How to Become an Expert with Obsidian (FULL GUIDE)

this system in obsidian can make you an expert in literally anything if I had to make a guess I'd say you're an ambitious person you want to learn you want to explore the topics you love and you want to be confident in your skills maybe

you're like me in the sense that you hate feeling ignorant and incompetent it's a nasty feeling and In fairness to us learning is difficult and it's very hard unless we have the right system in

place to support us and that's where obsidian comes in which is a minimalist note taking app that I've been using for over a year now and more precisely we're using the detal ctin approach inside it

which is a simple but really powerful way to not only take notes but connect them zet z z z Cen some Germans helped me out with the pronunciation last video

if I'm still letting you down I'm sorry I tried my best this system was most famously used by a man called Nicholas lurman who used it to write over 70 books and hundreds I mean hundreds of

Articles safe to say it works for Learning and it also works for creation and I'm confident to say that because I've used it for the past over a year now 17 months I think to consistently

write every week the all the notes the scripts the Articles that's hundreds of words per day and I've even kept track of it so this you know I can vouch for this myself and I really do believe in

it as a system and maybe the best part is that even though I haven't picked up some of those books behind me for months to reread I still have a good grip of the main ideas in them the most important ones and that's because this

system and all the writing involves really embeds it into your understanding it's more than just memorizing notes or you know flashcards it's about true

depth and understanding the ideas and letting them change your mind and change who you are as a person this is all based on the system that I did a setup video of a few months ago so I'm not going to bore you with all of the

technical details again that'll just be tedious but maybe you already used that and I know a lot of people were commenting that it's served them well it's changed how they learn even coming

back months later to report the good news and that's really nice to see it's I really appreciate that if you're not using the system but it does sound interesting to you I would recommend going to watch the other video maybe

afterwards I'll link it below and you know forgive me it's a little updated but it still does the job I think and a lot of the common struggles have been addressed in the comments so I do warn you though there is a slight learning

curve and it does take a few hours days even weeks to get used to so if you do struggle initially I totally get you but just have some faith I also won't talk too much about the benefits of this system cuz I already

did that in the other video if you know you know and if it is new to you then it has changed my entire philosophy of learning and I can't imagine my life without it nowadays it's so fundamental

and Central to everything now it's not for everyone I will admit that but if you are a writer if you are a thinker if you are a student a professional anyone who deals with knowledge and likes to

learn in their spare time it's worth a shot it's worth giving a chance that's enough waffle so how do you become an expert with obsidian your first step is to go to this Monastery in Thailand and

there you'll find my old Mentor Benedict a monk I want you to speak to him and I want you to tell him flames of the rising Serpent and he'll know what you mean he'll give you your next

instructions no it's simpler than that you just read you consume stuff and I say consume stuff because this isn't the 1800s anymore we're not just we don't just have books available we have

all sorts of other media that is perhaps equally as valuable we also have videos out there we have podcasts we have articles blogs even Twitter threads and

paid courses and Instagram posts all of these can teach us something of course it does depend on the subject you're learning about some will naturally push you towards books whereas others might

be more video focused and you know some might have all of their information in subreddits and you know rarely elsewhere but even then having multiple formats just keeps things fresh and dynamic really makes learning more fun this

video is useless unless I show you the process in action so for this video I'm going to become an expert on men's shoes yeah I know it's an odd one I

wanted it to be something simple easy to show off and easy for you to follow and you know let's be honest I'm not looking to become an expert in chemical engineering just for a video I'm sorry I

know but don't get me wrong there is no limit to the complexity of topics that you can use this system for in the past I've used used it for things like Greek literature anthropology and more

philosophical ideas which are much more dense and heavy it's so versatile this system that you can really put it anywhere and it will work also I have a confession I'm being a bit selfish here I'm actually looking to buy new shoes

and I don't really know much about them so this is a you know completely selfish opportunity for me to learn more about them and make the right choice when I buy the next ones okay so I know nothing

about men's shoes so this means I can start my research wherever I want just anyway where I found some good articles and videos and I simply consume them one by one while taking notes on the most important

points now what counts as important depends on you and your goals for me right now I don't care about the history of the shoes or the manufacturing process I just want to know about the

style and where you'd use them so that goal is going to orient all of my notetaking and really make it personal now just before this Second Step which is when things get interesting I want to

add that you can do this with practical topics too and by practical I mean anything that involves you learning by doing things like sports playing an

instrument coding all of these Hands-On tasks but there is a small catch sure there's the theory that you have to study but what matters perhaps even more is the real world practice you have to

get out there and do it and that in itself is a form of learning you can't for yourself into saying yeah I'll practice later or learn about all of it first and then do that stuff you have to

go out and do it because the theory won't you know it will only take you so far at some point you have to get out the door you have to get real experience and make mistakes and build that

intuition and only then can all of that theory justify Itself by being practical in the real world for example in the case of my topic shoes I had to learn how to shine them which is something I

never really learned before and at some point I should go out to the shoe shops of London and you know get a feel for them myself beyond the words on the page or seeing them in a video with each piece of content I consume I create a

source notes for it and all of the interesting ideas from that video article book whatever will end up here I think of this folder as my lecture notes like you're in college they're not super

rough but they're not polished either it's just collecting all of the things that mattered from that Source it's important to mention that they're all in my own words and you'll see why in a second with books for example I write

down on the page number maybe a quote or passage I found interesting and then underneath it I elaborate in my own words I give it a discussion would it remind me of what questions do I have

could I link it to something else anything interesting that it made me think of how exactly you take those notes depends on what the content is and of course you your style no one really

can tell you what's right or wrong and this is simply how I do it you can write more you can write less you can write rough you can write the most polished stuff ever it's up to you and this already is half

the work like it's amazing on its own you're understanding the ideas you're practicing your writing you taking time and effort and Care into these things that's amazing if you stop there now

this is all very simple so far it's just no taking pretty standard but bear with me because soon you'll see how it comes together into this galaxy of knowledge is Network or in other words you're soon

to be expertise My First Source note on men's shoes is an article written by The Art of Manliness who by the way are ogs and they actually got me into the online writing game so do check them out I'll

link them below this is a guide on men's shoes and is quite General so I figured it was a good starting point for me who knows nothing I read through it plucking all of the important points I find some

dos and don'ts different shoe types and maybe some pointers on what to look for That's My First Source note complete and please do make sure to link back to the original peace because then if you have need to revisit it it's so much easier

for yourself also I know I repeat this all the time but do write it in your own words I I know I sound like your English teacher saying that all the time but it really is important you have to you know

if you copy quotes word for word you don't get to think about them and you're just kind of transcripting rather than turning into true understanding and forcing yourself to think and to digest

the ideas in step three you distill mix and refine all of the points that you picked up in your Source notes Here we use the atomic note style mainly because of three big strengths they have but

first off what actually are they Atomic notes are a single unit of knowledge that you can move around you can edit and build upon and most importantly you can connect with other Atomic notes they have three strengths that you don't

really see in mainstream note taking Styles and at first they seem weird and counterintuitive but later you realize why wasn't I doing this before it just makes sense I was tempted to completely

skip over these cuz I mentioned them in the past video I just can't though they're too important to gloss over the first strength is that they're singular which means each note limits itself to

one idea in your final write ups or in the real world in general you can't really isolate ideas there's always going to be nuance and any sane worldview has to look at different sides

of the story and consider things from many fields that's just how it is however when we're talking about notes that can be tricky because sometimes we try and juggle many different ideas

within a single note and it gets confusing gets messy we don't know what we wrote and where it's found so the theory here is that if we separate them

into single Atomic notes we know exactly where all these ideas are and we can better manipulate them edit them and see the bigger picture from the top view we

take these big complex and nuanced topics and split them apart into smaller more ordered units of thought which we can work with much easier the mixing of ideas when we actually take these notes

and put them together that is saved for later for when we do our final writeups or in general when we have learned many different things about a topic and we're ready to start to see the bigger picture

maybe for example this Art of Manliness article is quite General it goes over many different topics within the world of shoes for example uh it talks about shoe anatomy and I'm going to make an

atomic note on the anatomy and in that note I will refuse to talk about anything else other than shoe Anatomy I'm not going to talk about the style I'm not going to talk about the materials or how you you know pair it

with other outfits that is not for here this note is just shoe Anatomy there are other ideas I save for their own notes and yes they are all similar but to keep them

separate for now just neatens things up and you will see later that we can mix them in a way that creates an ecosystem of thought without getting cluttered think of it like Wikipedia let's say you're reading an article on some French

person and eventually it mentions born in France just because France is mentioned it's not going to suddenly go into a whole four-page tangent on all things French it saves that information

for the French for the France article and it focuses right now on the person yes France is related but that doesn't mean you have to go into the politics and the the infrastructure of France

it's it's just stupid Wikipedia likes to split and order these things in its own articles and then link them all together in a sense you're building your own Wikipedia page one that is completely

tailored to your interests and written by you for you the second strength is that each Atomic note is independent meaning that they have a start a middle and an end and you don't have to first

read a bunch of other notes to understand what one is saying by that I mean I can pick any note from my collection and even if I wrote it a year ago and I forgot everything it will have

all of the information I need to reinform me to get me up to speed there is no extra context I need to help me understand this note again it makes it super convenient to work with because

when you're doing projects you might use notes from months ago from years ago and you will have forgotten what's inside but now you don't need this whole Bank of context to understand the note it's

all there for you in a sense you're allowed you're allowing yourself to forget with this system it does the remembering for you in a way of course you will have to read many notes if you

want to get a a refresh of The Wider topic but the point is each note explains itself the third strength is that every single note is free to

connect now this might sound crazy if you come from more traditional note taking but in this system every single note is stored in one folder just one I

have hundreds of notes from so many random different topics all in this one folder and that gives them the the freedom to mingle and to connect with anything else if every single note you

write is locked away in a notebook in a folder or in some random document somewhere on your hard drive it doesn't it doesn't have the freedom to connect to anything else it's completely shut

away and you don't allow those bridges to form between topics to then create new original thinking or something exciting that you didn't see at first and what you're doing here by putting

them all in the same place is you're allowing those those eure moments to happen where you think you know oh he's writing something that that author

from 200 years ago mentioned and that philosopher said something similar 2,000 years ago and you think oh you see those connections and that can happen all the

time sure but it's much easier when all of the ideas are next to each other and they're all in the same space despite being separated by Time by location by all of these things by mixing those you

hopefully find a fresh and exciting perspective and that can only happen if you let it if you give it the chance to do so the linking feature as well as the tags help you connect notes that are

from very distant topics to make connections that you never saw coming originally so how do you actually write an atomic note well I'm not going to lie to my teeth not to my teeth I'm not

going to lie through my teeth and say that it's simple cuz it's not there is a learning curve and there are a lot of small details that you have to figure out for yourself and it comes with

experience I promise you but you know even so I want to give you a head start and give some a rough guideline a rough template on how you can write an atomic note one that's solid and will serve you

well once I finish my source notes I read back through them and I decide what here deserves to be made into an atomic note this part can be tricky it's a little bit abstract and for longest time

I didn't understand the difference between a source note and an atomic note but I do get it now I still struggle with it sometimes but there's many guidelines that I used to help me decide what to write about first is the most

simple and the most obvious you take what you found in the source notes that was the most interesting the most exciting and you convert it into an atomic note you give it a more proper

Rite up you it out more you elaborate more and just polish it and give it the care it deserves because remember these are going to serve you for the rest of your life once written they're written it's for this reason that I almost never

copy and paste Straight From the Source notes I give it more care and time and attention it does take more effort of course but you know in the process

you're still learning and refining and really revising the concepts so even that process of writing it again in a sense is useful but hey if you want to

copy and paste that's fine as well we don't all have time for these long write ups so do as you wish for example I finished my source notes on a video by the gentleman's Gazette on five pairs of

shoes that every man must own you can see that I wrote down what he said pretty roughly one of these pairs of shoes was black Oxford's so I decided to take the idea that you should own them and make it into an atomic note it's not

redundant because I didn't just copy and paste it and I didn't regurgitate the same sentence but I used as a chance to flesh out the topic to elaborate on it and to really add my own two sents I

took the impersonal from the video and gave it a personal touch I added onto it a flavor of I guess my life and what I would use this for and that is what you should be doing because again this is

your system and it's there to to serve you and to help you and to assist you in all your learning besides even if the content in the atomic note was exactly the same as the source note you now have

given it a chance to connect to something else you've created a unit of an idea that is free to connect to other units of ideas other Atomic notes and that wasn't really possible when they

were locked away in the source note the second thing I look for in my source notes to turn into Atomic notes is a recurring theme something that keeps popping up time and time again I'll move away from shoes for a second cuz it's

easier if I use literature to show you this a while ago I read the Odus plays by Sophocles within those although it wasn't explicitly mentioned I kept seeing the idea of family come up again

and again the you know theme of family I noticed that a lot of the ideas inside that book were Pro family they were highlighting the importance of having good ties with your parents and you know

respect them in as they age and having a mutual care for each other and not being ruined by bitterness and jealousy to each other that was something that was evident to me throughout the book so

what I did then is I made an atomic note dedicated to that idea and to prove I'm not making up and you know coping to myself I actually went through all of

the source notes and took examples of where this happened quotes passages I discussed it a little I gave some evidence to back it up and this Atomic note was just a way for me to wrap that

up and to you know take something that wasn't evident initially and make it into something real and tangible and connectable so if you keep seeing a

general idea pop up in your Source notes you can use an atomic note to name it and to give it a summary and to wrap it up and Define it as one and finally

Atomic notes can just be your own thoughts they don't even need a source to exist sometimes I make them and in the references I just put me cuz I just thought about it I know it sounds

obvious like no we can just think about stuff and write it but not everyone has the confidence to do that for ages I was never willing to write down my own thoughts because you know I

thought they had to be from somewhere and you know they they are we're all the product of our lives and our experiences but you can write down your own thoughts and those can be perfectly valid Atomic

notes maybe it comes from the fear of being wrong and that's fair you might indeed be wrong the notes you make based on sources might be wrong the sources might be wrong and you know there's

elements of Truth in everything but the willingness to be wrong is important because it means that you know you don't have the truth and it means that you are seeking it and trying to find new things

learn from different people read a wide variety of sources and step a little bit closer to that ideal of Truth so when you read your Source notes you can ask yourself well what do you already know

about to what new questions did it Inspire and maybe what does it remind you of Elsewhere all of those questions can Inspire your next Atomic note and I guess the source is you in this case

just don't write that in a a dissertation don't say like trust me bro it came to me in a dream I just thought about it it just makes sense that might get you kicked out from college whatever

okay okay but seriously uh for example in regards to my my topic men's shoes I'm going to write all of these notes with regard to my personal style there's

no original source for that it's just my style it's me and that will influence what I choose to make Atomic notes on and maybe what I choose to ignore compared to the next person with each of

these Atomic notes I have a status tag and this tells me how developed the note is because you know some are rougher than others and some need more care and attention over time but you know for now

this isn't so important I mentioned it in the setup video what is more important are the tags now there's a whole tagging system and it's super important because you know we still want to keep our notes organized even without

a folder system and you know we want the best of both words and that is the tagging is how we achieve that again I won't go into detail cuz I cover it in the setup but just know it's there and it's important I also link to other

relevant notes at the bottom which creates this tree of reasoning that you can explore through for example if I mention the whole cut shoe design in one note I might reference another note that

elaborates on that topic and it gives more attention to it again we're not using each Atomic note to talk about everything if we mention one idea in this that isn't the main idea we just

link to the other Atomic note that does cover it in full detail these are all of the atomic notes that I've written for the art and man article I hit all of the main ideas I linked some of the ideas

together and I even started to make an indp an index is like a contents page for a topic it gives you a broad overview and helps you understand the topic from a bird's eye view I do this

by taking the tag moving it to an index folder which is just there to keep it separate and easy to find and then within that note I add subheadings that are relevant to the topic and under each

of these subheadings I link to any notes that are relevant to it and this just gives me a again an easy way to understand the topic as a whole and to jump in when ever I need step four is

called synthesis and this is what really separates the system apart from anything else it's what you need to become an expert the three steps before this are good but synthesis is a must synthesis

is when you repeat the last few steps you find good sources you consume them and then you take solid notes and you know turn them into Atomic notes all that good stuff and you grow your

collection but you're not just adding new notes you're also refining existing ones you edit them you add information you make sure they are you know you give

more angles to the same topic and really build nuance and depth to your understanding you will grow and mature as a person so it makes sense that your notes can be lifted up with you you can

edit them you can update them keep them fresh and relevant as you develop through your life and learn new things for example if I watch a video now that covers an idea I talked about two months

ago in some random notes I might go back into that note and revise it maybe add something adds a contradictory point a counterargument or just an extra bit of detail that helps keep it relevant and

strong now what this means is that one note can have ideas pulled from several different sources so you know initially it's going to be One Source One notes but after time after you consume more

and read more and do more you can have many many sources talking about the exact same idea you use little aspects from each one to refine that one idea every Source has its weaknesses it might

be missing something it might have a lot of stuff you don't care about and it might not be presenting a a fair picture of this topic and that is why you read

multiple different things in order to gain a strong idea of something and all of those weaknesses are kind of evened out because where One Source lacks in something another source might account for it or you know make a

counterargument all of these different things with Sy with Sy sake h say it with synthesis you pull the most

relevant interesting things from a wide variety of sources to make your Atomic note stronger as strong as it can be and not only stronger but better suited to you as an individual if you have a stem

background like me then this might just sound like research to you and it is it's research when you research you have to read multiple different papers and

then draw ideas from each of them to get a better understanding of your own topic that you might be discussing in your literature review or your paper whatever that is tough work especially without the system to help you if that's how you

roll then you also need a way to store study and manage all of the references that you use in your final WR up that's why I'm excited to say that afari is sponsoring this video I used to use zero

as my reference manager but I found it clunky and a bit outdated aari is a clean and modern reference manager one that remains simple and the easy to understand you can see here that I've

uploaded a few of the papers I've used for my research so they're all neatly organized in one place you can then generate a citation and easily plug it into your dissertations articles or whatever else you're working on without

the pain in the ass process of writing all yourself writing your notes in obsidian or on paper is great and all but it can be a little tricky for some people to remember the context of each point they make with afar you can jump

into the paper itself and make annotations within each page line and section all with color coding of course it's clean attractive and I like that I can add my own thoughts to each line to

help me guide my thinking I can't lie I get lazy when I do technical research and that was especially true back in college sometimes I just can't be asked to dive into every single little rabbit hole that confuses me at first what's

nice is that I don't have to here if I want to know more about a side point or if I need some context I can just ask the AI chat then and there like I did here with this anthropology paper if you

work as a team or have group projects in college you can share your libraries and work on the same paper together which I could have used myself back in the day so if you want to modernize your reference manager then do check the link

in the description below now there is a free plan so you can try explore and enjoy at your own pace but if you do decide that you want the full experience

you can use code odesus at checkout for a nice 10% off so do have a look I think you'll love it I've Loved using it and many thanks to afai for sponsoring this video using this formula of consuming

writing linking making all these notes I've managed to build myself a pretty decent Network on shoe knowledge it's not exciting but it's there on the graph view you can see that all of my sources

are red all of my tags are yellow and all of my Atomic notes are just plain old gray in blue is my index which gives me a bird's eye view of the whole topic now In fairness I haven't done enough

research to call myself a shoe expert but you can see from this system that if you give me a few more weeks months not a year probably weeks and months I can

become an expert on shoes and I will have more knowledge than 99% of people on that topic weird Flex fair enough but it's true it's inevitable I'll encounter

lots more detail many different misconceptions different opinions on the topic and all of that will build me a nuanced and detailed worldview of shoes

obviously for a lot of topics you're going to have to do much more than a few weeks or months worth of research some of the bigger more complicated ones could take you know years to become a true expert but the point is this gets

you there and whatever topic you pick no matter how complex or ridiculous it can do that and of course remember that in some topics you will have to go out there and practice and do something with

all this Theory I also want to emphasize again just how personal this is in this uh shoe research I purposely did not write any notes on Chelsea boots or

trainers cuz I don't wear them and I don't want to I don't like their style I'll never buy them I don't just don't care about them now no offense to Chelsea boot wearers but you know this

is my system I'm not going to pretend to care just so I can cover that topic why would I unless you're doing this for work or for school then you decide what interests you and if something doesn't who gives a just don't write about

it that's okay now you could end it there that's the system but I want to add an extra step called repackaging which just helps you go the extra mile now this is already quite a high effort system and it's you know it's pretty

serious but you wanted to take it one step further you could take what you learn and change it into something new to repackage it into a new piece of content it is harder it is more

effortful but you know shoe wisdom never came easy that was there Blood Sweat and Tears there rather than remaining the student here you become the teacher because as we know from College from the

fan technique from teaching a toddler how to do something or you know what something is you learn when you teach and when you're forced to explain an idea in your own words in a new way you

really have to understand it so when I say repackage that's what I mean take the ideas you learn and then communicate them in a different medium or all the same medium that's fine but the point is

to add a spin on it to add your experience to add your two cents to analyze it to give it a fresh take anything to make it new and original you

were already doing this in a sense when you were writing Atomic notes you took ideas put them in your own own words and you know add added something relevant to

you but here I mean full projects I mean you can go and write articles blog posts shoot videos on the topic anything it sounds weird even crazy to recommend

this as a learning technique but you my thinking is that if you're passionate enough to become an expert on it who's to say you can't write about it or make videos about it or I don't know start a

newsletter or a blog or a channel dedicated to it it's not really a stretch to say if you care about it like that then you might care about it enough to make it the center of your next

creative project that's the end and these uh obsidian videos always intimidate me because I get that looming feeling that I've missed something that I haven't explained something properly

or I've forgotten something crucial and it's just it bites at me so please if anything confuses you if you want a further elaboration tell me write it in

the comments or send me an email mail I'll do my best to see and respond to everything it's difficult but I try again this has a learning curve it won't

be easy and it took me I think weeks to feel properly comfortable and get used to get used to it now you might struggle at first but do give it a chance because

nowadays it's as intuitive to me as breathing and that's not cuz I'm special I have a special talent it's just cuz I got used to it and I gave it the time to speak for itself and to do it job and if

you're interested in the setup and this is all new to you then do have a look at the video I'll link it down below and finally I have a newsletter if you're interested in things we talk about on the channel you know Reading Writing

creativity then you'll also like that it's a lot of the same stuff yes but many different ideas that are a bit maybe more unusual things we don't see

on the channel so it's completely free to subscribe with a link down below and I do my best not to spam you it's a let's say quality not quantity I hope so

I'll see you there and as always thank you so much for watching I'm grateful