Mastering Obsidian - Secrets from Knowledge Creator ⁨@construct_by_dee⁩

You can only make sense of yourself if you have something to look back on.

And that is what the daily note is.

Like, it's so much more than just filling in information and having statistics.

No, you have a trail.

It's past you screaming at you, like, hey, we want more of this.

This is what makes us happy.

I feel more naked if I don't have obsidian.

I would, if I have to choose between obsidian and my phone, I'll choose obsidian.

Because it does feel like an extension of my brain.

It's like, you have basically five years to learn how to learn.

Before, let's say you have two years to learn how to learn.

And then your life is going to get quite difficult

with all of this rapid change happening in AI.

Like, it's going to disrupt a lot of different industries.

Hello, I'm Dustin Pauli-Mater.

Today I'm to welcome you on to the Polytools Creator Spotlight.

Construct by D, who is a PKM consultant and YouTuber

building Construct by D in public.

Thank you for joining me on the show.

Thank you for having me.

Nice to be at us.

It's going to be great.

I know that we're going to nerd out a lot about obsidian.

That's why I was really excited to have this call.

Because I know that like, it's hard to talk to people

about something when you're at a sort of level.

And people want to talk about, oh, second brain paramethod,

when an actuality you, for example,

are creating these like intricate databases

and even taught me something new about making databases for journals.

And I watched those videos voraciously

and even had your blog posts saved on my to-do list

to kind of go through it even more deeply.

So I appreciate you nerdy not with me.

I'm very happy to find somebody else

as excited on a couple of these tools as I am.

So I'm pretty sure we're going to have a nice conversation.

For sure.

And I feel like there's also probably

going to be a lot of tensions going on here.

And for anybody listening in, I'm sorry about my voice.

I lost my voice this week.

I'll try to project as much as possible.

But hopefully, you'll be talking quite a bit here.

Let's just kind of start off here.

Since you have a faceless channel

and that kind of creates a air of a mystery.

People can watch.

I'm kind of curious to what got you started

as a content creator.

Because you want to make content.

But you're still keeping things hidden.

I like the framing of air of a mystery,

like I'm a vigilante or hiding down the scenes.

I think for the idea of having my channel up in front of me,

it's I want to make the content do the work

and not be a face for my ideas.

Let the ideas speak for themselves.

As for why I started,

I think it was quite a selfish reason.

So I always had this idea of,

well, let's backtrack.

It's like I was always interested in technology.

I was always interested in finding cheat codes for life,

essentially.

And I remember throughout university,

I was looking for something that can give me advantage.

Like I was doing financial analysis in university.

Then I went into consulting.

And all of these things, especially my career up until last year,

when I decided to go forward with this company I'm doing now,

you had to digest a lot of information very quickly.

And I never found a tool that lends itself well.

So three years ago, four years ago, I found Obsidian.

And I just immediately clicked.

And around the time I was listening to a podcast

on an article done away, I found it.

Where they were talking about the consumer versus producer mindset.

So I don't know if you're familiar with the consumer versus producer,

but the consumer is basically the person that sits in front of a YouTube channel

or YouTube video just consumes everything,

but they don't really take anything away from it.

Most of the time, you won't even like the post.

Or if it resonated with you, you wouldn't even comment.

So you're just a passive consumer.

And this person, again, I don't know where this article is.

I should actually go find it because it has a significant impact on my life.

He spoke about becoming a producer.

And there's different ways of becoming a producer.

And the easiest way is just to engage.

So if you like a YouTube video, you comment on it.

And then you are allowing this luck surface area,

or this luck surface net to become bigger,

where somebody else might respond to you

and you might have a nice conversation from it.

So now you're not a passive consumer.

You're actually producing something,

you're putting something back, you're giving something back.

And while I was playing around with this Obsidian,

and I wanted to learn it quicker

because I knew that advantages of it,

I decided to use the street code.

It's like, okay, if a producer wants it,

makes you learn something quicker.

And it increases the chances of people pointing out

where I might be going wrong.

Why not just go all in?

And I decided that day is like,

okay, well, let's just start a YouTube channel

and produce the first video.

So I think that is where I started.

Like a very selfish, a selfish endeavor

where I just wanted to learn it quicker

and get immediate feedback.

So I don't even think it's that pretty good.

Yeah, I don't even think it's that particularly selfish.

It's one of those things where it is a matter of leveling up

that you're learning ability.

There is like the Feynman technique

where you try to break something down as much as possible

and explain it to someone else as simply as possible.

And in doing so, you can either test

how deep your knowledge is,

but also make it more concretely memorized.

Also, there was something like,

when you were talking about it,

the creator versus producer,

kind of made me think, you know, five years ago,

something like that,

I was kind of exclaiming to somebody

about how some weeks I'm more of a creative,

some weeks I'm more of a consumer.

And it's interesting to me

where it's not necessarily good or bad

or like one is stronger than the other.

It's more about like what is my brain

want to do at that time?

Yeah.

So like one week I'll be like really creating a lot of content,

but I'm not really learning much.

And then there's other weeks where

I'm taking in a lot of information

and like going down rabbit holes

about decoupling or something like that,

but I'm not doing anything with it,

like you were saying there.

So I try to find that balance

where I'll make a blog post about what I'm learning

or I'll try to spend some time learning

when in between making videos or blog posts

and try to balance it out.

It's also hard to know when you're in that state

until a couple of days into it.

Because there's like a week long state almost in a way.

Yeah, but I'm curious with you also producing things,

there's obviously some people

that would comment on it or they would give feedback.

And I don't know if you remember the first time

when somebody gave you feedback and they gave you an idea

of like, of course, yeah, this is obviously

the easier way of achieving this goal.

So it's, I don't know, it feels like instead of Googling

for a solution, you have people that just come

and hand the solution in your lap without asking

because just because you put it out there.

So I think of it as like a just a nice little cheat cutway.

It's almost like, like let's say you are searching

for a new house, a living, a new city that you move to.

When you make your friends and family aware

that you're looking for an apartment,

you basically outsourcing your apartment search to people

because as soon as they hear about something,

they'll come back like, hey, I have this friend

that has this apartment.

It's the same things like you put your ideas out there

and you outsource your thinking to a wide collectors.

And I just say it's something beautiful.

They're really enjoying.

Some of my videos recently, I've literally done that

where I'm like, hey, I don't know what the solution is here.

If you have any like solutions or ideas,

leave it down in the comment below.

And like, for example, I'll show you this before the call.

I installed Bazite on here,

but I actually initially started it with Windows first

and then dual booted it with Bazite.

And I was actually consulting AI

and doing like a sound boarding session with it over and over

again, trying to figure out because I have an EGPU

that also has a drive in there.

How do I split the difference between Linux and Windows

because I have to do contact creation too?

I would want this device to be my all in one.

It's a powerful computer.

I could use it for a contact creation like we're doing right now

instead of using the little mini PC I'm using.

And I was trying to figure out like logistically,

how do I split the drives, internal and external

and the different operating systems

and I was trying to figure out, I even called up my uncle

who's a techie and my friend who's a techie

and then also using AI to try to outsource it like,

hey, give me ideas, give me kind of like function.

Yeah, but I've also, it's nice

because you basically get free consulting, right?

There's a couple of times when somebody comments

and I just said like, oh, this is cool,

we have a cool perspective.

Do you mind if we hop on a call?

You are getting free consulting sessions from experts

and they are freely giving it to you

when normally you would have to pay like 500 euros

for an hour call, you were just getting it before free.

Look, we're doing it right now, right?

It's a free networking.

Yeah, right?

And it's all because you put something out there.

Like, it's the reason, and it's not a free lunch,

you know, like, it still comes with risk.

Like, I know a lot of content creators

because I'm in the content creation field

so you meet other content creators

who have been burned by the system a little bit

where you have people that don't agree with the viewpoint

and they attack them and then the content creator

takes it personally.

And that is the negative effects of it.

Like, you putting your ideas out there to be scrutinized

and not everybody will agree with you.

So it's not a free lunch, it's what I'm trying to say.

Like, it doesn't come without the cost,

but I would say the advantages of putting yourself out there

is so much bigger than the disadvantages.

I was showing you before the call to the insane plan

I had for content this year.

A lot of that is due to the fact that like,

I felt like I was behind mentally

and over the last five years I've been trying to catch up.

I started doing interviews in 2020.

And ever since then, my attention was split

between interviews and solo content,

both of them were useful.

Solo content was better for SEO,

interviews are better for networking

and for just creating clips too.

Like this video is probably going to create like 30 clips

and that's going to generate a ton of views.

This channel that you're on right now

got 390,000 views in the last year.

Roughly, and thank you.

But it's only like 300 subscribers.

It's not a huge channel.

And what the thing is,

it's because a lot of those clips really got a lot of attention

and there was a lot of quantity behind it

and the quality of the guests like you coming on

made the quality of those clips better.

And so you already have some blog posts,

like on medium and stuff like that and sub-stack.

And then on top of that, you're doing video,

since your videos are mainly just voice anyways,

you're technically doing audio,

what is your favorite kind of content to make?

I'm going to make, but first of all,

before we get to that,

I want to ask you a question.

So you said you feel you are behind compared to

other people or yourself or?

Where I wanted to be mentally,

where I projected myself to be.

Uh-huh, a little bit of attention.

So when I started university,

like I came from a small-ish town

and I was quite a neophyte when it came to basically anything.

And when I went to university,

I started meeting very intelligence,

educated people that just knew everything about everything.

And these were some of the people that started

the vouring books since the age of three.

They would read a book a day.

And when I make these people like,

Oh, shit, I'm so far behind.

And for the next three months, no, four months,

I decided to take on the Uberman Sleep Cycle,

which is the experiment that it into all.

Like my my grades definitely suffered,

but the Uberman Sleep Cycle is basically

just where you sleep less.

Way less, like you sleep a total of,

I think like four hours or something like that.

And you sleep in 30 minute increments throughout the day.

And all of this was to read more books.

So I had this long list of all the books that you should read.

So I went through the productivity books,

I went through all of the fiction books

that you had to read in order to catch up.

So I can definitely resonate with like,

you are not where you want to be,

but it's such a good motivator.

Because I didn't get a lot of information

into my head in that small period of time.

But I wouldn't recommend the Uberman Sleep Cycle

and the Uber Sleep Cycle to anybody.

Maybe if you took a little bit more of a partial approach

where you were doing like a book a day,

but still getting enough sleep or something like that,

or even half a book,

or maybe even just doing audio books

just to make it faster, something like that.

But yeah, it's interesting what you mentioned that

because that's the creative, that's the input side of things.

So my system works in an input and output kind of mindset.

I think a lot of them do, not just mine,

but it's interesting to think about the modular degree

versus the constant production.

And that's how I kind of view the input and output

and learning a whole lot

and then finding a way to put outputs.

I think that the reason why I was doing so much

with this yearly planning was because I like, okay,

I have a lot of content I wanna make that's new,

but I also have a lot of content

that's been in my backlog for years, so it's old.

And so let me just double up for a while and do a blitz,

even though I might burn out a little bit,

the blitz will help me schedule out ahead of time

that could take a break.

And that batching ahead is what's gonna help.

No, hell yeah, hell yeah.

But to get you a question,

which type of content do I enjoy the most?

I think I'll make a call back to Richard Feynman.

So I have this quote which I'm obsessed with.

It comes from, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman.

I think that's the first book I didn't know

who Richard Feynman was.

Then one of my friends recommended

is surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman,

which is a book that he wrote.

And then I went on a Richard Feynman craze

because I don't know, just spoke to my soul.

He has a quote, notes aren't a record of my thinking,

process, they are my thinking process.

So I think writing, it has to be writing

because that's where your ideas are born.

That's where you get your wrestle with your own mind.

So I really like, I've come to really enjoy writing.

So when writers say that writing

is the most difficult thing you can do,

I don't agree with that, I've always enjoyed it.

I'm not a good writer,

but the process of writing is something

that I really enjoy.

And what I found at least in the last year,

I think I started my newsletter

at the end of last year,

and I should have started it way earlier.

But the newsletter, it acts like a dear generation engine

because every week you have to produce something.

And you're staring at that blank page

and it's like, okay, what am I gonna write about?

Like, what have I been thinking?

And you go through your entire week,

oh, I read this article, which gave me this idea

that I obviously noted it down my obsidian somewhere

because that's what it's for.

And you just started to write

very interesting thoughts and ideas out on paper.

And then that ultimately turns into longer articles

and then the articles turns into YouTube videos.

And then the YouTube video comments

and article comments gives you new ideas for new articles,

but it always starts with the writing process.

So I would say that the writing process

definitely the most fun for me.

And the video, I would say I don't really enjoy

the admin of the video side

because it feels like knowledge management 10 years ago

where you didn't have the tools to connect notes.

So if you wanted to make it work,

you had to go full Zettel Carson with different mailboxes

like a whole wall full of mailboxes

that you can sort the little cards into different categories.

The admin is just too high.

And with video, the editing process,

the admin is also still quite high.

But as we spoke about before,

we started this chat of ours.

AI tools is going to make the editing process so much easier.

So I think over time,

I think the admin costs associated with videos

going to become much less

and I might be enjoying it a little bit more

and might become a content for writing,

but I don't think it would ever surpass it.

I talk about automation on the channel a lot

and delegating editing is one thing.

But also too, there's fire cut and glean

and we've mentioned OpusClip before to call too.

There's ways of automating some of the editing process,

which is nice.

I think you and I are very much aligned where,

I'm a writer first, I like writing,

I like the concept of blogs and even too,

I hate editing as well.

So I align with you quite a bit on that.

The one reason why I asked this pillar content question

is that it's kind of a way for me like a better commentary here

to figure out like, what do you align with?

Like for me, I found you through YouTube.

I see you as a YouTuber first

and then the writer second,

that's how I came across your content.

But I'm curious to see how you identify yourself

because a lot of people saw me as a podcast or first

and then a YouTuber, then a writer.

But to me, it's the other way around.

It's a writer, a YouTuber, a podcaster.

And the way you identify as a content creator,

I think it's really important.

Also on this show, I color code the interviews on the playlist.

And so like depending on if you're a writer,

you'll be like orange-ish, yellow-ish.

If you're a YouTuber, you're reddish,

if you're podcasting your purple

and if you're kind of in between, you're more of like gray.

And so I also asked that question

just so I can know what to color you.

How to tag your system.

So I don't generally always mention that,

but I figured this was kind of a neat little moment to do.

We talk about organizations.

So he might as well start in there.

Well, and I like getting met up on this show too,

because part of his why I made this

is at the other show where I interview PolyMaths,

I would often find those PolyMaths

because they made content.

And so I found them through their content.

And so we would have 25, 30% of a conversation

talking about how they became a creator.

And I realized I really love that conversation.

I wanted to do more of those.

And also too, it'll let me connect with more cool people.

And that's why I created this show here too.

And creating content around Obsidian

is not an easy task.

I feel like even like notions a little bit easier.

With Obsidian, there's a complexity level to it.

And so I got a lot out of your journal's tutorials.

What inspired you to start making videos

on Obsidian particularly?

It's, I think it's one of my curiosities

is how to learn things quicker.

So again, it was a little bit of looking for a cheat code.

So when I was looking at the different things

in this life that I could do, there's a lot of things

that came up, like a lot of different interests,

which I want to get good at quicker.

And the first subject that I landed on

was learning how to learn.

Yeah, it's probably the first one you should learn.

It's, you would think, you would think

but I've been spending like the last three years

convincing some of my closest friends

to start using Obsidian.

And guess what?

They're still not using any of these tools.

And I keep telling them like this.

Now, more than ever, like you have basically five years

to learn how to learn.

Before, let's say you have two years to learn how to learn.

And then your life is going to get quite difficult

with all of this rapid change happening in AI.

Like it's going to disrupt a lot of different industries.

And my friends industries included in that category.

So I'm trying to convince them and they're just like,

no, they don't need it.

And one of the biggest wins that I had was a friend

that studied with me and we worked together

and she's this very corporate lady, extremely clever.

She has, she has the memory of an elephant.

Like she can remember every meeting, every detail

and just all around brilliant person,

a Richter of her big company now as well.

And she didn't need a system like this

until something happened where a little bit

of traumatic experience where she found that in meetings,

because of this traumatic experience that happened,

like she can't remember the previous meetings anymore.

And that's suddenly when there was a need that arose

where, okay, I need to do something about it.

And that's when she started with Obsidian.

And now she worked through what happened

and her memory is back to normal.

But now the skill level that she's at now

is just vastly superior.

So it's always funny to me.

People who don't need it, don't need it.

But if they use it, they would just have so much more.

So much more.

It would have so much more.

And that's why I kind of like it

because I'm the laziest person you'll ever meet.

That's kind of the...

If the job said, if you want a job done

the fastest, higher the laziest person.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm definitely that person.

So when I'm looking at things that I need to do,

I want cheat codes, so I want the easiest way to do it.

And I found that a tool like Obsidian

makes every facet of your life easier.

But there's anything you can think of this tool

if you use it in a right way,

it will make it easier.

It's, you don't come across these tools a lot in life.

But yeah, continue whatever you want to say something.

Yeah, I want to jump off of that

because we can definitely nerd out a bit of sitting here.

When I was telling you about the poly tools database

before I had over 100 different knowledge management tools.

I went and scoured the internet

to try to find the best one.

What I wanted was to do a calendar and task management

and project management all in one thing.

I think Note Plan got the closest to it,

but eventually I was able to turn Obsidian

very close to Note Plan.

I don't have Mac devices or Apple devices,

so I couldn't use Note Plan.

And I definitely wanted something local too,

because I had a lot of issues with Notion

where my old apartment ended up having internet connectivity

issues where the old wiring would disconnect

and the latency would actually kill my connection.

And then on top of that, it would actually go out

for weeks at a time, or like a week at a time,

multiple times a year, or even days at a time,

and Notion's constantly online.

This is way before the offline mode,

which still isn't even that good, came out.

And so I realized I needed to have something local

so that way I can still create content while I was offline.

And I found that Obsidian is the closest thing

you can get to the all in one system.

It still doesn't do calendar very well.

Task management is very individualized.

Everyone does things differently.

But it's very interesting to me that you could create

as much as you can in there.

And actually, as of recently,

I've been trying to find alternative data sources.

So for example, I got a very wary of Gmail training

their AI on my emails, because that was something that came up.

And so I copied all of my old emails that were important,

conversations with old guests, or conversations

with my late mentor, or late grandmother,

and copied them into Obsidians.

And now I went through Yahoo Gmail and Live,

got all my emails off of there,

and now they're referenceable in Obsidian.

Yeah, it's true.

And then on top of that, like Amazon,

where I always kind of kept my book list.

So all those different rabbit holes you were talking about earlier,

like Richard Feynman or something like that,

I would save their books into my Amazon wish list.

One day I scrolled through,

and I saw two books were missing.

They were just blank.

They were still in the list,

but there were no references as to what they were.

And I have no idea now what those books would have been.

I've forever lost to what those books would have been read.

And also Kindle stopped letting you download books to your phone.

So I was like, okay, I'm not going to use Kindle anymore.

Let me go ahead and copy all the different book names

using the book search plugin in Obsidian

to now have a reference of all the books I want to read.

I've done that now with movies,

I've done that now with video games,

so I can have my backlog,

like what do I want to watch?

What do I want to game?

And keep track of all that and keep track of progress

if I wanted to get to even to that level of tracking.

And like how it track into another thing is individualized.

There's a lot of there's a lot of plugins for that.

I'll stop rambling here.

Essentially, I was trying to put in data

from all these different sources.

What do you think about that?

I think there's a lot of things that Obsidian can't do.

So when people want to bring everything into Obsidian,

meaning they want other people's knowledge coming in.

If they are project manager,

they want to see other people's meeting notes.

And to me, it's just a personal knowledge management system

should remain personal, extremely personal.

And you should be very careful about what you bring

into the sacred realm.

Because otherwise, it feels like, at least to me,

that you're turning it into a Wikipedia.

And with a lot of people that are consultable,

they have the same problem at the beginning

where they just want as much information as possible.

I'm like, no, you're missing the points.

Think of this as a literal extension of your brain,

just like our phones are an extension of us.

When you leave your phone at home,

you feel like something is missing.

You feel like you want naked in a way.

And to me, Obsidian is so much more,

I feel more naked if I don't have Obsidian.

I would, if I have to choose between Obsidian

and my phone, I'll choose Obsidian

because it does feel like an extension of my brain.

That being said, there's always ways around it.

So I think with the new AR tools coming in,

the project and task management side of things,

that is going to be simplified quite a bit

and people are going to start bringing in more information

which I would caution them against,

meaning other people's information,

because I do see people starting to pull in the information

from the people that they are managing

or some of the people that I have meetings with.

I would say just keep everything personal

and then just pull everything else in.

What is Obsidian not good for?

I'm still with Convince at Obsidian

is good for task management.

Yeah, I just have a scratch pad for my to do list.

I'm like, I don't know, I can't do those

or pants plugins.

I think that there's a lot of people

who heavily relies on tasks.

And I'm not one of them, I think in projects.

So the getting things done methodology.

We basically says, okay, create a project

and the project is made out of sub projects

and then the sub-projects have tasks

and then you complete the project through the tasks.

For me, it's, I don't really think in tasks that way

because if I'm working on a project, I know what to do.

I just need that homepage for that project

and a cool thing which I've discovered

while playing around and trying to find

what is the natural laws of note-taking.

And I feel like I'm getting closer to it.

It feels like there's a golden ratio

of how what the proper way is

that you should do knowledge management.

It feels like I'm gravitating

and we are all gravitating towards like,

oh, this is obviously the right way to do it.

And one of those little indicators

that I'm hitting in the right direction

was the meeting and work session note.

So what we're doing now, we have a meeting.

We are sharing ideas, we're sharing thoughts.

This meeting in my obsidian is tied

to the project podcasts and under that project podcast

is podcast with polyinivator Dustin.

And if in the future I want to come back to it,

I can see the break from trails of,

oh, I had like this meeting

and then another meeting with Dustin

and then we spoke about this

and just like a general catch up.

And then if before I went to,

well, before this podcast,

I was just doing a little bit of a background check

on you, like see if there's anything of interest

like in your ideas and something that I risen it with.

And I must say there's a couple of cool ideas

that we definitely need to speak more about.

But I could see my pre-work to this podcast,

to this chat that we have in there.

And I think obsidian lends itself

well to thinking and projects.

Everything that you're doing should be a project.

Everything that comes your way,

it should fit in somewhere

and then you automatically lean towards

the producer mindset again

to go a little bit full circle

is if you just capturing things into your vault

and you're just allowing everything

and you want to use obsidian for all functionality

and you want to use it as a save it for later app

for that video that you might never watch.

You're going to produce your own mind, Mikey.

You are degrading yourself a little bit

by allowing things into this very intimate space.

While I agree with a lot of that sentiment,

a little devil's advocate here is that

you never know what's gonna last.

So I mentioned earlier in a whole Amazon wish list,

some of those books disappeared.

And there was a, you mentioned too earlier

and there was like a post that really inspired you

or like a book that really inspired you

and you wanted to go back to it and reference it.

There was a blog post that was called do epic shit

and I would reference it like every year.

Not even like as on purpose,

it would just be like,

I'm kind of feeling a little motivation.

Let me go look at this post.

And the person who made it

decided to just delete it off their website.

They deleted like 40% of their blog posts off their sites.

And I would reference this post every year

and I realized I needed to have a local copy of it.

This is actually what I'll still use a notion.

So I copied it into notion.

And that same mindset was allowing me to realize,

okay, I need to start saving pretty much every blog post

that I want to read and reference.

The same.

Yeah.

And that way I can also have a connection too.

So like your blog post that I actually have it on my

to do list still, which is funny.

I think I read halfway through it,

but I watched all your videos for the journals plugin.

I want to reference that blog post down a line again,

allowing me to connect it with maybe Danny Hatchers

or maybe Ali Doll or Thomas Franklin

have a particular mindset on the CRM

or a database and how they constructed in notion.

And I could take that notion idea

and combine it with your journal's idea

and find a new way of displaying the information.

And for example, too, Jarvis, like Ironman's Jarvis,

there's a lot of people who made GitHub repose

and some videos talking about their projects

of creating their own Jarvis.

This is even more a lot of chatbots got popular too.

And I have a reference pool now of different blog posts,

GitHub's and YouTube videos around that topic.

I created a database because the search plugin sucks

and obsidian as you know.

I think you talked about Omni Search at one point maybe.

But I created a database referencing just that Jarvis tag

and filtering just for those words.

And it came up with all 20, 25 notes that I had about Jarvis.

So there's one thing I've been playing around with the sources

specifically for the last two, three weeks,

like I finished up the obsidian base series.

And the last one was the source base

where I got so excited that obsidian base allows you

to pull in sources easily into your obsidian

with the thumbnails and the pictures.

So it's easily identifiable.

And then you can link it with the different tags.

And I was looking at it and like,

I'm just pulling in all of the things again.

But as you said, you never know what you might need in the future.

So now I'm thinking about this defense layer before obsidian.

So obsidian is all my very personal intimate space.

But I want another capturing tool or something

that allows me to at least capture ideas, articles,

YouTube videos that I might want to reuse in the future.

And this could be a different obsidian vault

or it could just be a folder in your obsidian vault

which is like random sources and you allow it to be cluttered.

But for me, if I haven't used it in a project

or I haven't taken a time to make a note

about this piece of content, I don't want it to be connected

to the notes yet because it hasn't.

It hasn't been formed yet.

Yes.

But like you said, you still want that information there

when you need it.

So I mean, I'm starting to think about like what tools

you can use and you can just use obsidian,

but I still want a defense layer.

I don't even think it's a matter of different tools.

I think you are talking about different layers.

And I think that's still kind of the right idea.

Even having a separate vault kind of complicates things too much

because jumping between vaults is annoying.

I would bring up, you might need to dig

into my modular degree concept a bit more

because that's what I was talking about before

where I created a curation.

I actually started off as a Google sheet eventually air table.

That's what brought me to notion and then eventually obsidian

actually has the best version of it

where the modular degree, I started out collecting

all the courses that I wanted to take for this degree

I wanted to create.

But eventually I started pulling in the podcast

and the videos and the articles and the books

and the audio books.

Even at one point, one of my podcast guests

even came up with the idea of tracking conversations

that you mentioned earlier.

I need to do better about that.

I don't use any meeting tools to transcribe

the meetings that I'm doing,

but I do have Riverside here that we're using right now.

And I can send you the transcript afterwards,

but I try to put the transcript into the notes

of that person too.

That allows me to have all that data there.

And in the modular degree folder,

I'm not using those for projects.

Those are just collecting the information

for what I want to learn.

If there is a post that I want to make a content about,

I usually, all of my content starts off

on like the title, right?

I usually, those are generally finalized titles.

Maybe tweak them a little bit when I actually post it.

But I'll be like, okay, top three things

for Obsidian users or whatever, right?

And then if I have your post or maybe a Reddit post

that inspired me to make that post,

I'll copy the URL and put it in the note of that content piece.

So in my content folder,

I'll have the title as a note.

And within that, I'll have the reference

to whatever blog post or video that inspired me to make it.

But that already means that it's earned its place.

If it's tied to something that you're producing,

that's a no brainer.

That's like, yes, this should definitely be there.

If you read or watch the video and is like,

oh, that's a cool idea.

And you create your own idea and you use it as a source.

And you do nothing else with it.

That source should still be there

as the golden source of truth of how you came,

how your brain works and how it makes connections.

But I do see a lot of people just using it as a dump save it

for later where they don't have those connections.

They're like, okay, maybe I like the thumbnail

and the title looks cool.

Maybe I'll come back and I have a lot of those videos

and articles about Claude code and OpenClonell,

which I'm not allowing into Marx anymore.

Like, they need to really prove that they need to be there.

So I'm using a couple of other external save it for later apps

in order to, well, the one that I'm using now,

which is working quite well is recall,

but this is a couple of things that I want the team to change.

But it has a little bit of a smarter interface.

They allow linking automatic tagging

that have like a graph interface as well.

The only drawbacks is obviously data is theirs.

And your data, well, you also need to pay a monthly amount

for it.

But to me, it doesn't really make that much of a difference

if they decide to close shop in two years

and all of my data is gone.

I don't really care that much

because the important sources would have filtered

through to my obsidian.

I'm thinking about that in a little bit more of a YouTube way.

The temporary aspect too, where you just make a temporary aggregate.

So like, there was a lot of plugins

that I really wanted to keep track of with obsidian.

Because I go into obsidians that almost every day at this point

and dig through newly updated, newly posted plugins.

And I also been digging a lot into the beta plugins

because I found some really cool ones in there.

And I try to save the GitHub repost now in my vault.

But before I just have like four.

So you want to save the...

Well, if you want to recreate that plugin

if they disappear in the future,

that you have all of the information, oh, that's clever.

And I don't think it's really saving the actual code.

It's just saving the page for it.

But at the very least, that way I can reference it later on.

And maybe go on the web archive to find it or something

like that if I have to.

But it's also a matter of tracking.

So what I had done before was just created a note

of obsidian plugins that I wanted to do.

And the top is like, here's the ones I'm actively trying.

Here's the ones I'm most interested in.

Here's the ones that are just kind of curious.

I might keep it around just in case.

Or if I have a specific need,

the type of tracking down the line, I'll use it.

And like conbond was kind of in that section too.

And now that I actually started collecting

more and more GitHub reposts, I realized,

and especially since I wanted to kind of create a view

specifically for AI plugins.

I wanted to actually maybe make a post about it

on the line where I have, there's like 60 plugins

for AI and obsidian.

And a lot of people don't realize that.

And like half of them are in the beta tab anyway.

So you don't even see them in the actual marketplace.

And so I wanted to create a database

of all the plugins, start categorizing them.

And so even though they are taking out space,

they are some of them, my name is the temporary area.

I might just delete them down the line.

I want to create a database of like prioritization,

like which ones I need to test next.

That might help my system, which ones

maybe are worth creating content about,

which ones are specifically for AI,

specifically for task management, specifically for bases,

and organize them a little bit more effectively.

So now I'm actually collecting more than I was.

I'm actually not thinking about what is the drawbacks

of having a bloated obsidian bolt

because functionality wise, it would still run perfectly

because you're not thinking and told us.

So there's no real quick thoughts

that comes in mind of what is the real drawbacks

if you just save more, rather than less.

But there's something in me that still says,

like something feels wrong about this.

And I can't put my thumb, I can't pinpoint it.

Maybe maybe it's because if you just allow everything

and you're gonna take a list K with the ones

that actually matters, maybe that's it,

but I need to be risk with this thought.

So thanks for pushing back.

Need to think a bit more.

I think there's also just a minor pushback

before we move on to like the journey's plugin.

I think that's what it's called or something like that.

Or there's a couple AI plugins that do it

like a semantic journey where they basically link together

different nodes that have similar tags or similar topics.

And again, I wouldn't want to use like check TVT or AI

to really do that, but down the line,

I might find a plugin that does it

just by a semantic search, it doesn't actually do AI.

Or maybe you can use like Cloud MD4 or something like that,

where you can just basically track different topics

and have a journey through your own vault.

But you can't do that as well or as much

if you don't have enough notes

to actually create that journey in the first place.

Yeah, it's fun to keep future possible use cases

in mind as well.

So like the way you're thinking.

How does your Obsidian workflow impact your content?

Because we talked about that a little bit,

like if you have obviously a really great idea,

but what do you think?

My Obsidian workflow.

I follow a daily notes first methodology.

So every day I have a daily note,

which is basically like the main adventure of the day.

And then I see every time when I do something,

like let's say I go to the gym or I have a meeting

or I have a podcast with you,

that's a little bit of a side adventure that I go on.

So then I'll go to that note

and that's where I live for the next hour.

And then once that is done, I process the meeting

and then I go back to my daily notes

and then I ask, what's next?

So throughout the day,

I'll come across interesting things.

And I guess that's also why I love Obsidian this much

is because in the past,

before I started using this,

I tried all of the different applications

and like a long time I tried motion

when I have a cool idea.

It's like, oh, this is my $1,000,000 business idea

and you write it down somewhere.

And then 10 years later,

you come back to that low shitty page that you wrote

and it was never seen again.

With Obsidian, all of my ideas,

if I put it into my system,

I know that it will be retrieved soon or later.

There's so many ways for serendipity to show its face

where something just comes,

you might be searching for Dustin

and then there's another Dustin in your vault

that was a guy that went to high school with you

and was like, oh, I haven't spoken to that person in a while.

You go to his notes and you can see

like I could have lost my spoke was like two years ago.

We spoke about this and then you can

rekindle with them base of information that you have.

This is so many ways for information to retrieve itself

which you show itself.

But throughout the day, I take different ideas.

I have article ideas, video ideas

and I log it into my Obsidian.

And then when I have the energy,

that's when I sit down and go to my content creation page

and I just see what past me have served up for praise into me.

And it just feels like less effort.

I imagine in the past the way people would have to do something

like those like writing, for instance,

it felt like they always started at zero baseline,

like at the lowest point.

And then you had to have so much activation energy

in order to get started.

But with Obsidian, it's so easy.

All your ideas is there.

Like I always have way more ideas

than I have time to execute on them.

The only problem is just finding the motivation

on a specific day to sit down

and just start with any of the ideas that I have.

So I think the content production is then.

Yeah, you definitely have a high quality, I would say, threshold.

And I want to also just kind of quickly mention,

you should definitely consider doing some batching

in the future too, if you can,

where you just create like a seven video series

that are 15 minutes long each or something like that.

You just do it all in one weekend,

maybe like a few days later, edit them all.

And then schedule them out over the next seven weeks.

So now you could have a consistency factor

without having the pressure of having to make a video.

And that might make it easier for you to focus

on the more detailed heavy videos that you need to work on

that are just basically addition.

So I try to have that baseline of content that goes out.

And then every time I come up with a new idea

or there's some news that's happening,

like a new plugin that's really cool.

Speaking of which, I keep thinking about it

during our conversation.

I want to make sure I mentioned it.

There's a plugin, it's a tangent.

It's called Sync in Bed.

And it actually took my journal's database to another level

where I had this idea of I wanted to embed the quarterly notes

within my yearly notes.

And it allowed me, if you could do embeds naturally

in Obsidian, but it's one way, it's only available.

This allows you to edit those quarterly notes

within the yearly notes.

So you could do that macro planning ahead of time.

And I wanted to do the same thing for weekly and daily notes,

all the daily notes within the weekly note.

It's still manual, yet to go in there

and add in the links for each quarter or each day.

But I find myself not doing daily notes very well,

very often.

And I don't do weekly notes at all.

I do decently well now with the yearly

and I'm getting better at quarterly.

And monthly notes are probably my best

because I actually created into a content series

which we can talk about too.

But my point is, I need to do daily notes better.

And I'm actually asking you,

how can I do better about doing that?

Well, if you want to, well, first of all,

I'd want to know about the batching.

The, how would you approach this?

It would be, you have a topic that you have,

like let's say, 10 different chapters

that you can break this topic into.

And then you just record along videos,

that's how you do it.

I also tend to make a lot of my,

I'm thinking about my creator channel,

first and foremost, right here,

where I had a series about how to be a modern content creator.

I also had a series about my creator equation,

which was something I came up with to expedite creator growth.

And both of which had a lot of sub topics

that needed to be discussed individually.

So I created like 14 or six videos each.

And each one of them also had a blog post corresponding to it.

And so I created those ahead of time

and then scheduled them out once a week

for the next month or two.

And it allowed me to not only be consistent,

it was also something that could easily create

all in one go because it was the same topic.

And then on top of that,

I created a super cut at the end.

So in case somebody wanted to watch it all at once,

it also helps with YouTube watch time too.

And that's another video you can

didn't have on top of that.

And I also turned all of them into podcasts too

because it's might as well.

Oh, that is so clever.

Because I've always been struggling with

if I sit down in order to produce a YouTube video,

it normally takes like two, three, four days, maybe even longer.

But before that, when you're actually sitting down

and recording the wrestling with your own mind,

that is the difficult part where you want to structure,

okay, how would you going back to fun?

Like how do you teach it to somebody

in the most simplistic way that you possibly can?

Yeah.

And that's the part where it has a lot of friction,

where you have the idea,

and you know what you want to say,

but now you need to figure out a good way to explain it

and an easy way to explain it.

And put yourself into the shoes of somebody

that haven't been playing around with these tools

for the last four years, for 24 hours in a day.

And once I record and I have something close to finish,

I just want to immediately publish

because I'm always there.

I want to publish it now, but listening to the batching process,

I do think I'll challenge myself.

I'll let you know how it goes.

It's not necessarily one or the other.

The reason why I do it, like I said, is for that foundation.

The quality can be lower,

because essentially the point is more of the value

of what that series offers and the continuation of it

and people coming back.

And it's also a matter of appeasing YouTube

with your consistency factor.

And then you can still do your higher quality videos

or more specific topics in addition to that.

And you're basically just spending a weekend

doing the sprint of posts.

And then from there, you can spend the rest of your weeks

doing the regular content that you don't really do.

You don't have to worry about being consistent.

That's awesome advice, Dustin.

Thank you.

So to answer your question, how to start daily notes,

what do you want to start daily notes?

This is my question, Gene.

The daily notes for me is a matter of keeping track

of what's going on in my life.

And I don't even do very good habit tracking as of right now.

And I feel like I won't until I start doing daily notes.

But on top of that, I want to start keeping track of my emotions,

my thoughts, what's happening those days,

because it's good to have that data down the line.

I even have a formula now for data view on my database.

I think I might have gotten it from you, perhaps,

or someone similar to you, where on my daily note,

it'll pull up any previous days of like that same day

of the previous year.

And that allows me to kind of reference back,

what was I doing a year ago, or five years ago,

at the same day.

And I think that that helps to,

like when I'm doing yearly notes,

it's good to reference my monthly notes

and know like, okay, what happened this year?

I've been to how you do those yearly notes too,

but I have a preview and a review portion of those daily notes.

And I'm reviewing what happened the last year.

And then like later on, I'll be planning what happens next year.

Like what did I do right?

What I do wrong before?

What can I do better the next year?

And I reference the other notes.

And the same thing happens with like,

weekly planning, or maybe like monthly notes or something like that.

Like what happens last month?

I can go through my daily notes and figure out.

Yes, okay.

So you do want the data,

but there's something stopping you from actually putting in the data.

And that's the hurdle.

That's the strain that is the cost.

And I think with AR tools coming into the play,

the hurdle of capturing information is so much lower.

Even if you just put at the end of the day,

you just have a voice note that you put on your daily notes.

We say, you know what, this is what I was struggling with.

This is what I did.

This is what I felt good about.

Even just that will give you a much more fun year in review experience.

So for me, I have found through talking to a lot of people

that I have more energy to give towards my daily notes than most.

Most people feel at least up until last year

felt that it's too much effort to put in three pictures,

to give your day a rating, to rate your sleep, to put in your sleep hours,

and to write down the food that you ate,

and then give an in-off day review.

Like most people feel that friction is just still too high.

And I tried to explain to people that listen,

the payoff that you get from this,

just filling in that data is significant.

Because at the end of the year, my yearly review is such a pleasant

experience.

It is so fun to do because I have one big base table

that have 365 rows for each day,

which I can see these were my best days,

these were my worst days.

I can see the summary of the day,

and then I can see three pictures.

And we know that a picture is worth a thousand words.

So you immediately relive every specific day,

and what I've done is worth the journaling setup.

You break it down per week and per month.

So I'll base that three tables.

The first one is the year by days.

The second one is the year by weeks,

and the third one is the year by months.

And from a weekly review at the end of every week,

I have the script that runs,

and up until likely I did it myself, I did manually,

and that's what people didn't want to do it,

because it's still too much effort.

But now it's automated.

What I would do is I would pick the three best images of that week,

and I would put in my waiting list.

I would write a short summary,

and I would put in my waiting notes,

and I would average my daily scores to give the weekly score.

And when you get to the end of the year,

when you fold in all of that data,

with bases, it is now so much fun,

because you can fold to the base to see,

well, give me all of my worst days.

And you can go through it,

and you can look at the pictures like,

okay, the worst days was when I had to go into the office.

I had to go with my day job.

I had to travel in commutes,

and I had to sit in useless meetings for three, four hours a day.

Maybe I should do less of that.

Okay, what was my best days?

My best days was when I was doing something

completely brand new novel experience

that I've never done before.

First, I'm going snowboarding, rollerblading,

making a new dish, meeting a new friend,

like going to an experience of those other days that stood out.

It was either experience new novel experiences,

or socializing with friends,

or achieving something where it's in sport, or in my business.

And that gives you an idea of how you can lead a more enjoyable life.

So before I've started to use these tools and the daily note,

I don't really have a view on what makes me happy.

And I don't think a lot of people have that view.

Nobody have taken the time to understand themselves,

and I feel the daily note is a way to understand yourself.

It's a way to get more familiar with who you are,

because as it's Steve Jobs,

it said you can't connect the dots looking forward

or something like that.

It's the same thing.

You can only make sense of yourself

if you have something to look back on.

And that is what the daily note is.

It's so much more than just filling in information

and having statistics.

You have a trail, it's past you screaming at you,

like, hey, we want more of this,

this is what makes us happy.

And if you don't have this, I think last year, two years ago,

went to Sri Lanka with a couple of friends.

And one of my friends, he always does this compass year review,

which is a website where they have this PDF file

that have 10 pages of questions

in order for you to do your yearly review.

And the process is normally like, go through your phone,

look at all your pictures, look at your calendars,

week by week, and then break it down,

write down what made you happy,

what do you want to do less of?

What stood out?

And then you have your year review.

Now, that's a very cumbersome process.

And we were about 10 sitting in a villa,

and we were all very excited to start with this process

of doing our yearly review.

And while I was looking at us starting,

I saw everybody's world to do this.

And excitement factor, you can see

everybody was excited to it.

They had a lot of energy.

And something in me told me that 10 minutes later,

it's just going to be me and the original friend

who recommended this process is going to be left.

And that is what happened.

There's this people that authored 10 minutes,

it's like, okay, this is too much effort.

It's too much effort to review my life in the past year.

And it's too much effort to lead my life

in a better direction.

Like, that's what I saw.

And with the daily notes, you just simplify everything.

And the captioning process now is,

it's tremendously simple.

Like, there's no excuse that hurdle isn't day anymore.

It seems like you gained that momentum

and that the yearly reflection,

even like quarterly monthly reflection,

helped motivate you to do it farther.

And one thing I'm seeing too in our conversation

is that like, you've definitely got

an higher skill in the reflection process.

And I feel like I've definitely got

an higher skill in the planning process.

We kind of have that duality here.

Definitely.

I need to learn more about your planning mechanism.

We can exchange.

Yeah.

We're talking about like, okay, you're great at reviewing.

I'm great at planning.

How can we bridge that gap there, D?

Well, I'm guessing a couple of sessions

where it's like, yes, like use case.

Yeah.

Well, all you need is like, for the daily journaling,

it's basically just, you need to find a way

to keep yourself responsible with it.

It's an accountability partner where you say,

like, have you full it in?

Or at the end of the week or the end of the month,

like, have you full this in?

For my side of the producing,

I think that's a little bit more difficult

because that, that's,

well, I'm guessing that's also just having

a accountability partner.

The way that I do it in the past,

like, if I feel you don't have this problem,

but the way that I make sure that I produce something

is I wait for a spur of motivation,

you know, like when you sometimes just feel

like you have the energy to do something very difficult.

And while I'm in that state, I lock in that energy

and I message your friends saying,

listen, I want to produce a YouTube video

by the end of this week Saturday.

If I don't, I need to give you 250 euros.

And I've been doing it quite a bit

where I know that I can produce an article in a day.

So every week there's about two times

when I would message a friend and say,

listen, this is public.

If this is not out, I need to give you 250 euros.

And if it's a big thing, like a big project,

like the base videos took quite some time to create,

I would message two friends

and there would be five or a zero, so I would do two.

And I haven't paid them once,

but it's quite nice to have,

you basically give, hand them the responsibility of like,

listen, are you done yet?

Am I going to get my money?

It's like it's, you force that obligation

on somebody else to check in on you, which is quite nice.

And I'm the guy on you.

Well, the daily publishing.

I don't think I have that much money yet.

This is during 50 euros per day.

The daily stuff for me, like I said,

it was more of this catching up.

And I also have multiple series.

And so that context switching allows me to kind of keep

that momentum going because if I'm burned out

on the creator brand, I can go work on the obsidian

and polymathy stuff.

Or if I'm burned out on that, I can make a gaming stuff.

I also have some sub brands that are,

I've talked so many for over decades.

I can make this so many stuff.

I love travel and EDC and like one bagging.

And so I have a travel kind of sub brand too.

And so it's just one of those things

where like that context switching helps a little bit.

There's something that I'm curious about.

It's like you've made a lot of content

about obsidian in a lot of different ways.

Is there something you haven't made content about

that you want to?

Oh, that's a, there's a lot of things

that I want to make content about.

So me and a friend of mine, we both like cooking.

So we like making food.

And I gave this idea like last years,

like hey, we should just start a cooking channel

so that we can expense claim all of the cool

kitchen equipment that we want to buy in any case.

It's like I know how to make money

from YouTube videos now.

So we might as well,

might as well just start a cooking channel.

And then you have the socialization,

you have the business elements

and then you get free supplies of whatever you buy

because even the food that you're making

can be expense claimed from texts.

So I think content wise,

like if you want to go completely

off the rails away from obsidian,

I think that's in the books for later this year.

I do like music.

So I think I would have like a faceless channel there as well

where I'm just like playing stuff

to keep myself more comfortable to learn

guitar and piano, to learn to play it a little bit better

from obsidian topics.

There's a lot of things that I am working on.

One of them is obsidian for writers.

We spoke earlier about the how producing things

it draws people to you,

similar people, people with similar interests.

And one of the people that got drawn to me was

a writer in America that is extremely knowledgeable

in the whole writing process, like fantasy writing.

He have done a deep dive into all of the fantasy,

the fantasy and just writing, I don't know,

writing theories, writing methodologies.

It's one of the most,

I didn't know writing was this complicated,

but we've spent the last six months.

We've gone through all of the theory

that there is related to like,

oh, here's main character, side characters.

What is locations?

Okay, you need to think about this

and the nearest journey,

but then you have this like three-point story structure,

four-point story structure, all of this,

which he was basically teaching me

so that I can build it out in obsidian.

So this has been a six-month project,

and the vault is ready and going to release it quite soon,

so I'm gonna be making a lot of writing content on it as well.

I think in the future it's going to be mainly my content,

would be mainly around obsidian with these AI tools

for the different use cases.

So the use cases that I have up until now

is work for what color workers,

because that's what I've been doing for the last nine years

of my life up until the end of last year.

So people in companies,

where they have a lot of meetings,

a lot of different projects, so okay,

we found a way to make that easy.

The first thing I probably use it for was journaling.

So the daily two-yearly notes roll up,

like that was at the use case.

Now we have writing, studying is still something

I want to concentrate a little bit more on.

So I think that covers most of the things

that I want to touch on,

but I do want to make more content on just the hobbies

that I enjoy, so cooking, music.

You also probably have a lot of different interests

that you want better at.

So for me, I always had this idea of,

I want to be just above average at a lot of things.

Yeah, the journals level as I would say.

Say again?

So I have a scale of being multidisciplinary

and you have like multipsentialite,

jack-of-a-trades, generalist, and polymaths.

You're better than average.

You'd be like around that generalist level.

Oh, yeah.

So for that, I don't mind being the best guitarist

in the world.

I don't mind being the best singer,

but I do want to be just above average.

Like I want to be able to,

to, to, to a neo-fi,

somebody that's completely new to a specific topic.

Like let's say I could take guitar.

If I were to play for them,

they're just like, oh, this person can play guitar,

but it's just smoke and mirrors.

And now I'm enjoying himself.

And now I can move on to the next thing.

It's like, okay, how do I juggle with four balls?

Learn this skill, then I have it forever.

It's like, okay, mentalism.

Let's go into mentalism for six months.

So there's a lot of things that I want to get to,

but I feel like I need to get this business thing

really figured out.

Yeah.

And it's getting there,

but basically laying the ground works now.

So you, you know the process.

Like it's a lot of work that goes into creating content

like this.

In order to make a career out of this.

Yeah, once it's the easiest,

but it's definitely one of the most fulfilling

because you get to choose what you want to do.

Yeah, choose your own adventure.

And so I like about it.

Oh, yeah.

There's a few more questions before we end up wrapping up here,

but one thing I want to bring up to you is like,

something I talk about with the Pauline Matthews stuff

and even with knowledge management is phases.

And the phases sound sequential

and they can't be serialized like one after the other.

But I also sometimes juggle phases too,

especially when they have multiple interests

that I want to do at the same time.

And that's how it's kind of like you have phases

then projects and goals within tasks.

So that's the structure of it.

And I think that like having that bigger macro phases

pick the point of view allows you to structure

your yearly and quarterly layers a lot more effectively.

And there's something else I wanted to mention too

is like decade notes.

No one talks about that.

I think that doing decade notes is really cool.

Yes, yes, tell me more about the decade notes

because I did read some of your content on it

and something in it.

I have much.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't have much about it.

And it's a new concept.

And that's why I kind of wanted to bring up to you too.

It's one of those things where like you know

how we do weekly combinations of all the different days.

And then we have months with different weeks.

And then you have the quarters with different months

and then the years with different quarters

and then the years with different months.

I think that having the decade of different years

is also very helpful.

And the motivation for me, again, was kind of content.

I want to write an autobiography as some points.

And I need to have the data and like your memory

is not going to be strong enough when you're 80 years old

to remember what happened when you're in your 20s.

And so while that's another reason why

just doing yearly notes and monthly notes and daily notes

is so important.

But I've been doing a now page updates, I call it

because their exhibitors, the author,

came up with the now page.

So it's like you're about page

but a separate page on your site.

What's going on?

What's happening now in your life?

And I turned that into a series.

Because after a couple of months, I realized

I wanted to have that historical context.

So I had this like now page blog series that I was doing.

So every month I make a blog.

And quickly I turned it into a blog as well.

So now I have this monthly context

that I've been doing for the last like three years

where professionally and personally

what's going on in my life.

I just tell the public, I mean, I keep something private.

But for the most part, that is my monthly note.

And now when I do yearly notes or even decade notes,

I can reference those monthly blogs and blogs.

I think it's so cool.

So when I was playing around with medium subs

that I called up these different like article websites,

my first idea to get closely like this newsletter

type of thing was every two weeks

I'm going to publish an article which is almost like this.

It's like, OK, here's what I'm working on.

Here's what I'm finding interesting.

This is what I'm cooking this week.

This is a nice podcast or song that I'm listening to.

And whenever I look back at my content,

those four, I think four articles within that fashion

that I have on medium and subs day,

they're the most fun to look back on.

Because it just gives you this little window

into a past you again, which is like, oh, I'd

remember watching this series.

I remember listening to this music

and you just have to look at this flood of memories coming back.

So you kind of make me want to do something similar.

Because it's a null page blog.

I'm going to get 15 hours.

I'm going to follow suit.

Because I do make doing that.

Gary Vee is a famous content creator and business man

who talks about a lot of stuff in this realm.

And when he talked about a lot in the popularized,

a lot of creators was documents over creating.

And essentially, just documenting what you're doing.

And that's what started my YouTube channel too.

I was trying to document my modular degree,

do it yourself degree thing.

Eventually, I pivoted to like how to do your own degree too.

But doing that monthly vlog is my documentation.

I also do a quarterly tech stack post

where I talk about what tools am I using as a content creator.

And then like I thought about doing a quarterly null page

and a yearly null page.

And I kind of do that with the yearly where I'm like,

hey, once a year, I talk about the yearly notes

and like the way I'm doing it.

I haven't really done like a monthly vlog

on the yearly scale per se.

I haven't really done that yet.

Because that's a lot of work to be doing like a quarterly

and yearly one.

But I think it's kind of cool to kind of have that scale

or every quarter you're doing some kind of post.

And every year you're doing some kind of post.

Like an anniversary.

Yeah, well, what else would you put in that note?

For me, I would think about, okay, let's broaden out

to like what is my biggest win for this quarter,

this year or this decade.

So what else would you want to put in it?

Meaning what else would AT-year-old you find interesting?

Yeah, I think I guess the best thing for me to do

and we can do this maybe after the call

or maybe the next call we do,

let's go through our templates a little bit.

I'll just look at my notes here.

Like on my daily notes, I have the like the morning tasks

and then end of day.

But when you get to like weekly,

it's kind of taken into account all the different days.

And I want to do some sort of like weekly planning,

like weekly goals and tasks,

and then like a weekly review.

So like I have the days in between those.

But then once you get to like monthly and quarterly,

that's when things get a lot more interesting.

So the monthly note, I have a private part

where it's goals, tasks and weekly overview

and I go through each week and a monthly review.

And then I have my now page.

So I have the private and then the public part.

And with quarterly too, it gets even more interesting as well,

where you have month one, month two, month three.

And I try to go for this 12 week year,

which is a book that was pretty popular.

And then I have for me, quarterly is about alignment.

Like are you aligned with like are the actions

you're taking aligned with your goals and values

of you as a person.

So I have EQ guy as one of the alignment,

but I also have my own personal four pillars,

the mind, body, spirit and emotions.

And those are the ones that I talk about on the other channel.

It's like self development and learning and spiritual alignment

and like maybe like meditation or something like that.

And then you also have like habit check

and personal brand review, content and journal check.

And that's what I do on my quarterly ones.

And then yearly is even more complicated.

You have like the preview,

planning, manifestation for the future.

What's the ideal theme?

What's the goals you want to accomplish?

Big projects and then what phase,

like I mentioned earlier, what phase are you in?

And then I have like, what happened this year?

And that's just when I just write out a full-on like book

essentially of like, what can I remember at this year?

Ideally, I would do that maybe every quarter,

like go in every quarter and do like a big chunks.

It's more fresh, but I tend to end up doing it

at the end of the year.

And then I do like a review of the year.

What am I grateful for?

What's my quarterly planning?

Monthly planning look like,

which are just links to the different notes.

And that's when I do like the quarterly stuff

and the vision of the future.

It's so interesting to me that we think

in completely different ways.

And how do you do that?

Because I think from the daily note up, so I'm granular.

And when we get to the quarterly notes

and the yearly paying notes, I don't,

well, the yearly, I just do the review,

but I don't really do the planning.

All my stuff comes, they filter up from the daily notes.

And it's interesting to me that people prefer,

it's like, no, I want a quarterly review.

It's like, but why?

Why would you want like that?

I, for me, it doesn't, it doesn't immediately make sense.

And I have tried the quarterly reviews and like alignment,

but it just doesn't stick for me.

But for other people, it's like they preach for it.

I don't do great with the reviews.

I should be better with it.

But I should mention to like quarterly is more philosophical.

It's the monthly and yearly that are more practical.

And I think that the reviews are kind of easy

because it's just like writing what happens.

It's the planning where it's like, I also think that sometimes

it's a matter of the databases.

And so like the planning is just like putting down

the goals and the goals database, putting on the projects

and the projects database.

And that's kind of what that is for.

The areas that you spoke about, mind, body, spirit and emotions

and emotions, emotional intelligence is important.

Yeah, so last year when I was, I had a couple of consulting

clients, like a lot of them consulting clients,

where we were trying to map the whole life out on paper.

And I found it most valuable because I didn't think a lot

of people have done this exercise before where you just

sit down in front of a big white board.

And you really just try to get all your responsibilities,

all the things that you think about out on this white board,

everything, your obligations towards your spouse or your friends

or your family, your house related things and texts

that you need to do and sports that you're interested in,

everything to get it out on paper in such a freeing exercise.

And I've done this a couple of times now where I basically

have to walk people through the entire life and help them

just to, to work for them at everything else so that we

can organize their life in obsidian, because that's what it's for.

And I came on the different life areas and the ones that stuck,

they say, normally, normally you would have between five and 10

areas, depending on your individual life.

For me, it's health, wealth, career, social, leisure and environment.

I think I'm missing one, but yeah, that gives you the general idea.

And how I fit my mind, everything should fit within one

of those buckets.

So for you, you have a more concise bucket list,

you have four bucket list and everything.

Technically, it's eight.

So the Eekie guy, like the Eekie guy is like your vocation.

What are you good at?

What do you bring to the world?

I have all four.

I have the like the personal one that you have like the outside one.

OK, OK, OK, that makes sense.

That makes sense.

So it's just different frameworks of trying to map everything

out paper.

And I wouldn't, but it's so cool that we're dynamic.

I think it's so interesting, but I wouldn't encourage everybody to just take one

day, take a Sunday.

We're set today.

Go set at your favorite cafe and just take a big piece of paper.

And then you just try to write everything on like splurge, vomit,

everything out on paper and just notice how you feel.

Then the next step is obviously cool.

You've thought about everything.

How do you make all of this easier?

That's where Obsidian comes in.

Technically, the decade notes too, it makes me think like people overestimate

what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in a decade.

And I think that decade notes are good for that kind of planning too.

Like I'm not doing that yet.

I'm not saying I've never doing that.

But it's kind of where my mind went where it's like if you could think about it

in that scale where it's like, OK, what could I do in a decade?

And then how could I break that up into different years?

And then the whole 12 year concept kind of breaks it down even farther

where it's like, if you can get this project done in a year, what's stopping you

from getting it done in a quarter?

And even if it takes you four months, more than a quarter, that's still

shorter than a year and you can get even more done that year.

And anything else that you do in that year is now extra

because you got that major thing done.

And so now you can have even more going on.

That's kind of also the same motivation for me, but the daily content

where I had that foundation layer.

And anything else I could read on top of that is now extra.

And then like you said earlier, Nicole, accelerate the growth.

What you afraid of Parkinson's law, meaning you are being so productive,

you're producing so much content.

And then you find ways to reduce it quicker, which creates more time.

And you feel we need to fill it up because I've been seeing a lot of people also,

people that I'm consulting for working in finance or in corporates, which

they have so much going on.

And then I help them bolt their own system with these AR tools that free up

basically all of their time, all of the items of a gun.

And when I speak to them a week later, they're just as busy.

So is this a continuous rat race where we're just looking to fill our time?

So that's what I'm scared of.

Like I don't maybe maybe I don't need to get more productive.

I don't know if necessarily more productive is what you need.

I think that you just need to get more like skilled at it.

Like I think you're already producing great content,

which is what brought me to your channel and what maybe want to invite you on the show.

Like your quality is already there.

But what I talk about on the creator channel that we're on is the acceleration

of your skill set.

Like you talk about editing so annoying, but there's certain skills with editing

that accelerate it.

For example, I used to eventually resolve for my videos, the speeding up in the

video, I didn't realize that shift L puts it up to X speed, which means made a huge difference.

And it's six months without knowing that you can't do it.

I did like three years without knowing that.

And then on top of that, there's also a hot key that I always change when I

installed them into your resolve, where it's the slice tool.

The slice is all the bars all the way down all the time.

And that was also something you have to specifically go in there.

So I press S keyboard and the slice is the whole thing.

That was a change that I had to learn.

And again, there are also like fire cut and glean and using AI editors and so

like that can also help, but just putting enough reps in like once you get to

100 videos, your skill level is going to be a lot different than you even realize.

I look back on some of my first videos, even to 100 videos ago.

And I'm like, man, I could have done a way better.

Yeah, with the editing, it's like I'm also getting at the point now.

Well, a year ago, I got into the point where I'm like, okay, I know exactly

how long it would take to edit something.

So yeah, we're definitely getting there, especially with the admin AI

solutions that we have.

But I did have another question for you.

You mentioned that you want to estimate what you can do in 10 years.

So what do you want to do in 10 years?

Well, bye.

I want to move to Singapore.

I want to finish at least half a dozen different books.

I want to produce a ton of content, start speaking on stages and perhaps

start making music at some point within the next decade.

Clear goal.

You thought I'm kind of surprised how clear it was.

I'm thinking like that question for me is I don't have this idea of absolutely no

idea.

So I think, well, the last three years, I was basically building up to quit my job

and do this full time.

And I keep on hearing people talk about, you need to appreciate the journey while

you're in it.

And I'm really trying to like, okay, this is the time that I'm going to look back

and it's going to be like, oh, oh, yeah, that was fun.

I'm really having a lot of fun where I think about 10 years, I have no idea

where I want to be.

You're more present right now, though.

And that's probably okay.

I think just for example, I joined TikTok when it was still musicly, partially

doing the Gary Vee kind of screaming at the top of his lungs.

You should join this platform.

And back then, everyone saw it as a comedy, dancing, lip singing platform.

But I saw the potential of it being like a video place like YouTube, even way back

then I started making short form videos from scratch on there.

Now I use opus just to make clips, but I was doing it from scratch and learning

how to those skills.

And I'm telling you, pre-COVID TikTok was a jam.

Everyone was having a blast doing duets.

If you had a crush on somebody, you would do a duet with them over and over again.

I saw people get married because of that.

And it's crazy to me.

Like from 2018 to 2021 summertime, I think, was like the best years of TikTok.

And I look back on those times, like I had a lot of fun making those videos

in those experiments and explorated meeting people.

And yeah, it's fun to think about where you want to be.

And then also try to appreciate where you're now.

So yeah, try to appreciate love a little bit more while you're in it.

While you're in the thick of it.

And I think what you're doing now is while you obviously learning a lot of different things.

Like you have a nice skill set that you're building up here, so I mean,

when your content creates it, there's a lot of things which gets forced upon you.

Like we don't dream about, oh, how do you record?

How do you edit videos?

What would lead to better engagements?

How do better speaker work?

It has, it has fun benefits attached to it and skills that you get to burn,

that you get to build along the way.

So yeah.

And I think a lot of these skills have compounded a lot too, which is nice.

And I got to meet a lot of my heroes and people I looked up to because of these videos and stuff like that.

Right.

We talked about obsidian as like our major tool.

But what tools do you use for content creation and or repurposing?

What do you mean by repurposing, is it?

So like opus clip is a repurposing tool.

It takes your long form, turns it into short form.

You mentioned a automation creator before our call who takes their content and uses tools to auto-generate things.

But you probably also are, that person's probably also taking tools and making them with tweets and stuff like that.

Like a long post.

Yeah, I think some stack, for example, makes clips, I don't know, pictures of your blog posts, for example.

And that's repurposing.

Yeah, I think that's still a part of my business that I need to optimize a little bit more.

The repurposing.

You know who to call.

I'll, we will definitely have a little bit more chats.

There's a couple of people that I know that's interested in the technology side of the repurposing and marketing for me.

I don't really enjoy the motting side of things.

Again, through the contents that I publish, I meet interesting people like yourself.

And weren't the people I gel really well with?

And this guy, he's a, he's a products developer.

And his skillset is vastly different to mine.

So he thinks about the customer journey.

He thinks about how a product should look like the, the, the go-to market strategy, like the advertising of it, the marketing, the,

all of those things that I don't really care about for me, the most entertaining thing is think of different use cases in obsidian,

how it could make my life easier, and how I could learn things that I find interesting quicker.

So now I'm pairing up with people that have the skills that I don't have to do, that's that part of it.

But up until now, I would just say my, the tools that I use for editing, it's a Camtasia.

Okay.

And 48.

So it made the editing process quite quick, but I'm switching now to basically building my own tools.

So I spoke about a lady called I versus AI on YouTube.

And please go check out because she makes some really useful content on the topic of obsidian and AI integration.

And what she's doing is she's using these packages and basically building her own applications to

edit the entire videos and then create shorts and then put in visuals on top of your video or automatically.

You just go through the process once you iterate and then you just have it for all future videos.

So I think that's where I'm heading.

I really like building, playing around, tinkering with something that I can build myself and see,

okay, I'm manageable this with these AR tools where it can go look at the video.

It can detect the filler words that I use and automatically take it out.

And I can see the path in script.

That to me, that excites me.

I would say OpusClip, Riverside and Descript can already do a lot of that.

Where like when I run these videos, I actually run it twice to I do our horizontal one.

I might have to do our different instances as a faceless one.

I'm going to do you a visualizer.

But normally if it's side by side, I would run us horizontally and get a YouTube video.

And I'll actually reframe it vertically to get like a nice high resolution version of our background and stuff like that.

And I'll actually export it as 4k, which helps with the referencing side of things.

But on top of that, I'll actually be a little bit more aggressive with the cutting.

So there's AI features in Riverside's editor that can cut out the ups and us and cut out the pauses.

It can even, it's the editor one that cuts out the filler.

So like earlier in the middle of our call, I'm going to edit this out, but I went to the bathroom and like Riverside will detect that and cut it out for you or ask you to cut it out.

And then on top of that, it can do magic audio enhancing the quality of our speaking, which granted my voice today.

I'm definitely going to need.

And it's like, I will actually be a little bit more aggressive with the cuts and the pauses on the vertical one.

So I'm going to consider the opus, which also does the same thing.

So anything that Riverside doesn't get opus global fill out the rest.

And that way the clips are even more fast cuts when I'm doing the actual purpose factor.

Can I tell you something funny?

Yeah.

So with Camtasia, they have a, a site program called Audiate, which is basically the audio editing version of Camtasia.

So you record a video and when you're editing, you open it up in Camtasia.

So then you can do all of the cutting and pacing and like moving things around.

But then if you want to enhance the audio, you open up audio, Audiate, which is linked to Camtasia.

And it also has that auto-remove fellow word features, all of those up things.

And what's good about Riverside?

Sorry?

It has avatars as well.

Yes.

And also, what are dubbing features?

So there's a lot of things that they do have.

But one of the features that I saw with Audiates was to change the audio file that it's fed.

One of the options was improve mail voice.

So when I started with YouTube and I saw that option like,

I'm going to have an improved mail voice.

Good evening, everyone.

Because a deeper voice gives you more authority.

Just a little tension on that.

I went to a podcasting conference a couple of different years and one of them had a guy going around with like a desk that he was hanging on himself.

And basically he would put that on you and have someone record.

And you would just get like the microphone and say like whatever kind of line you can.

It was from Amazon Music.

I think that did this.

It was like the kind of a little growth hacking thing they were trying to do.

But essentially they give you a chance to say something in your best podcast voice and win a prize.

I think it was a $60 gift card.

I won it actually.

But basically I just went up to it.

I just like, yeah, I'll do it in the world world.

Whoa.

I just did like a podcast voice or movie voice.

Was this really funny?

A couple more questions here.

What can you share your favorite story that's happened to you as a content creator?

No, we've only done it for about a year, year and a half.

But there's enough time here.

I don't I don't think I have a favorite story.