Build a Second Brain in Obsidian: Ultimate Zettelkasten Guide

4 years ago I started building my second brain in Obsidian and it was hands-down the highest leverage thing I did for my

thinking, for my writing, for my learning. Because before that, I had notes everywhere. You know, I had book

margin notes, I had notes in my Apple notes that I never looked at again. I had a bunch of Google Docs I couldn't

even remember which account is under, where and what is it called, and I never went back to any of my notes. So, I

couldn't build on the knowledge that I was just hoarding and collecting. And plus, the ideas that I had that were

mine, things that came out of the shower, came out of walking, or having really good conversation with others,

I didn't write them down anywhere and I was so sporadic, I couldn't remember half of them. And so, to just get over

that frustration, I decided to go into Obsidian. Once I built my second brain, I realized this is a true tool for

thought, which by definition means it protects your thinking and it expands your thinking. So, this is my

Zettelkasten, my second brain, and I'll show you how I set it up. And the goal is simple, get off the consumption

hamster wheel and take input, actually turn it into output, right? All of these things that we're learning from

podcasts, from YouTube, from books. Like, it sounds really great, but the second we close that book, turn off that

podcast, we don't remember anything. So, we're not using the knowledge and if we're not using them, we're not actually

learning anything new. So, it's just a waste of time. And that is what this tool for thought, my Obsidian

Zettelkasten, is built to do. So, let's talk about how to set this up. First of all, there are three non-negotiable

rules if you want to make sure that your Obsidian is actually a tool for thought. Number one is never spend more than 1%

of your time in Obsidian tweaking the system. The number one problem people have is they continuously tweak the

system, try out new features, try out new plugins, but actually don't spend enough time working on the ideas. And

the idea of thinking inside Obsidian is so that you spend most of your time thinking. So, 1% might sound crazy low,

but for the past 4 years, I really spent less than 1% tweaking the system. The system is actually really simple to set

up, and the more simple your system is, the more flexible it is, and the more it's going

to be able to grow with you. So, definitely, if you find yourself you're spending your own 90% of your time

tweaking the system, rather than putting things into it, then that's a moment to really assess and think through, okay,

can I just stop thinking about the system for a second and focus on the notes I'm putting in, the ideas I'm

putting into my Obsidian. The second rule is to avoid the other extreme, which is dump everything you have into

Obsidian before starting. Right? For a lot of people, there is a need to be very comprehensive in their knowledge

system, but the problem with that is, once you put those things in, you're never really going to look at it again.

I find it really helpful when I started was to start completely fresh, and the first note will just be the note that's

top of mind for you right now. Maybe it's a book that you're reading that you're putting the idea in. Maybe it's

something that you're working on, and start to build your Obsidian from the bottom up. This way you'll realize that

the important things always come back in, because you're referring to it, you're starting to think, oh, with this

note I need to refer to this other really great idea that's really central to how I think, and you'll pull them all

in. And the ones that are nice to have, but you ne- never really encounter it again, it's

okay to let those go, because, you know, there's a more than enough information out there, and we're

probably continuously learning if you're on this channel. So, don't worry about dumping and translating all of these

different notes that you already have into Obsidian, but start the other way of Okay, what am I working on now? Let

me just build something, get used to the system, and then you can import more later on. Now, for the third

non-negotiable rule, which is you have to sync Obsidian across all the devices that you use. And there are two ways of

doing it. I'll share it in a minute, but I want to mention why this is important because when I first started I had

Obsidian on my laptop, and that was it. But when I'm reading, I don't have my laptop next to me. So, all of these

reading notes I think, "Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? Maybe I write it down on in the margins, or I put it on my

phone, and then I can put it into Obsidian later." That never happened. So, I just kept on losing momentum and

feeling like, "Oh, still, you know, I thought Obsidian was going to be the home for all my ideas, and yet

I'm not capturing them in the moment when I have my idea." So, now I have my Obsidian on my phone, on my iPad, on my

laptop. So, it doesn't matter where I am, I have a device that's there for me to put notes in. And because they're

synced all across, so I don't have to worry about all version control, all all of these things.

Now, for syncing, you have two options. One is free, one is paid. I'll share the paid one first because it's easier to

set up, but of course it's paid. And this is the official Obsidian Sync where you just click a button, and all of your

Obsidian apps have this very safe and secure way of storing all of your data across the different devices, which is

awesome. I don't actually use this. I sync everything through iCloud, but I'm actually considering switching because

I've got so many notes that anyway I have to pay for iCloud, might as well just use Obsidian Sync and make

everything easier. So, I am in the middle of transitioning, but when you're just starting and you don't have that

many notes, you can totally use a free version of your iCloud folder, or you can use Dropbox if that's something you

like. And I have a video actually outlining how you do that, so you can check out that video here. But either

way, the main thing is you want your notes to be synced across all your devices, so it doesn't matter which one

you have on hand, you put one in and it is stored in your Obsidian.

Now we have the rules out of the way, we're going to set up. And remember, this is only going to take 1% of your

time inside Obsidian. So, it's going to be very simple. My system is so simple that for the last four years, I really

haven't done too much to it. It is, you know, no crazy plugins, no crazy hierarchies, it's just bare minimum

driven by Zettelkasten. If you don't know what that is, I have a full video on this, but I'll explain a little bit

in this video as well. It has served me so well. Again, a reminder, this setup is for me to think. So, this is not a

personal wiki for AI. I will do a different video on that if you're interested. This is really not for AI to

read, but for me to capture the ideas, process the ideas, create output from the input, so that I'm integrating the

learnings and actually doing something with it. And to do that, you really do not need anything complicated. People

keep on asking me that I haven't posted many Obsidian videos for years, and they're wondering if I'm still using it.

I am, it's just I've told everyone everything they need to know about the system, so I didn't want to make any

extra videos for the sake of it. But now that AI is here, this video is important because the number one

complaint from smart people who are using AI is that, "Okay, now I'm overwhelmed because

it seems like I'm outsourcing too much of my thinking to AI. But at the same time, I don't

want to not use AI. So, where is that line where I can protect my brain and how I think and be able to not just

protect it, but grow it and at the same time get productivity out of AI. And And to me, the answer is absolutely having a

knowledge management system that helps you think and protect that space for you to go deeper on ideas. And that's

something that AI cannot do. So, this video is going to be on that. I have a separate video here on more of the meta

philosophy. I think now we have three brains that we need to work with together and

make sure that each one has their place. If you want to get into the more meta ideas, you can check this out here. But

in our video here, we're going to make it really practical and set up that Obsidian specifically for thinking. Step

number one, simple, we're going to download Obsidian, use it for whatever device you currently use. It's mostly

all supported. Download it and oh, open up like this. Once you open Obsidian, it'll look something like this. It'll

ask you to either create a new vault or open a folder as a vault. So, a vault in Obsidian is just a folder where all of

your notes are going to go. So, if you don't have one folder in mind, you just click create, name it.

Let's say Obsidian demo and pick a location. I'll choose my desktop

and create. So, now it's created. Here's Obsidian with one note already created for you so

that you can see. Now, Obsidian is just a markdown file reader. Let me show you in the

the desktop just so you can see how simple it is, right? We said Obsidian demo is the vault that we're using. So,

it's a folder that exists on our computer. And then within it, the notes are just these MD files. Since Obsidian

created this first one, you'll see only this one here. And you can even see a preview on the side. It's simply a text

file. Which is why people love Obsidian. Because number one, it's straight on your computer. It's not saved in the

cloud by, you know, the software itself. Obsidian is not forcing you to store all of your notes in its cloud. It's locally

on your so, which means it's private. You always have access to it. And two, MD files are really great because they

are very easy to process. Not just by humans, but also by AI. Which is why there's this resurgence of Obsidian.

People are saying, "Oh, Obsidian won the AI war." because it uses MD files. So, it's a great place if you want to

set up not only your second brain, but also your AI's second brain. Which I also talk about in this video here. So,

you can check that out. Now, if you create a new note by either clicking here or command N on the Mac, control N

on PC, you'll see that there is now a new note created, a markdown file that's created in your folder. So, this is how

Obsidian works. It's just helping It's just a wrapper for creating notes inside a folder. That's it. And you can read

it. That's the basic function of Obsidian. Which is The simplicity of it is what makes it powerful because then

you can really tailor it to how you think and help you think. So, let's call this, um,

first idea. And you'll see as you update this, then your markdown file also updates.

And inside Obsidian itself, you'll also see that note is there on the sidebar so that as you create more notes, they're

all going to be there. And this is a good time to get you orientated on this page of

what's going on. So, first, the leftmost icons are functionalities, which we'll get to in a moment. And then you have

this bar of all the files that you have access to and you can do a few things with them.

Then in the middle here, it's your note where you're going to be editing, you're going to be typing things, you're going

to be processing the ideas and capturing the ideas. You can open up another pane like this one here. Obsidian decides to

open up graph view so you can see the power of connecting your notes together. But if you close it, it will just go

away and you just have your note here. Then there's also another side panel on the right-hand side which has all of the

additional information that's linked to your note. So, it'll have things like backlinks, it'll have the links that are

mentioned, it'll have tags, it'll have properties if any and outlines. We'll get into the details in a moment,

but all you have to know is all of your notes are going to show up on this left panel here and then you're going to be

able to click on them and edit them inside the middle section. The structure is really simple, just a

bunch of files inside a folder. That's not where the magic is. The magic is how you take your notes, which is where I

use Zettelkasten. In a nutshell, this is a way to capture ideas into notes, process them, and then be able to turn

them into output. It's an input to output process. I talk about it more in detail here.

But basically, there are five steps to your note-taking in order to make it a place for you to think.

And the five steps are capture your note, process your note, connect your note, create output with it, and then

improve on it based on feedback. Let's go step by step with an example. Let's say I'm reading the book by Alan Watts

called The Book. And there's I'm reading through the chapters and there's an idea here, okay?

It says that there are quite a few notions in the world that are made up, and one of them is that we think there

are opposite poles in his words of relationships, so things like light and dark, you know, good and bad,

solid and space, and we think that there's an actual conflict between these two, and usually there's one winner.

Like between light and dark, we probably like the idea of something being light. Between good and bad, well, we prefer

good. And we don't actually think about them as a continuum or that they can coexist,

you know, paradoxes exist. So, when I want to capture this note, previously I might have wrote something

in the margins, but this time I'm going to put it into Obsidian. All right. First, let's create a new

note, control-N or command-N, and we'll call it fictional belief. And here, I'll show you the first thing to avoid,

which is your file name cannot contain these characters, the forward and backslashes as well as colons. So,

make sure that you use something different. So, I'll use a dash, fictional belief, which is opposite

poles of relationships. Um are in actual conflict

with one, usually winning over the other. All right, so that's the key idea. So, we've captured this idea. And

inside the body of the note, we're going to summarize the idea. So, here I'll use a few Zettelkasten principles. Number

one is atomic notes only, which means each note only has one idea. So, for example, in this book where he talks

about this idea, there's actually four Actually, there's more. There's six ideas that he mentions that are

fictional beliefs that we have. So, instead of creating one note with all the six, I'm going to focus on one of

them and and then link them to all of the other six if that's what I want to write down.

Here specifically, I want to demonstrate one idea. So, I'm putting this one here. And then you want to rephrase it in your

own words. So, already we're starting to process the idea, not just to go for the quote and and, you know, very easily

forget that, but try to integrate that idea with my ideas. So, I might say Alan Watts talk about the idea of social

fiction, and one of them is believing that opposites are actually contradictions of each

other rather than thinking about them as a continuum or a paradox that can

definitely coexist. By the way, if you're wondering what I'm using, I'm using Whisper Flow to dictate

rather than type. This has also helped me with my note taking. So, if you're curious to try that below, I'll leave a

link down below. And now we have the core idea written down in our words in an atomic note that has one idea per

note. Okay, perfect. Now, just as this is not very helpful, the next step we're going

to do is to connect this note to other notes. So, as we're looking at this idea, why I picked it out is actually

because it really reminds me of one of the core ideas that I believe in, which comes

from Scott Fitzgerald, who says that the test of first-rate intelligence is to be able to hold two opposite ideas and

still be able to function. So, I'm going to connect this note to that quote. So, we can create another note. You can do

control or command N or control N and create the next note here, but I'll show you a different way of doing it, which

is start with double brackets, which then pulls out all the notes that you have, and then you can put in the note

title that you want. And I will do this. Let's call it Fitz Fitzgerald.

And once you click out of it, it will create a placeholder for a note. So, this note doesn't exist yet. If we look

here, there is no note called this yet, but we have a placeholder. And if you click on it, it

will create a new note. So, this is a really easy shortcut that you can use inside Obsidian. And if we open up graph

view here, we can see now these two notes are connected. You can pull them around if you want to

see them, but we've just made our first connection. There are two types of connections that you can make. The first

one we've already made here, which is another idea. But, one of the things that you want to do, and I highly

recommend this, and this is for me now a non-negotiable rule as well, which is I want to name my

source into a source note. So, for example, for this one, I will name it the book by Alan Watts.

And this way, whenever I have any idea that come from this book, I make sure I tag with the source

the book. So, this way, when I look at this note, and I look at the backlinks, I'll see all of the ideas

that are connected to this book. And now I regret choosing this book because it's so confusing.

It's called the book, but I'm calling it you know, the book, this book. But hopefully you know what I mean.

You'll see all of the mentions of the source which helps you again find ideas back to the book and from the book find

the ideas that stood out to you. All right. So, now we've connected ideas, we've

connected the source. Now we want to move to the next step which is to think about the output. This is where I want

to introduce tags. So, of course when we're taking notes it doesn't mean we're turning it immediately into output in

that moment. But it is really a game changer. If every single time you take notes, you think about how am I going to

use this note? Is it that I'm going to bring it up and share it with someone? Is it that maybe I want to do more

research on this topic? Or is it maybe oh, I'm going to write a report about this idea and this is going to be one of

the things I want to pull in. By just thinking about how this go is going to fit into an output,

it really gives more purpose to the idea and help you better apply it. And I found that using tags to

signal, hey, this is the status, this is the purpose of this note, has really helped me

use more of my notes. So, a tag inside Obsidian is just a hash and then you write something.

Let's say, you know, if we call this an idea, then it will have the tag of idea and you'll see there's a light purple

behind to indicate that this is different from the body text. And if you come here to the side and go under tags,

you'll see, okay, there is one tag called idea and there's one note in it. So, if we continue to tag this, let's

say Alan Watts as the other tag, it will show up here and you'll see how many notes are inside

each tag. Now, I think a lot of people just tend to tag

their ideas with topics. For example, uh for this one you might say, "Oh, this is philosophy."

And then, for any other philosophy uh notes you also tag it the same. I found this not at all helpful, uh

especially because my thinking is very bottom-up, and I want to think intersectionally between

different ideas. So, it is really unhelpful to have these tags as philosophy, because easily I could be

saying that this is also a a note about you know, uh thinking. This is also a note about uh critically reviewing the

world. This could also be social science. This could be a lot of things. All right, so what I found really

helpful is to tag them in relation to the output. And I have a few go-to tags that I use, which are

um questions, quotes, anecdotes,

studies. And so, these are basically building blocks that I want in my output. For

example, this quote here, I would tag a quote so that in the future, when I'm looking

for a quote, this will then allow me to later filter all of the notes in my vault to quotes. So, if I'm looking

specifically for a quote inside let's say a YouTube video I'm doing, or maybe in the newsletter that I'm doing,

instead of looking through all of the notes, I can filter by quotes. That has been really helpful. And the same idea

is for anecdotes, for studies, for questions, so that I can think about my notes in terms of the output I'm going

to do. The second the of tags I like to use are status-based. So, for example, this idea, let's say I want to do more

research into it. I typically then have a research tag so that I know there is something I want to do with this. Or it

could be something like draft. I have everything I need in this idea right now, and my next step

towards the output is to draft this, right? Or it could be, okay, this note actually I've already drafted it and it

is published. Then I can also tag it published so that I know, okay, if I ever want to look

through my vault to find everything that I've published, I can find it through the tag. So, in this sense, even though

you're not always working on output based on the notes that you're taking, let's say I have an hour right now, I

can sit down, I go to my research tag, and I spend that hour researching specific ideas I've already left for

myself so that I can go further on those ideas as opposed to okay, my vault just keeps a bunch of ideas. I don't really

know what to do with them or where I should start. Just by keeping in mind the output you're going to have already

makes the notes so much more useful. And once you have these notes, it'll grow over time. For example, when I was

googling the exact quote of the two opposing ideas, it created it mentioned that, okay, there's also another

sentiment that he said as well, which is an artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain

fully functional. So, what I can do then is also take this

quote over here into my Obsidian, link it to this quote here because the

two are very similar, which is great. Right? So, I have another quote here.

I'll tag it quote as well so I can find it later on. But also this links to one of the things

that I've written about, which is creativity as a proxy for intelligence. Now, this comes back to what I mentioned

at the beginning of four the three non-negotiable rules. Right now, I've started a vault that is empty, right?

And even we can delete these welcome notes and the first idea, which is empty.

Okay, I've just started and right now I only have four notes. But the thing is, I have written a lot

of other things before. And if I haven't imported of them, now is time to import the

essay I wrote on creativity as a proxy for intelligence because it really is directly related to this idea of Scott

Fitzgerald. I would then come to the essay I wrote, I copy pasted or find the word document that had this, put it all

into it, and now I have Let's just put this into it and let's just say, okay, this one's published. And now, inside my

graph view, I have all of these oops, interrelated ideas, right? And so, next time when I hit on any of these topics,

whether it's creativity, whether it's intelligence, whether it's fictional belief, whatever it is, I'm going to be

able to trace back to all of these different notes that have a slightly different angle coming at some of the

very similar concepts. And this is how I can then build on my ideas, right? Because previously, it was, okay, I have

these ideas, I think they're pretty good, but I don't have a one place for them to consolidate, I don't have one

place to connect them, to build them towards some sort of output. So, this is why Obsidian for thinking is

so powerful. Now, you can really just stop here and start building your vault, but I also share a few nice-to-have

settings that you want to put in, plugins that are really helpful and help you save some time. So, let's get into

the nice to have. First of all, let's talk about how to search in Obsidian because when you're

connecting things, you have to look something up, you as you build more vaults, how do you make sure you can

find the notes that you've created? So, three ways. The first one is the quick switcher, which you can open by command

O or control O if you're on a PC, which helps you find or create a note. So, the word that you type into the quick

switcher is only going to look for titles that include that. So, for example, if I look for opposing

viewpoints, it will show me all of the notes that have the title including the my keyword. If there are notes that

have opposing or oppose as a word inside the content only is not going to show up. So, this is the first one, quick

switcher for finding file titles. The second type of search is global search within your vault. So, it's not just the

title, but it could be in the body, it could be in the tag, it could be anywhere. So,

you can either find it here to search or you can go command shift F or control shift F if you're on the PC. And let's

say, you know, I'm looking for Alan Watts. And here is his name is not mentioned in the title here, but you

see that I actually mentioned his name both in the body as well as in the source note, so it's going to be able to

find that the notes no problem. Whereas, if I did command O, so opening up the quick switcher and I type in Alan, I get

only find the note that has his name inside the file. So, those two are different. Then there's actually a third

option. This requires a plugin in order to be able to do, but it is to do semantic search rather than keyword

search. So, as you'll notice with the Obsidian, if you type in a keyword, it's going to be able to find that keyword.

But, if I mistyped it, then it's not going to really understand what I'm actually trying to say. But, if you have

AI helping you do semantic search, then you're going to be able to do this. This is completely optional, but as you have

more notes and you start to not being able to manually memorize everything that's there, I highly recommend this

plugin. Which is under community plug plugin. And here is a really great moment to

talk about plugins. So, Obsidian comes with, you know, all sorts of functionalities so that you can view

these markdown files, you can manipulate them, build them together. But, there are a lot more things that you can do,

which are in plugins. And there are two types of plugins, core plugins as well as community plugins. Core plugins are

built by Obsidian. And so, these are really all of the functionalities that you can decide to turn on and off. For

example, you can turn off backlinks to show up on the side, if you like. For whatever reason, you can, you know,

enable canvas, you can enable footnotes view, whatever it is that you want is here.

Leaving it in default usually is good enough to just get you started, and then you can tweak

the difference if you find yourself wanting some functionality later on down the line.

And community plugins are kind of like, exactly as Obsidian say says, kind of like softwares that you install. They're

created by people outside of Obsidian, and so you have to be able to trust the source. Now, Obsidian does some of the

reviews, and they require them to be open source, all of these things. But, it is a choice whether you use

community plugins or not. And for the function of semantic search, uh you do have to turn on community plugin.

So, you turn on, you reload, you come back, go to community plugins, and you'll be able to browse. So, the

one that I use is called Smart Connections. I've actually been using this plugin for

2 plus years now, and for all of these community plugins, you can click into it, you can see how it works, and then

you can click install. If you ever wonder whether the community plugin is safe, there are some uh social

proof up at the top of how many times it's been downloaded, as well as they share their repository. So, if you use

AI, you can copy and paste the link and ask AI to take a look and look for any security concerns as well before you

install it. Now, once you install it, you enable it, and this way you're going to be able to

use it. So, let me show you in my own vault, which has a bunch more notes, so that you can see how the embed works.

All right. So, I actually have a quote uh that's called this, and as if you can

click to connections, you'll be able to see all of the notes that are semantically similar to this note. So,

as you can see, I've got dialectical thinking, which is really about the ability to embrace paradox and be

flexible with ideas being seemingly contradictory. I have things about what is intelligence, uh since it talks about

the first rate of intelligence. We talk about paradox. We talk about unlearning as hardest part of learning. And so,

you'll start to see that I might not remember I have these notes, but by having semantic search on the side, I'm

going to be able to see, "Oh, okay. Actually, you know what? This is a really great note to link inside this

note." I can just drag it over. And this way, uh it is a lot easier to connect your

notes as your vault really grows. But at the beginning, you know, don't worry about it too much because you don't have

that many notes to even embed in the first place. Speaking of plugins, there's another really common one that

people like to use, which is templates. And this is when you notice yourself always putting in the same type of

information into your notes. You know, a lot of people put in created dates, or a lot of people have uh different headings

they like to have in their notes. So, if that is you, you can come down to settings here, go to core plugin, uh

scroll down to templates. It should be automatically um turned on, but you do need to change the settings. First of

all, files for a a folder for the template is important. So, let's for us put in a

folder called template, so that Obsidian knows, okay, everything inside that folder is where the

templates are stored. And ask you for what kind of date format you want, and time format you want. I'm just going to

leave it as is. All right. Now that we come into our vault, we can create a folder that

matches that template folder that we set. So, you can click here, new folder, we'll call it templates.

Then, within that folder, if you right-click on the folder and create a new note, you'll be able to create a new

note. So, let's say this one is called template, and I will do an idea compass. So, this is another idea that I've

talked about in this video here, where when you take notes and you want to really stretch your thinking, you can

use an idea compass on the note. So, what happens is you have four directions: north, south, west, and

east. And for each of them, you want to

for north is the theme. For south is where the idea leads to.

For west it's similar ideas and for east is opposing ideas.

And so, this is sometimes a really useful tool if you want to stretch your thinking or think about what other

things are related, it's great to use the idea compass here. And since I don't want to type this in

every single time, it's really great way to create template for this. And here's a side note by the way,

you'll see that there's funny things going on when you look at this bolded text and this is markdown formatting.

So, you don't have to remember any of these because they're actually really

intuitive. If you want to bold, you can just select the text and do control B or command B.

If you want to italicize, it's the same as Word con- control or command I to italicize as well. So, you'll see that

there's like different star signs to indicate that as a part of markdown's formatting, but you really

don't have to worry about this until much later. So, and you can see this video here for a quick breakdown.

Now, when we want to insert the template, we can go into the note that we want to insert it from

and then you have several different options. You can come to the side ribbon here, find insert template. We need to

rename this to template, my bad. Now, we can go back here to

insert template and it'll show you all of the templates that's within the template folder. We're going to click on

this one and bam, you have your template inserted. Another way of doing it is control P or

command P. This is the command palette. And if you type in templates, it will say, "Okay, template, you can insert

template, you can insert the date, you can insert time." So, that's also another way of doing it.

And then, there's one more way of doing this. You can also add a custom shortcut to add templates as well, or really a

custom shortcut for any command. I'll put the video down here if you want to explore that. But again, you know, don't

get too excited about all of these things. If you don't even need to use templates, then don't worry about this.

And this brings me to the settings that you want to have. If you go into settings, you click on

files and links. There are two things you want to set up. Number one is to have your default

folder for new attachments. Attachments usually are just dumped into the folder, and over time, it can really clog up

your side panel if you care about that. So, you can select, okay, I want it in my

vault folder, which is by default, or you can say, okay, I want to have it in a folder that's specified. So, you might

call it, you know, attachment. And then, you create a Once you say that, you create that attachment folder

here, and you'll be able to add any images or things like that, and it will show up in attachment.

While you're in a files and links, there's another setting you want to enable, which is under links. You want

to enable automatically update internal links. And this happens when if you rename a file,

Obsidian will automatically update all of the other files that's referring to this file with the new name, as opposed

to have a bunch of broken links. So, let me give you an example. If this is turned off, and I change the name of

this file to be F. Scott Fitzgerald instead of Scott Fitzgerald, it will then tell you, "Hey, by the way, you

know, you have other links other files linked to this. do you want to update this? And you might have to say, "Okay,

just once or do not update." In which case you'll have a broken link. Whereas if you click always update, then

it doesn't matter which note you change, it will always help you update. And it'll tell you how many

links have been updated because you changed the name. And that's a really good hack. And the last setting that is

nice to have, but you know, lots of us like to do this, is go under appearances and choose the theme. Right now I'm

using default, but you can go under manage and really see all sorts of different themes.

It's very easy to get lost in this. I currently just use default and I really like it. And I think part of the reason

why people feel like Obsidian is very intimidating is because most of the YouTubers that talk about this are

using, you know, like a dark mode and it looks super technical when it's really not. So, if you want something clean to

start with, use default. If you want to customize it, you know, give this a few try, but it will be a time sucker. So,

I'm just putting this out there. If you want to get things set up first, start with default and then customize it over

time. There are so many functions in Obsidian, but really all you need are some notes

within a folder and just connect them over time. Think about the output that you're going to use and structure your

Obsidian vault so that you move towards the output. And that is going to create such a luxurious space for you to think

and be able to take your ideas deeper, which in this very fast-paced space is the differentiator between the quality

of your output versus someone else's way you do knowledge work. Let me know if you have questions down below. I have

videos here on both the meta idea of how to set this up, as well I will create a video on how to set up Obsidian

specifically for your AI to use as well as a part of the shared second brain. So, I'll see you in the next video. Bye.