#second brain

well, at least they didn't lie. and i am grateful for that. happy reading folks! it's the only way to be! reading! reading and reading ~｡༚˖⑅｡༚˖⁠♡

The Alternative title of this entry should be "How the Church of Obsidian saved by dirty heathen soul".

Anyway, I have a (now on Hiatus) youtube channel that I had fucktonnes of notes, scripts and suchlike for that were sat on my overcrowded gDrive unorganised and doing nothing.

I had heard of Obsidian before but it all looked very overcomplicated and I didn't think I would have a use for it from watching all the how to videos where members of the Church of Obsidian showed people their simple (read: complex) note taking system that they had optimised.

However the one thing I will say about Obsidian is that there is no one system and because everyone works differently, everyone will do shit differently. Take ideas from those videos on how you can organise shit, but don't copy their system because their system might not work for you. However, I have been converted to the Church of Obsidian so I'm going to stand here and testify.

Anyway, as I said, I had a big fuck off load of Youtube Shit, and I decided the best way to do that was using Obsidian. Why? Well unlike other note apps, it's all text editor readable .md files. It's a personal wiki system and you can literally change .txt files to .md files by changing the file extension. Yes you heard me. Also, there is no server. If Notion or Evernote's servers got hacked or taken down, you're notes are gone. With obsidian, your notes are on your harddrive (I have my vaults, yes, plural, on a pendrive). You can put them on a cloud server or a home server or just on your PC and you can copy them and fuck around with them all you want, they're yours and if Obsidian decides "Obsidian Sync" (their optional paid web sync service) isn't enough and decide to paywall the app completely, you'll be fine because your notes are literally just a load of files readable on any text editor.

Anyway, how did I adapt all my files on gDrive to Obsidian. Well first I went to drive.google.com and downloaded all the relevant notes, scripts, files and shit relating to my Youtube Channel. They download as .doc files so I had to convert them to text. Most web "doc to txt" services limit you to two files per upload unless you pay, but I found a free (if slightly janky) app called MultiDoc Converter which is free and did the job well.

Next thing I did was mass rename the files from .txt to .md, which you can do with the shell. Yes the shell! It took me a while to figure out but here's how I did it.

Go to the folder where the .txt files are.

shift + right click > Open Powershell

Type ren *.txt *.md

This converted the txt files to markdown files. Yes, it's as simple as changing the friggin file extension. If you do not change the files to .md, you will not be able to Edit them.

Next is to open a new vault in Obsidian (if you don't already have one). In Obsidian, make a folder for all these new files (if you want) and in the file explorer, move all the files from the folder where they were into the folder in your vault.

Congratulations, they're now in Obsidian.

Now what?

Well the files (for me) were unlinked and unorganised. So I took the subjects the videos were on (I had a lot of videos about closed stations) and put relevant hashtags in them to link them all together, then when an article mentioned something else, I would link to the article using that.

This was a history channel, so I made a lot of Ghost notes to link references to years together (some I made into blank MOCs) and gave them the Hashtag #year. You can't make hashtags from numbers I'm afraid.

The Result?

Organised, but searchable and indexable chaos.

I am a person that loves to learn and take notes, but I tend to run into the problem of over-consuming. I’m a big idea type of person so I have many things I want to try but if I don't have a system most ideas are stuck in my head taking up space that can be used for creating.

I need a system that can be used in all parts of life that will help me capture my ideas and build on them. I reintroduced myself to the concept of a second brain. A second brain is essentially a methodology for saving and systematically reminding yourself of ideas, insights, and connections you’ve made through your experiences. It's used to free up your brain space and ensure you are creating valuable things from the information you consume.

It's a pretty simple concept that is achieved through a 4-step process:

CODE

Capture the ideas and insights worth saving

Organize for accountability

Distill down to the essence

Express your unique ideas and experiences

Todays Reading: 📖 I will be finishing up Keith Haring Journals and extracting my highlights and notes from these books by Steven Pressfield

-The Artist’s Journey

-The War of Art

- Do the Work

-Turning Pro

-Nobody Wants to Read your Sh*t

I will be taking my notes and adding them into my second brain 🧠 📖📓📚📲📱🤳💻🖥️💾👨🏾‍💻👾

My paperblanks journals 📓 are the conduit in which the obscure, brilliant, broken, and racing thoughts 💭 of my mind transmutate into physical form.

Once captured, via transferring notes 📝 and highlights in my various books and media, to my paperblanks journals, they will be organized and distilled using Notion. An amazing app and the digital hub or control center of my second brain 🧠.

@paperblanks-functional-art @paperblankcanvas-blog @paperblanks-journals-blog @paperblanksandpens

In his book Building a second brain 🧠, Tiago forte lists the benefits….

THE SUPERPOWERS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN

1. Making our ideas concrete

2. Revealing New Associations between ideas 💡

3. Incubating ideas 💡 over time ⏳⏲️⌛️

4. Sharpening our unique perspectives

In order to start, I'm playing around with Notion and Obsidian.

I have so many notes cluttered around that honestly just becomes useless.

So putting this here as my public accountability.