A Puzzling Situation


 When you buy a boxed 1000-piece puzzle from a store, you start off with a huge head start.

The start is that of knowing your puzzle-assembling journey will have a definitive end point. There will be a definitive. solution.

Your  huge head start will include knowing precisely what the big picture solution should look like. It's all mapped out on the cover of the box.

The same is not true when you try to piece together tidbits of information about a subject area whose terrain you do not yet know.

Say you want to acquire mastery over a new computer language such as Python, Javascript, or VBA.  No one hands you a closed box with the big picture map of the terrain on its front cover.

As you start capturing small snapshots of the new and unfamiliar terrain, you simply don't know if you have all the puzzle pieces on the table. You don't know which ones you might be missing. You don't know if the pieces you have gathered thus far are supposed to fit together. You are simply poking in the dark and hoping you don't fall into a crevasse as you explore the unknown country.

Same problem comes up when you start your note-taking project in Obsidian or some other Zettelkasten-supporting platform. You don't know if any of your self-generated notes are correct or what you are missing.

An aside: YAML? What the heck is YAML !!!  Apparently something to insert into your Obsidian notes.

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