Learning Obsidian Through Real World Examples
my approach to explanations and tutorials
During the era when I was regularly teaching people how to use Salesforce as a fundraising database, I learned that using the characters in Downton Abbey to explain familial connections, multiple residences, and estate gifts was far more effective than making up information on the fly or using Jane and John Doe as donors. When absorbing new information, it's nice to have a known element to follow. It grounds your understanding because the example focuses on something that you already comprehend. That frees your brain to focus on what's new.
Most of the videos on the internet discussing Obsidian are using examples that hold no meaning while trying to show you how to use not only a new application but a new approach and way of thinking. Consequently, these tutorials don't have any impact and are often downright confusing, less than ideal.
By framing examples and tutorials with concrete information, we remove the hurdle of following the big picture and are able to focus on the important question — do you understand how Obsidian organizes information?
For this reason, we're skipping examples where we create Note A, Note B, Note C or imaginary companies that offer no handles to grab. Instead, we're building out a full world of Notes and Links and Folders in the Example Vault using people, ideas, and sources that exist in real life. Actually, they're all items mentioned by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) in a YouTube video — The Question Adam Savage Never Gets Asked (But Wishes He Did). There's a method to my madness.
For those of us whose brains naturally connect various webs of information, Obsidian is a wonderful tool to capture those pathways of thought on the page (or technically the screen). It creates an external repository for the complexity that our minds are often juggling, allowing us to quiet the chatter and invite new waves of thought. This has been an unexpected benefit of working in Obsidian.
Adam is an excellent example of what this way of thinking looks like in real life. As his answer unfolds, the story includes pool halls, tennis legends, hustlers of all types, and the psychology of sports. His mind is the storage unit holding all of those seemingly disparate points of information that he organically connects. Therefore, we're going to use that diverse information to demonstrate how it all links together if we were to explicitly reverse engineer his thinking.
When we discuss Using Notes as Labels, I'll break apart the entire transcript of this video to highlight where we can build Links between Notes and ideas. For now, think of Adam's video as the end result of the type of work that we're capturing in Obsidian to develop our own assertions and fresh takes.
I encourage you to watch the video before moving to the next set of instructions and explanations. It's worth your time. Doing so will allow us to start with information that is already naturally grounded in your understanding instead of inventing arbitrary placeholders. Plus, we might learn something interesting along the way.
Next Up:
Linking Notes in Obsidian
I always love to hear how others are thinking. Share what works for you!
