

So I could start with my notes from last week, for example, and it has all of the individual verses that I've linked to there. And I can click on in that graph view, one of those verses, and I can see all of the other notes that also have reference to that verse. And I can open all those up in different panes and I can kind of study all of those ideas together, which was exactly like, if that's the only thing I got out of Obsidian, then I'm good. So I knew what I wanted to create. I knew, or I had an idea that Obsidian was a tool that could help me do this. I built a previous version of this inside of Roam too. So I kind of cheated

coming to Obsidian where I knew already what I wanted to get out of it. But then I built it that specific way. And once I did that, I started to figure out other ways that I could layer things on top of that. But if you just go look, like do a Google search on how to use Obsidian or use cases for Obsidian, Obsidian workflows, whatever, you're gonna get thousands of different ideas

and you're gonna just be overwhelmed. Like, I don't even know where to start with this kind of thing. But the place that you start is you put that stuff in there and you figure out, like for me, the big thing there was those backlinks, intentionally connecting certain backlinks. You know, I'm not just connecting every single backlink for every single word. There are some apps that have taken that approach to backlinks. And I've talked to people who are like, there, see, this app can do it too. And I'm like, no,

it can't. You have no idea what monster you are creating when you do that. But tags are another thing where I can, I use tags. So I have like sketchnotes and I've been able to use those as a filter now for not just my sermon sketchnotes, but also like if I go attend a conference talk, for example, I got to go to craft and commerce a couple of years ago, went to the entre leadership summit a couple of years ago, like those are sketchnotes and using these tools specifically to help you slice things that will give you a view of exactly what you want to see. Not worrying about, oh, I got to set everything up in a specific way so that down the road, I can combine these tags and I can combine these backlinks

and have this flexibility to do whatever the heck I want with them. No, just find one thing that's useful and use these to help create that inside of your system. Yeah, that's great advice. Nick, you started using this with early betas you've gone through it you know the whole journey now you teach courses on it what are a couple things that you wish you knew when you started using these tools that you know now um i think I think, yeah, just that's a great question. I think it's about making it simple to begin with. And the most important thing is just knowing how to create a new note and knowing how to add a link to another note.

things and and just kind of think about it you know give yourself a moment to experiment but you know just kind of ask yourself you could always just play around with the experiment of having a conversation with someone and then you know let's take this podcast as an example um you know the the practice by seth godin was mentioned so you could say you know the practice by seth godin is a book that David mentioned. You could decide at the time, maybe you want to put David Sparks as its own note, you know, as a person note, so to speak. So you can put little brackety things around it. We won't go into exactly the notation. But then when you click on it, it becomes a note. And what you've done there is you've created a link

between this podcast note and David Sparks. And then you could also create a link to the practice or Seth Godin. You could have all these links and you can overdo it. But at the same time, it's important to know what you can do. Like this is the basics. We're just connecting information.

Like we're having a conversation at the coffee shop and, hey, this thing is related to that thing. Let's make a connection. And so really, you don't have to worry about structure to begin with. And you should just kind of go and kind of see where things take you if you're just starting out and make connections. take you, if you're just starting out, and make connections. And then only from that pile of goo can you start to form something out of it.

The goo kind of becomes Play-Doh, and then all of a sudden you're making a little stonehenge-y type of objects. But it starts from just having some material in front of you that you can work with and kind of understand what it's trying to say. And so make relationships relationships make links and then later on you can throw in tags but it's too early for tags if you're just starting out later on you can throw in folders but it's too early for folders if you're just starting out just make some links get comfortable with making connections between ideas between people between noun-y type of things. And kind of see what comes of that. You know, it's funny because I'd written down before you started answering that, Nick, that my advice.

Actually, there's two pits of advice I have. But the first one is embrace the chaos, but slowly. You know, so often we're used to coming to things like this saying, well, I need to define my structure. I need my folder structure. I need my, you know, whatever structure you think you need out of an app. And using these tools, the structure will find itself. And that's part of the journey. I think that's actually one of the benefits of it is that the structure comes to you.

You don't come to it. But you have to kind of embrace the chaos at the beginning of just creating notes and atomic thoughts. But the second piece of advice I'd give, and these are both pieces of advice that I failed to follow as I got into this stuff, is be realize how powerful it is, you are suddenly going to be tempted to turn every app on your computer into a subcomponent of one of these tools, you know. And I know people, I mean, you know, that like go really crazy with this stuff. And it becomes their journal tool and their diary tool and their calendar tool and their task tool, and their calendar tool, and their task tool. They basically want to import their entire life into these apps. And I think that there's nothing wrong with that. You can do it.

But I think you should resist the initial urge to do that. That should be something you only come to after you really, really decide you want to do it after you've been using the app for a while. Because I think it's very easy to suddenly let noise crowd out signal if you're not careful with a tool like this. Yeah, absolutely. Really well said there. If you're listening, don't take your hundreds and thousands of notes from that Evernote or the Bear or whatever it is and just throw it in and say, Evernote or the bear or whatever it is and just throw it in and say, okay, I'm good to go. And throw it into whatever your link-based tool of choice is. But instead, start from a strong core.

And those are both really good ideas. Embrace the chaos. And it's like in link-based knowledge, structure finds of, it's the reverse. And just to allow that to, to happen. And, and, you know, there, there is a dogmatic perspective of only, you know, like the pure Zettelkasteners out there can be a little dogmatic to say, you know, only links and only direct links. And then the, you'll naturally, you'll magically have a conversation partner, conversational partner. And, you know partner after you've gotten to like 3,000 links and you'll be talking to each other and exchanging stories. Now, I believe that you will be structuring things as time goes on. start out with, to start out with when you're just, you know, between one to like 100 or 200 notes, that's where you should have the faith. Have the faith to just kind of embrace the chaos. And then after you get into the hundreds, you'll start to recognize that structure naturally. And in fact, Mike, you told me that one of the problems you had

with Rome was you never got to the structure point. Is that a fair statement? That is, yeah. Which is also why when I moved to Obsidian, I had a bunch of people ask me like, oh, did you use that import tool to move everything over? And I was like, no, I saw it, but I have no idea how awesome it is because I wanted to do it the right way this time. saw it but i have no idea how awesome it is because i wanted to do it the right way this time i want to ask you real quick here um you're talking about the just starting out and your first hundred notes whatever i think you've given some great advice on just like create some new

notes and create some links one of the things that really stood out to me and made this stuff click for me as I went through linking your thinking was the idea of adding opinion notes in line with your, I forget what term you use, but like the fact-based notes. Like I read this thing in this book and then here is my opinion as I process it. So as an example, I've got one on habits in my Obsidian Vault, where I've got the Charles Duhigg cue routine reward diagram that everybody is familiar with. And then underneath that, I have an opinion note saying, I don't really like this model because it seems like as soon as the cue is there, you automatically have to follow through with the routine. And then I interject after that, you know, some of the stuff from James Clear's book.

And I find it really helpful to kind of process my thoughts that way. Building that MOC for the first time was a big light bulb moment for me. And I'd like you to talk a little bit about the importance of those opinion-based notes. You talk about this a lot in the course, but just kind of high level, like, why is that so important, especially as you're getting started? Yeah. So the opinion notes are so important because it's making you an active participant in what you're ingesting, what you're interacting with, ideas or information. And yeah, so we had a lot of hands-on exercises

where we would look at something. I think at the time, the GameStop stock manipulation was big in the news. And so the question was, let's make a note and say GameStop stock manipulation is bad. Now, I'm not saying that we believe it's bad. I'm saying we make the note that it's bad. And then within that note, we start typing about why we think it's bad.

And then let's do the exact opposite and say GameStop stock manipulation is good. And then write in thatStop stock manipulation is good. And then write in that note why it's good. And you'll recognize that after a while, these goods and bads, they're just placeholders. And that's the beauty. That's what it should be. Because eventually you get to the point where you can say that, well, the GameStop situation causes Wall Street hedge funders to go belly up. now you have a more specific note that you can talk

about and that becomes the title or this is a bad example i'm working on the fly but the idea is that you start with an opinion and it can be really broad a good and a bad but it's only a prompt a thinking tool for you to get to the truth. Because once you start writing about that, then you wreck, you reveal to yourself what the truth is to you. And then you can make, you can find that punchy statement to be your new file name. And then that becomes the file name and you're like, aha,

I've hit on something here. And whoa, why am I all of a sudden referencing what happened five years ago to me when I was, you know, in a subway and wherever. And those are the magical things that happen. You're put into environment where you're forced to actively engage and think and create and connect. And that's what we're doing here when we, when we create opinion notes. And then those are high value evergreen notes, a term by Andy Matuszak, which allows these notes to age well over time. 10 years in the future, you can come back to this note and connect it to whatever's happening to future you. And suddenly this note continues to gain in its complexity and value to you. That's awesome. I 100% agree. There's that quote that thoughts

disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips. I would add to that clicky keyboards. First time I started doing this in Obsidian, it was kind of amazing to me how I was solidifying my thoughts on the topic as I was going. And I've got these, I call them maps of content. I don't know exactly what they're going to end up as yet with these evergreen notes, but like I've got one on Obsidian versus Rome because there are things from Rome that I miss in not having an Obsidian and there are advantages to Obsidian that you don't have in Rome and vice versa. So writing out, you writing out all of the different, and it's simply just like jotting down a list of the pros and cons of each basically, but

then interjecting my own opinions on like why this is such a big deal. It's kind of amazing to me that like I don't really know what I think until I start creating these opinion-based notes. Absolutely. It's amazing. There's just something about writing down thoughts that it's like taking them to the next level. I find that true throughout my life, and I think it makes a huge difference. And this gives you a place to write them down where you can smash them together. Yes.

All right, Nick, if someone's listening and they want to learn more about Linking Your Thinking, where should they go? Sure. They can go to linkinyourthinking.com backslash guided, G-U-I-D-E-D, guided. And that's where we're doing a guided program. It actually, it opened yesterday and we sold out. We're just keeping it at 40 people and it sold out in 10 hours. But the next one, we'll figure out the spot. And so you can go to that page and join the waitlist. And then you'll be first in line for the next one that opens up in June. And then the big live workshop will start again in August for cohort four. Nice. And you also, I would recommend heading over to YouTube and just looking up Linking

Your Thinkings YouTube channel. Nick has a bunch of content there about getting started with Obsidian and other interesting topics that I think really kind of help you kind of get a better idea for all this stuff as well. Like I said, I think they're the best produced Obsidian YouTube videos on the internet. So check them out. And if anybody wants to reach you, they would do it at linkinyourthinking.com, right? Yep, that's best. Or email support at linkinyourthinking.com.

Well, we really appreciate you coming in and sharing this. I think this is a superpower tool for people that want to get focused. And I think both Mike and I highly recommend all this great stuff Nick is making. 100%. We are the Focused Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm. If you'd like to become a member, we would appreciate it. And we do have additional content for members.

Like today, we're going to be talking about some of the nitty-gritty between Obsidian and Roam and these other tools. You can sign up as a membership over at relay.fm. Before we go, however, I want to share with you another show on RelayFM, and that's Rocket. If you like this show, there's a good chance you'll like Rocket. Rocket covers all the hard tech news of the week, but in a fun way. From the latest Apple news to scams with fake blood testing companies, Rocket is there for you, and you can find it at relay.fm

slash rocket, or search Rocket wherever you get your podcasts. My thanks again to Nick Milo for coming in today, and also to our sponsors, Timing, Spokes, and Indeed We'll see you next time