How to Write Mini Essays (in Obsidian)

the mini essay is one idea on one page of at least 100 Words and less than 300 it has a beginning a middle and an end and that's it you can write them they're simple they're easy they're fantastic and what's more when you write them in a tool like obsidian where you can link them to each other you create something really amazing an idea verse of your own thoughts that grows and value with you over time now if you're feeling stuck on that treadmill of just reading and consuming other people's writings so much so that you barely write yourself then the mini essay might be one of the most important tools to help you unlock those sticking points and start writing some of your best work in this walkthrough I want to share with you the benefits of mini essays three ways that you can Kickstart your writing of mini essays and three examples with workflows of essays that I wrote myself are you ready all right let's go okay before I show you how I have written many essays and how I write many essays we have to talk about the benefits why even write them in the first place and it really boils down to three things the first one is it optimizes for the generation effect now this is what a bunch of research has shown us that the generation effect when you write something in your own words that you're learning it leads to improved comprehension and improved recall two really valuable things now the research doesn't say this but something that creators and writers know in our bones is that when when you write something you don't just improve comprehension and recall you actually catalyze more insights you you generate more meaning and you actually develop a bit of an intuitive sense when it comes to the topic at hand and all of that leads to this expanding surface area of luck of happy accidents of innovative thinking all this is accomplished by writing by writing your original words even if they're influenced by something that you read in fact they're going to be they're going to be influenced by the out world but what matters is how you take those Sparks and and go to remarks and that's what we'll cover in this next bit and one more I want to give a shout out to Odyssey whose YouTube channel really blew up recently thanks to a few videos including one on Mini essays and there's another Point that's relating to the generation effect which is when you write something in your own words like in a mini essay you uncover the gaps in your own understanding so thank you Odyssey for bringing light to the power of an essay especially a mini essay and after this video you should go watch that one the second benefit is that we are optimizing for the finan effect this is where the best way to learn is to teach so if we can put ourselves in an environment where we're crafting a very simple story just over 100 words with a beginning middle and end we can actually learn faster by having an audience that we're teaching even if that audience is just us in the future and number number three it optimizes for note making not note taking if you want to better understand things put them in your own words with your own insights and experiences the value of note making is that you get to understand your world better as you're creating meaningful things it's the best of both worlds so those are the three benefits combined and why I'm so excited by the mini essay is because it combines all these benefits into the most ideal measurable piece of work in anyone's knowledge work and even many creative efforts you know if you've written one or if you haven't it's fun it's simple it's effective and it has all these benefits so without further Ado let's go into how we even start the process it all starts with the spark boom kapow zap something resonates with you you're walking around the world and you say that's interesting or that's important when you do don't stop there don't continue to scroll that's the bad habit that we all have a bit of in the digital age we're just on these digital hamster wheels scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and some way somehow we have to get off the wheel and the best easiest simplest funnest way to get off this hamster wheel of consuming too much is to Simply say because that's interesting because that's important to me because and whatever you say next it doesn't matter what you say next it doesn't matter if it's any good if you even like what you say next the the point is that you go from leaning back to leaning forward you're active you're engaged and you're thinking and writing in your own words that's how we go from spark to remark that is the value of not making and it's the start of something meaningful it could be the start of a mini essay so in this next section I want to cover the three techniques that can Kickstart your actual mini essays let's go now you've found something that sparked with you you've captured it you've put it into a note and you've even added your own remarks so you've gone from from a spark to a remark and you said why it's interesting but you might be thinking well how am I supposed to write something that has a beginning a middle and an end and I think that it's helpful to just have a few Frameworks to get us rolling faster to Kickstart our efforts so I want to share with you three fast ones and then give you actual examples of how I use these in actual mini essays that I've written and shared with others so these three techniques can be boiled simply down to experience opinion and event so the first one is experience you might start your essay by saying there I was 10,000 ft above the air without a parachute wondering how I got there well okay we're hooked we want to know what's going to happen next so assuming something like that may have happened to you we're in we want to know what's going to happen that's a good start to an essay and all we're talking about is you sharing a personal experience that's it just start with an experience but lure Us in hook us with that so that's number one experience now number two is one of my favorites and and that's opinion so actually starting with just a really strong statement you might say strong statement and it's important because of this now I'm going to share why and give you a couple takeaways boom mini essay is over I think I lean on the first two a lot experience and opinion but the third one I'd like to share is event where you can simply say on this date this happened it's important because of XYZ I will share the reasons below and then I will also provide a couple takeaways boom you're done with a mini essay and remember the whole proc process of the mini essay you're improving your comprehension your recall you're finding gaps in your understanding as you're catalyzing new insights generating connections and creating some of your best works all this is happening just because you put the right forcing function in front of you a simple essay that's based on one idea on one page just over 100 words up to about 300 now of course there are plenty of more ways to Kickstart your essay writing efforts but these are three that I like to go to and I want to share with you three actual examples workflows all the way through with techniques along the way about how I did this myself are you ready for that I'm about to share my screen so let's get into it okay we're in you can see how I wrote this in my idea verse in obsidian this is a single note it has a bunch of different links we'll ignore those for now we're going to go down to the new section how I wrote three different kinds of mini essay let's just hop into it the first one is based on experience this thing thing happened to me so the Sparks here were I went to watch Dune part one and I was hyped up about it ready to be blown away and I was disappointed a couple years later I go to watch Dune part ton I'm expecting to be disappointed and I leave hyped up so what's this all about I had this experience I wanted to write about it how did I choose to write about it as a freewrite so I'm just going to write Loosely about something I love the freewrite because it gives me permission just to go wherever my mind takes me so as I wrote and this is the power of the free I discovered what I wanted to say that's it right there it wasn't that the hype was real it was that hype itself hype itself is real and so you can see what I wrote here let me just zoom out like how I would normally look at it so it's on a single page and this turned out to be 206 actual words when we get rid of some of the U the links that if if I click into a few of these notes you'll see that there are some extra words so we had 206 words this is a mini essay it's a story and it starts with my experience I just saw doe part two at this place and the hype is real and what I mean by that is hype itself is real and this was me writing about it figuring that out for my for the first time I didn't know what I was going to say until I started to say it and in fact let's see how do I I know what I think till I see what I link is another way that I talk about that to myself now I had free written freewrite to Insight I had my insight and it was hype is real now I wanted to rewrite it with that Kickstarter in mind so once I knew hype is reals like the big takeaway for me is I wanted to write with my newsletter in mind about this experience and that's what I came away with so if we just really quickly reflect on the techniques I had an experience and I chose to free write a free write led to an Insight that Insight led to me wanting to rewrite so if we look at this mini essay canvas I just spun up something very basic for us this is the basic process you have a spark you make some remarks you freewrite that's going to lead well actually let's go to this one that's going to lead to an Insight Insight is something you can rewrite with an audience in mind and boom mini essay is complete so that is number one this is an actual practical example can you see how you could apply this yourself just as a quick recap start freewriting about something as you write you'll discover what you really want to say and then write about death the second essay is about opinion so if the first was an experience this thing happened to me the next one is here's a strongly stated thing so for me this was where somewhere on the interwebs people were talking about AI and and saying that eventually it will feel as mundane as flying in an airplane after you've done it several times and all sorts of things so my initial remark was you know it's kind of like there's this magic to mundane meter I was like write something about this and so at the start let me just I actually have something ready for you from a a keynote I did so all I had at the start was just something I wanted to write about and then later on a day later a week later I expanded it with bullets of things I wanted to say then I sat on that for a while until I came back to it and started linking to other ideas in my PKM system my idea verse one was that compound interest is like magic another was this famous quote from Arthur C Clark that you can see here so what happened what was the process with writing this mini essay first I made that remark and then I played Garden master so I just showed you some slides and what what's a powerful with this is that you can write you can capture something that's a spark you can make some remarks and then you can have it be buried for a day a week a month years and then something happens and those Sparks were Embers smoldering and then with a sudden ignition these ideas take a life of their own and then I jumped back into it I was like the magic to mundane meter let's explore it let's add these links and that's when I added compound interest in any sufficiently Advanced Technologies indistinguishable indistinguishable from Magic and I felt like I hit something internally I hit this critical mass of energy where these idea Embers couldn't ignite into their own essay you'll feel that too you'll know when that moment is if you're writing things similar to this when that happens we go from G Master just kind of walking around pruning adding this and that to linking things link to ignite and then getting to the re rewrite with the kickstarter and on this one it's all about the opinion baby here's a strongly stated thing so in this case as I was writing I eventually found out that what I was trying to say and it took me this whole thing to write about until I got to the end it was actually the last sentence that gave me the title to the piece so I had to write the whole thing until knew what I wanted to say and it was that curiosity is the cure to the mundane these things don't have to become mundane over time I can this day in fact today you see that I'm somewhere else I actually flew from LA to Atlanta today so I was on an airplane and I was looking out the window I was taking a couple photos like it was my first time ever in an airplane so even the most mundane can become magical again with the missing ingredient inent of curiosity I wanted to write about that so my techniques spark to remark guard a master link to ignite and then rewrite and it was just because I captured something that sparked I Loosely gardened I Loosely cultivated these notes especially by linking and then something ignited and I wrote about it the bonus benefit of this is that these types of mini essays can lead to brand new efforts it might be a published piece in my case it might even be a bigger thing that it develops into even when that's not your initial intention That's The Power of writing and writing something easy and effective and simple like a mini essay the last one an event so now we're going to write an essay where we just focus on something that happened so the spark was last year LeBron James broke the NBA scoring record and that was held by Kareem Abdul Jabar and I remember watching it live and and they paused the game it was like what what's going on right now like there was basketball and then for the next 15 minutes maybe 20 minutes it was a ceremony for maybe 25 30 I don't know uh there was just a ceremony on the court in the middle of a basketball game to celebrate LeBron James breaking This Record now because I read up on it afterwards the YouTube algorithm fed me when Kareem Abdul Jabar broke the scoring record in 84 and that was such such a more quaint experience they didn't stop the game they waited till they're back in Los Angeles in a Lakers home game and then before the game they had a bit of a ceremony and so I found that this this was 39 40 years had pass and it was such a different different experience so it made me want to do research and I did a tremendous amount of research you can see this this uh this note has 2,000 words um I'm exploring all sorts of topics I'm exploring Avenues ideas a lot of this hasn't gone into any outward form but it's really informed me when it comes to the Dynamics of sports and sports leagues how they evolve over time in the relationships between not just players but players between Generations all of this from this curiosity from LeBron scoring uh breaking the scoring record and I was able to finally summarize it with a really fantastic title LeBron's a billionaire but Kareem got a sound system and that's because during Kareem ceremony he was the NBA gave him a sound system and it sounds just so quaint that that's what he was rewarded and they didn't have to give LeBron anything because he's already got 300 million from from Nike And he as of 2022 he's a he's a billionaire so all these different thoughts are encapsulated in this great uh mini thesis right here all of the intergenerational things and it it ties into strongly and what I'd put here for myself is c um and then I'd hit NB built on the built on the shoulders of giants and I even have a statement here that I I didn't finish but there it is load management is chopping it down so the Giants of wil Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul Jabar Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and then especially Michael Jordan all of those Giants have led to today when let's not talk about LeBron James let's talk about his teammate Austin Rivers who for his first few years in the NBA was or he started out as a benchwarmer and yet he was making as much as Kareem would make if he was playing today based on his 80s salary that's nuts so low-level players in today's NBA are making what stars were making comparatively relatively 40 years ago the NBA is built on the shoulders of giants and load management is chopping it down do you see the power we have a strongly stated mini thesis as the title and then the introduction is about LeBron James so if we go back to this one in February of 2023 LeBron James did this they stopped the game it was a huge deal so it's not the best intro but it does touch on the idea that we're starting with an event this thing happened February 2023 so what we're doing here is name it to frame it that's the big technique where I figured out a way to capture so much in a single sentence and then I can rewrite it and do all sorts of great things but the big technique here was naming it to frame it and so the recap and why I have this tab open too is at the end of the day the mini essay is the best unit of measurement that I'm aware of right now in knowledge work in the creation of intellectual capital and in many of our creative Endeavors and here here here's all you have to do just talk about one idea keep it to a page and do at least 100 words that's it one idea one page 100 Words and the best way that I like to go about it is that you're just writing about something that's interesting you talk about what the takeaway is and through that process you'll discover the title that's the order do the title last just talk about what's interesting what's the takeaway and what's the title so free right to Insight spark to remark and all the other techniques that we covered in this video they're part of my workshop writing original works and that's where participants learn and create their own reliable process using notes to write original works if you want to learn more check out the link in the description below okay so writing a mini essay is one of my favorite forms of notem making because what else allows you to make notes that force you to learn deeper generate insights and accidentally create some of your funnest proudest and best work as soon as you start making notes and not taking notes and as especially as you write these min essays you'll start to notice that your mind is sharper your insights multiply and especially your curiosity is nourished and I think some of you will start to wonder why you spent so much time trying to figure out the Dogma around zetel ctin when all that stuff is making you feel like you're doing it wrong what you need to do is open up a note talk about an idea keep it to about a page and write it in your own words link it to other stuff share it with future or share it with other people that's the process link those notes together over time and really amazing things will happen and it's that last point if you want to create a connected web of ideas of your knowledge and idea verse check out this video series where we get into it and you can learn how to create your own and until next time write mini essays and stay connected

Channel: Linking Your Thinking with Nick Milo

Views: 14,325

Keywords: obsidian, linking your thinking, obsidian app, pkm

Id: XsIK2kVbH6Y

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024