Obsidian: The King of Learning Tools by Odysseas

This video was mentioned in Anna Howard's creating a digital garden to end my doomscrolling video. It ended up being incredibly valuable!

Notes and Thoughts

• There are 3 main ways in which the Zettelkasten is beneficial in helping you to write, reading, and learning.
  • Firstly, it forces you to take it slow. By doing this, you actually take the time to think about and digest the author's ideas, this helps not only with understanding but also retention. The idea that reading should be fast might not actually be good, because speeding up that process may cause the ideas to go in one ear and out the other. Knowledge is better gained and retained by taking things slow
  • Secondly, Odysseas argues that the practice of Zettelkasten gives instant feedback, which is relevant because feedback and practice are what make you a better writer and a better thinker. He argues that if you aren't able to write about a topic and entirely synthesise and reformulate it, then you haven't fully understood it. As such, writing acts as feedback. It lets you know what you need to work on and it helps you question the basis on which arguments are built. Writing is the best way to think and understand
    • "If you teach something, you actually learn it better yourself"
  • Finally, it allows us not to segment our knowledge by (in my opinion) arbitrary topics which limit the our ability to see the full picture.
    • If I were to only write things relevant to sociology in my migration notes, I would never really understand what migration is about.