Obsidian for Beginners: Start HERE — How to Use the Obsidian App for Notes

in this video we're going to dive into the note making app obsidian as if we are a complete beginner hi i'm nick milo and welcome to linking your thinking where we talk about the how and why of making meaningful notes let's get started okay let's start by downloading obsidian go to safari type in obsidian.md and just download the latest version allow that to download close this once it's done open it up and simply drag it into applications so i've already done that and i've put it into my dock here so let's open it up first time it should look like this for you and it's saying open folder as vault create a new vault what's a vault a vault is simply a folder that obsidian is looking at for its files so let's create a new vault and let's just call it a folder and browsing location let's put that folder on the desktop and let's create it here it is so what we see is it's just it's right here that's all it is a simple folder [Music] okay so this is obsidian we're in this is what it looks like a little intimidating i want you just to focus on this button new note that's the most important note right now so let's click on that i'm going to blow it up a little bit right away it allows us to change the title up here let's call this guy note star our very first note i hit tab puts my cursor here and i'm just going to say hi i'm a new note that's all no star is just saying i'm a new note so what we want to see here is that if we go back to the desktop in this folder this is notestar that's it it's a md file markdown which is the same as a plain text file that you can open up with textedit which is on any mac in the world it's plain text is a type of format that as long as there are computers there will be computers that can read plain text and that's what we mean by a different term future proofing that we'll get to later now going back to obsidian we've made a note but what happens when we want to make a second note remember this new note new no okay and let's call this one never note no one likes me they only like this is the first magical moment in a software that can make links i'm going to hit bracket bracket which pulls up a list of all my notes and i'm going to select note star they only like note star now if i do a click on note star it takes me back to that original note that is a huge huge game changer i mean i'm getting goosebumps here because once we start linking our thinking it opens up a whole new avenue of thinking honestly it kind of reopens up the avenue of how our brains actually work so we're kind of getting closer to what feels natural [Music] but let's let's use like a real situation on this imagine you have a favorite movie we all have our favorite movies for me one of my favorite movies is the matrix it comes up all the time in conversations i'm thinking about the red pill and the blue pill and choices so why not kind of externalize that in this piece of software so let's go back to new note i'm just going to say the matrix and i have pre-written one sentence so first off what am i trying to do here i'm not trying to make a a critique of the movie i could i absolutely could but for my purposes what i like are the ideas the concepts that i that i glean from different sources such as movies like the matrix and morpheus presents neo with this choice the infamous red pill blue pill and so what i'm going to do is just highlight this i'm actually just going to hit the bracket and then bracket button again and so i've created a potential new note now once i click on it now it's a new note over here here it is right that's pretty cool that's really powerful that's awesome um so what's so cool about red pill blue pill well it's really about choices and the willingness to to have one's beliefs challenged and you know the more i thought about this concept i threw in a second sentence which is perhaps it's so difficult to take the red pill because we lose that sense of control right and sense of control it's definitely something that's integral to a lot of my thinking about when i you know feel in charge of what i'm trying to accomplish and other times when i feel like chaos is taking over so i know that's a note in the future that i want to create but here's the thing right now i can just add these brackets and it won't create the new note until i click on it so it's just kind of a placeholder it's a reminder for myself here's the other thing though this reminds me of something so i might type here related and let's call this adversity paradox cool now let's click on it to create the new note adversity paradox and so the university paradox is this crazy idea that we're never really seeking out adversity in our lives but when we find it we tend to grow from it so it's the idea that we get stronger from the stressors in our lives i mean that's pretty fascinating to me so i'm thinking about this idea and it makes me think immediately to a book that i had to read in high school and i fell in love with actually it was by viktor frankl and his man's search for meaning and he makes the argument he's a holocaust survivor he was and he makes the argument that it's not sex that brings us meaning like freud would say it's not power that brings us meaning like adler said it's suffering that brings us meaning now like nowhere in the adversity paradox is the the concept of victor frankl but because of how our brains work from our own personal experiences in this case mine i was able to make this connection and to me this is really powerful and this is the power of linking your thinking is because you can create these thoughts over time and they start to grow and build which we'll get into more so i'm just going to make the viktor frankl note i'm not going to touch it right now and i'm going to go back to the adversity paradox um what else what else what else hmm maybe nevernote could learn a thing or two from this concept all right so now we tied never note back into this and this takes us to the next really cool aspect of linking your thinking which is backlinks also known as linked mentions so right now check this out we're in this note called adversity paradox and it has a linked mention to red pill blue pill let's click back to that now what does that mean on red pill blue pill it links to the adversity paradox so going back to the adversity paradox here's the linked mention right now that we're at red pill blue pill we have that the matrix links to it right and we can even read in context that it says morpheus presents neo with the choice so we can click on that and now we're back to the matrix note so that's how these linked mentions work and it's a great way as you look at one note to see all of the different connections that you've made which takes us to the last point the last part of this demo which is the graph view now check this out this is pretty cool this is what we made in the program today we started with note star basically never note didn't like note star and was was jealous of note star and so when we linked the two we formed a new relationship and now these two notes are linked and we can we can build context through that link and then never note well we didn't go in this order but now it's connected to the adversity paradox which is connected to victor frankl adversity paradox is also connected to red pill blue pill which is connected to the matrix so in this way we have created all sorts of contextual goodness so let's take a step back in a short amount of time we've made all sorts of new connections we've externalized them in a program like obsidian and we started to grow them and cultivate them and the magic is let's go back in because let's say a year passes and i get back to this red pill blue pill and i'm thinking to myself you know this reminds me of something that just happened yesterday to me and i and i write this in this reminds me of something that just happened etc etc and uh so do we see what's happening here this note doesn't lose its value over time its value actually grows in time as i have more experiences and i externalize those experiences the connections grow now why is this important first and foremost when you link your thinking you improve your ability to recall those memories those those thoughts those ideas and that's the most important thing we want to be able to have confidence that we can find what we're looking for when we want to find it that is first and foremost and when we link we have a better chance of remembering secondly it allows us to build things as we're seeing here so we might not start with the perfect uh michelangelo sculpted out of of marble but we can get there slowly over time right and that's just through our own experiences that we're adding value to our existing collection of thoughts but practically you might be thinking why is this important well it depends i mean if you're somebody who is a creator this is the perfect way to create a new article or make a new speech because you've already done 80 of the work now it's just crafting it and honing it for whatever particular medium that you hope to deploy it in but i find that a lot of value just comes from having conversations with other people and and having this in the back of my mind i'm making all sorts of leaps of insights across genres and domains and it just makes every conversation that you enter that much more interesting and fun and engaging because now when you're listening you're more actively engaged because you're trying to you know understand whatever that person is saying in some other concepts that you've taken some time to really flesh out and this is where newness and novelty comes from and that's going to wrap up our first video on the basics of obsidian we didn't just cover the how but we really dove into the why and i hope you can start to see why this is so exciting hey if you like this video it's the first in a series of videos on covering the note making up obsidian as if you are a complete beginner if you liked it please subscribe below because there will be many more if you liked it also hey give it a thumbs up make a comment down below i'll do my best to answer i'm just so thankful that you watch and i look forward to seeing you in the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Linking Your Thinking

Views: 237,948

Rating: 4.9396944 out of 5

Keywords: Obsidian App, How to Get Started with Obsidian App, how to use obsidian app, how to use obsidian note taking app, obsidian for beginners, obsidian.md, Nick Milo, Obsidian Linking Your Thinking, https://obsidian.md/index.html, Obsidian app for students, Obsidian free course, obsidian app for students, Obsidian app features, imf framework obsidian, how to organize notes in obsidian, Obsidian app notes, Obsidian app notes tutorial, note-taking app obsidian, obsidian linked mentions

Id: QgbLb6QCK88

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mackncheeze]

Holy shit I just heard about this a couple hours ago. Now I’m seeing it here on reddit. Guess I’m quite the trend-setter.

[u/adx]

My problem with Obsidian is the license. Once I go to tie in my professional notes it kicks it over to the $50/year commercial license.