No Cause For Celebration: Obsidian Works

 Many an Obsidian enthusiasts out there sing the praises of this note-taking application.


But buyer beware. The reason Obsidian works is because you, the user has to put in the hard work of making your own highly personalized notes; of meticulously tending to your own small garden --as some metaphorically refer to it.

More to the point, and as the lecturer to the right clarifies, Obsidian should be call a Note-"Making" application as opposed to an information capturing tool. With each note, you have to fire up the steam boilers of your own brain and come up with your own, highly personalized expressions when generating each note.

You have to dig up the expressions that are most meaningful to you personally when creating your self-centered Zettel-kasten notes. ("Dig up" -- get it? A metaphoric homage to the garden tending arts.) It is in the doing of this hard and focused work that you generate the neuron connections in your brain for improving your personal comprehension of the subject matter.

Indeed, as I generate this here Blogger post, I have to do the same thing. I have to find a gardening image that appeals to me and at least if not only me, as expressing the concept of getting down on your knees and manually doing the hard work. It is because of the pain of doing this work that you will remember what you did. The message in the note will become well rooted in you brain. Then you will wake up days later and proclaim the wonders of Obsidian (or of some other Zettel-kasten centered method, i.e. blog posting)

I personally, learn best when presented with visual cues, such
as the image to the right. Other people may operate at the opposite
end of the visualization spectrum; preferring concept-directed words as contrasted with structurally concrete pictures.

So for me, the schematic to the right represents
The Circle of Zettelkasten Life
(You might want some music to go along with it --click & see)

This Circle of Z-Life involves: (1) the constant looking out (via the eyeball) of material to (2) Capture and (3) Convert (into your own meaning-returning expressions) followed by (4) Repeated Review of your internally-generated Notes for the purpose of (5)_Expanding on those Notes = Growing your Garden and/or (6)_Pruning the Notes = Weeding your Garden as well as perhaps (7)_Re-arranging / Refactoring your notes and (8) Cross-linking your Notes to other notes within your ever-expanding Obsidian Garden.

Because it is you who is directly doing the work of abstracting, cultivating, de-cluttering, re-organizing and updating your links; all that painful labor develops roots in your brain that tie your inner brain to your external Obsidian brain.

For a more detailed explanation of Zettelkasten and the note-making life, please see the adjacent video.

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