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- [00:00]
A
If you need to remember it, it's not important. If it's important, you will remember it. For some reason, it's become an obsession to just remember everything you read. There are videos on YouTube with millions of views. It is a very popular and viral topic. And nothing against the people that I'm flashing on the screen. I'm friends with quite a few of them, but it seems like people feel like if they don't retain the knowledge from what they read, they're a failure or they wasted their time when that's not the point of reading at all. Why would you want to memorize every word of a book in the first place? I know why you want to sound smart. It's an unconscious status symbol for you. You want to impress others with your articulation and intelligence. But you don't realize that sounding smart comes from understanding, not memorization. And understanding requires a much different approach to learning. It also doesn't help that schools tested you on your ability to memorize. You studied for hours because just so you could pencil in the right answer when that's not how life works at all. I get it. You want to acquire knowledge so that you can make better decisions and work yourself into a more advantageous life situation with more money and power so you don't have to worry about your day to day survival. Everyone wants that. But memorizing facts is the least effective way to get there. So that's what we're here to talk about. How to actually learn. Not just memorize things so that you can acquire knowledge and that knowledge can be used to create a better future for yourself. That's why you acquire knowledge in the first place. After we talk about how to actually learn things really fast or master any skill really fast, we're going to talk about why your note taking system and your bookmarks and the information you love to collect and hoard in your second brain or the sex doll for mental masturbators. We're going to talk about how those are largely useless now. Speaking of the second brain, we've actually been building one for quite a long time. It's called Eden. Some of you guys know it, but we just added a library feature, a reader feature. So you can click the link to this video, add it to Eden, and read and highlight the transcript so that those highlights are saved and you can pull in Kindle highlights, x bookmarks, sniped highlights, and have them all in one place. But the difference is that you're not maintaining this and organizing it because we organize it for for you you'll understand why this is important later, but I'm just leaving that here in case you want to actually try it. And of course it has the best outlier tool on the market so you can find outliers or high performing ideas if you're a creator on any platform. And then you can schedule and publish to any platform or do that all from the cloud MCP if you use cloud, so I'll leave it at that. But if you're a creative or creator and you aren't using Eden yet, I don't know what you're doing. I don't know why you would willingly get less results by not using Eden. All right, let's talk about how to actually learn anything fast. And I'm going to start with a previous tweet of mine because it summarizes it quite well. Learning comes from struggle, not memorization. Start the project. No, don't watch 20 tutorials beforehand. Let it expose the gaps in your knowledge. Try to figure it out. Search for the answer when your mind is most likely to remember it. Publish the project than repeat for life. Most people have no idea how to learn because most people have no idea what the learning process is. The reason that most learning fails is because there's no negative feedback loop. You can think of it like this. If you don't have the goal of getting in shape, and I'm talking a deep intrinsically generated goal, not a superficial goal you're pursuing to fit in like a New Year's resolution, then a night of heavy drinking and partying won't register as a problem or negative feedback because it doesn't impact your non existent goal of performing on your morning run or gym session the next day. You can go to work just fine with a hangover because you don't give a about how well you do at your job. That's only one example, but it applies to every single area of your life. To business, to relationships, to health. Like we just talked about. If I have the goal of hitting a PR in the gym, a bench press PR or running a marathon, do you think I'm going to go out and drink? Do you think I'm going to go out and do degenerative activities? Maybe I will if I'm not actually serious about the goal to but if I do, then it's going to impact my ability to hit the goal. And if that goal really means a lot to you and you do go out and party and drink anyways, which I'm not completely against. But to illustrate a point, if you do those things, your training is going to suffer and you aren't going to hit your goals as fast as you would, or at all. And if you really value that area of your life, health, you're eventually going to realize, man, I need to stop doing this. That's called learning. Learning is a cybernetic process. Cybernetics sounds like something related to cyborgs, but it stems from the Greek word kubernetes, I believe, meaning steersman or helmsman, the person who steers the ship. The word cybernetics was chosen because the helmsman is the perfect image of a feedback system. The helmsman doesn't just point the ship in a direction once. He constantly reads the current state, like the wind, the waves, or the heading, and. And then he compares it against the intended course and adjusts, in other words, the process of trial and error. And so few people have the direction that allows them to notice errors in their life. Cybernetics illustrates the properties of intelligent systems. There's a reference signal or the goal, so the system holds a target state. There's the sensor, or perception, so the system reads its current state. There's the comparator, or the gap between where you are and where you want to be. So the system computes the difference between target and current state, and the difference is the error signal. Then there's the actuator or the behavior. So the system acts to reduce the error. And you can see this all around you. Cybernetics is more of a frame of how to view reality. It's a frame you can put on to course correct in a better direction. When you look at a thermostat, it turns on the heat when it gets too cold, because it notices when it's too cold, the error signal. And then course corrects. And that's one small. That's not a very intelligent system, which you can also think of how your pancreas secretes insulin when blood sugar rises. Your body is one system composed of so many different intelligent systems. And that exposes the issue here very well. When most people try to learn something new, they focus on content. They hoard material and try to absorb it with space repetition or flashcards or courses and learning the fundamentals. They assume learning is an input process. And now I'm not saying that those things are bad. I'm not saying that space repetition doesn't work or that courses are bad. I love courses. I take them all the time because I like to learn things. But in reality, learning is an output process because output demands input. We're going to talk about in a future video intellectual obesity and how it's kind of become a crisis or an epidemic. But you can think of information and food as the same thing. Information is food for your mind. If you're eating too much food and you're not exercising, you're not putting out energy, you're not using the food or shuttling it to muscle growth or whatever your goals are, the same thing applies to the mind just consuming, consuming, consuming. Even if it's self improvement. Like that's no better than just consuming brain rot if you're not doing anything with it because it's making you mentally obese. I'm not trying to attack you personally because I was the same way. But a lot of people think that, ooh, I'm scrolling self improvement content rather than brain rot. So I'm better than the people that are scrolling the brain rot. When you're doing the exact same thing, you're still getting the cheap dopamine hit. And honestly, it could be worse because you're just getting a false sense of progress. So a goal creates the error signal, the error signal creates the filter. The filter creates relevance. So whether it's useful because most people fill their mind with noise and things they will never use, and then the relevance creates retention. I've talked about this many times before, but think of a person who has been deeply conditioned by the default path society assigned them. The goal of go to school, get a job, retire at 65. And that's all they know. That is the goal. That is direct their learning and behavior. Because they behave in a certain direction, they make an error. And then unconsciously, most of the time, they correct the error to maintain the direction that was set for them by society. So the destiny that they were assigned inevitably will come true, even if the person themselves aren't conscious of it or didn't want it in the first place. They just never questioned their conditioning. And now the pernicious thing here. I like the word pernicious. I don't even know if that was the right word to use. But the pernicious thing here is that the person who is conditioned to go down the default path will not notice opportunities like money making opportunities or health opportunities or opportunities to actually improve their life beyond the outcome that was promised to them. Right? The outcome of retiring at 65, whatever your image of that looks like, that's your bar. That's the highest you can go with that goal. And so you will not notice these opportunities of, say, starting a business or becoming a creator or Starting a personal brand or even leveraging AI in an intelligent way because your brain is actively filtering it out. It doesn't even have the chance to register and stick and retain because you're not working toward a goal that would demand that as input. These people are not in control of their lives. They are a puppet of someone else's ideals. And this is most people. I'm talking very negatively here, but this is just how it is. In order to fix this, or in order to course correct, you need the awareness of. Of the problem. Because you may or may not have noticed that if this, if this video is actually registering with you, a new goal is starting to form in your head and your behavior and learning are starting to pick up and notice opportunities in that direction. And by simply having awareness that this could be a problem that's going to direct your behavior in a certain way. We'll also talk about anti marketing in a future video, but this is largely marketing as well. This is a better form of marketing if you understand deeply how psychology works. Not the surface level psychology that goes viral on Instagram, but actual psychology and how learning and behavior work. Now this is the part that is important. If you consciously create your own frame by knowing exactly what you don't want out of life and comparing it to an evolving vision of what you do want out of life, you are only then able to sense when you are off track, notice the error, correct the direction you were heading, and learn as a byproduct. Now I want to repeat that part. You need to know exactly what you don't want out of life and compare it to an evolving vision of what you do want out of life. That is it. That is the key. That is literally success. That's it. What do you not want out of life? What do you hate? What are the experiences that you've had? Look, just create an image of a person in your head that you would despise being like. And now aim in the other direction. What does that person look like? What is their potential? And now that's imaginary. So you have to work towards that. But you have to refine it like a sculpture over time by comparing it to what you don't want or where you are now. And slowly, more and more and more, you eventually become the vision that you had. So all of that makes sense, hopefully. What do we actually do? Step one is to become obsessed with a meaningful goal. And the way you become obsessed is to look at your current actions and realize where your life will end up if you don't Change. And for most people, that outcome is not pretty at all. Sit with that image. Actually sit with it. Pause this video. Think and let it fill you with this potent emotion and redirect that emotional energy toward a better direction for your life. Moments like these are the moments that my life change. And it's very hard to explain. Some of you have felt it, but you just get filled with, like, I guess you could say this divine energy, something you've never felt before. And, like, you get choked up and you just want to attack whatever goal you have. Like, that is one of the greatest feelings in the world. And only then can you actually align the goals you pursue with the aim of your future. Only then does a useful learning process start. The opposite of schooling, where your learning is determined by the direction and goals society sets for you. The other thing is that being extreme toward a goal changes your brain and enhances neuroplasticity. And so in my eyes, a lot of people tell you, like, oh, don't quit your job. Have a backup plan first. Do all of this. And that's great. Like, that can work. Absolutely. But personally, I thrive when I'm under pressure. I want to quit my job. I want to feel the weight of the world on my back, and I want to carry it. I know that's a very masculine thing. So with those with a very feminine orientation in my audience, you may not resonate with that, but I think you can get where I'm coming from. To me, that is a much better option, is to just burn the boats. I like to romanticize my life a little bit. I like to feel like I'm going to war because that's what my brain responds to. And it gives me a huge advantage over other people who don't have that same energy and drive. And it just feels amazing. Now, step two, don't start learning, because the life you want lies at the end of a series of meaningful projects. Doesn't really make sense, but a project is simply a structured set of goals and milestones. It's a way of creating something tangible to work toward a goal. It's the way that you achieve goals is by creating a project and completing the project, and preferably publishing the project, whatever that means in the context of the project. If it's a tangible product, I mean, project, you put it out as a product. If it's a tangible writing, then you publish it to get feedback from the market by posting it on social media. Your mind is to be treated as a project, as is your body, your relationships, or your financial situation or any other domain or skill in your life. A project creates a frame for your learning by filtering out unimportant noise. Anything that does not directly move the project forward is not worth learning right now, at least, because you won't retain it anyway. In other words, when you want to learn something new, don't start learning, don't start studying, don't start watching tutorials. You start the project. You start with an image of what you actually want to do in the world first, and then you take the first step toward the goal. We'll talk about that a bit more. But step number three is to seek specific knowledge. And we'll start with a quote from Naval, because specific knowledge is kind of Naval's thing. I ultimately think that everyone should be figuring out what it is that they uniquely do best that aligns with who they are fundamentally, and that gives them authenticity, that brings them specific knowledge, that gives them a competitive advantage, that makes them irreplaceable, and they should just lean into that. And sometimes you don't know what that is until you do it. As a side note on that quote, you eventually come to realize this, but beginners especially get so stuck in, like, what do I do? What do I do? You just do something. Like, you learn what to do by doing something. And for some reason, that doesn't register for them because it's a paradox. They don't get it. They're afraid that, as an example, posting on social media. Oh, their first post is going to flop. It's not going to do well.
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This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook.
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A
Got a Sam's Cafe pizza.
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C
Order up.
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D
You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, just another perk of being a member.
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A
Come join us, Sam's Club.
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B
Really?
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A
You don't think that the first post is gonna. The first post is gonna do amazing. You're just gonna go viral and get famous all of a sudden. You don't think that. It takes years. What are you thinking? What's going through your head? Of course it's gonna suck. Of course it's gonna Be terrible. Of course you're gonna be embarrassed. That's the entire fucking point. Oh, it gets me so riled up to just like, I'm not a violent person, but, oh, I just kind of just want to like punch you in the face. It's a bit intense, but I want to give you a little slap and be like, hey, dude, just. Post schools teach general knowledge or knowledge required to do a job. They do not teach how to navigate your own path. They narrow you into one area of study, which by nature does not prepare you to direct your own work through the path of entrepreneurship or simply doing what you want to do. Self education is the process of learning what's necessary to achieve self generated goals. Again, no hoarding general knowledge to feel like you're learning. So as an example, let's say that I wanted to learn After Effects, right? Adobe After Effects, a very complex animation software that when you go into, you're like, I have no idea what to do. It's just a bunch of buttons that mean nothing. And so your first thought is, okay, I should go watch a tutorial on how to use After Effects. But then you do that and then you're no better off from when you started. You look in there and you're like, where is everything again? And then you get stuck in this loop of like, I need to learn this software inside and out before I even create anything. Which isn't the case at all. Instead, you need something to actually build. You need something you want to create in animation. You need a vision or an image of it in your head. When people sign up for Eden, there's only so many tutorials we can create before. It's up to you to just figure out how to do what you want to do. The software is a tool and you need to use it to actually achieve something, to use it like a wrench. How you would use a tool. You can't use a tool if you have nothing to use it for. And so when people come to me and they're like, well, how do I, how do I use this? And sure, I, we need to create tutorials and teach how to use it. But my first question is always, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to write content? Okay, do you know how to write content? Have you educated yourself? Have you started? And only then can I give you a proper answer. Because another thing that peeves me so much is that there's software coming out, there's tools coming out, there's videos coming out where they just think like, oh, I'LL teach you how to go viral in five seconds. Or this app will make you go viral. That doesn't work. That's not how it works. Because you have to learn the intricacies of attention and psychology and you have to practice so many times to get feedback from the market on your posts so that pattern recognition over time builds in your head to the point where you are an expert at that thing. It doesn't matter if Claude tells you that a piece of content is going to go viral, because do you understand how attention and value shifts over time? Content is subjective. Code is more objective. Yes, Claude and AI can write code that works because the end result that you're looking for, that you determine value, the value of the code by is does this work with content, with writing, with creativity, with art? It's very subjective. The value changes over time according to culture and market sophistication and how much an idea has been ran through to the point where everyone thinks it's just basic or cliche. And so in order for us to build a good tool like Eden, unless we want to go against our morals and just make a ton of money, like I could easily, very easily, just give you a system that would probably make you go viral once, but that would be freaking useless to you. It wouldn't do anything. I need to create a tool that's actually good, that you're going to use consistently, rather than just sign up once, go viral, and then not be able to do anything again and pay a ton of money to do so. So back to the After Effects example. Sorry, that gets me very heated. And I am essentially going to war with every other social media app because I do not like them. So you need to start the project with the knowledge you have. And if you don't have knowledge, then you find a specific tutorial that is as similar to the project you want to create as it can. So with After Effects, if I want to create a minimalist line animation, right, like I used to on Instagram, then I would go and try to find a tutorial of someone that creates that specific animation or something slightly similar to it, so that I can directly apply what I'm learning in the moment. And the thing is that most of the tutorial will be useless, but you'll be filtering it out and you'll be noticing the things that you can actually go and apply. And then you do that over and over again. And until you stack enough techniques, not every single tool in the After Effects sidebar or the Photoshop sidebar or the Canva or the Eden sidebar. But you stack enough techniques to get the result that you want, which is specifically your goal. As an easier example, think of learning an instrument like the guitar. Do you immediately go and study music theory? Probably not. You simply choose the song that you want to play, and then you learn the first chord of the song. Because you try to play it and you're like, I don't. I don't know what to play. You learn the first chord and then the second, and then the third. And then eventually you pick up other things. Like, this doesn't sound right. Okay, I need to tune the guitar in a certain way. I need to add a capo. And then you pick up little hacks until you're able to play one song and then the next, and then the next. And then at that point, you feel kind of confident that you could maybe try creating your own very simple song. And then years later, you're just going crazy and you can do anything. You're a master. That is how you learn. So we just learned all of that, how to actually learn things fast. And it's literally just do things for all the people that want a bullet point summary. Go and do things. See if that helps you. But now I want to talk about the note taking systems, the second brains, the obsession with just capturing ideas and writing down notes and hitting the bookmark or save and then never looking at them again. Because there's obviously something valuable there, right? There's something useful. You saved it for a reason, but you haven't actually taken it and applied it to your life. Am I saying that you're going to apply thousands upon thousands of notes to your life? Probably not, but there's a lot of gold that's just sitting there. So what? How do you actually manage that stuff? Because with technology that actually enables you to do a lot, people just aren't using it correctly. And I've tried all of the systems before. I started my second brain journey with ROAM research, if any of you guys know it. And it completely changed how I write my newsletters. I built a knowledge base of very potent ideas, and then I was able to pull from those when it was time to write, because the research was already there. My note taking was essentially like preparative research. And a few years ago, I even built Cortex, which wasn't meant to be a second brain software, but that's kind of what it turned into because I was trying to take my writing process, what helped me so much, and put it into a software. And in order to do that. We needed some kind of note taking system and connections and tags inside of there. But Cortex inevitably failed. And I, I mean it didn't really fail, but it very painfully evolved into the version of Eden it is today. That's why I haven't been posting very much. But as you can see with the black background, we are getting back to it because Eden is in a very good state right now, thank God. So I'm not here to say that second brains are completely useless. I just think that they are misused. They're very powerful, but people just don't know how to use them. Like organizing your entire life inside of notion is not going to help you very much because you bookmark and you take notes just for them to never be seen again. So you quite literally wasted your time thinking you were learning when you could have actually been learning in the first place and engaging with reality and trial and error. So in the past, people didn't have a popularized second brain that markets very well and catches attention. They had a commonplace book. Marcus Aurelius's book, Meditations is essentially a private commonplace book with notes to himself and digested philosophy. And it was never meant to be published, but that's kind of what it is. Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of notebook pages with sketches, observations, questions and borrowed ideas. Mark Twain, H.P. lovecraft, Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, Rick Rubin and many more each had some variation of this. But there is a major difference between your second brain productivity, bro, and these successful creatives. Their collection of ideas was the fuel for their creations. Their inventions, writing and music would not be what they are today. And I would go as far as saying you wouldn't even know who those famous people are if they didn't have some variation of a commonplace book. That's me saying that a digital commonplace book isn't like an absolute requirement to success, but it definitely helps in it. So rather than this being a second brain, I like to think of it as a second subconscious. Because when you create something, your subconscious spits out relevant ideas that contribute to the quality of, of the creation, but it's still limited in processing power. And sometimes it decides to just not help you at all, leaving you in a creative rut. And so that's what the second brain systems are missing is they don't have a project to apply the ideas to. It doesn't spit out ideas when the time is right. And related to this, a metaphor from Seneca was to gather pollen from many flowers and then digest it into your own honey. That's his way of saying steal like an artist. So you could wonder if the steal like an artist guy stole like an artist from Seneca. This is the antidote to writer's block. You don't have ideas for your writing content or videos because you don't have a repository of ideas to pull from. Every single thing I've said in this video is from other articles, videos, social posts, random ideas and highlights that I've saved before. So I think you get it. But how do you actually build something like this? How do we create a digital commonplace book leveraging modern technology like AI? Because that's what it's good at. And that's step one, which is to choose the right software or create your own AI system. And I want to have a quote here from Devin Erickson. Don't get breathless about how smart AI is. It's dumber than a sack of wet hammers. Leverage instead its ability to do rapid input and output for simple tasks on large data sets. There's a bunch of idiots on Instagram and other social media platforms right now saying that if you use AI once, then essentially like you are useless. Everything you've done is useless. The whole Hank Green situation. And I would encourage you to go watch my video on how to think five dimensionally because it will break down exactly why these people are idiots. And in another video we're going to talk about how everything is a religion and we're going to break down ideology because frankly, it's sad to see who I thought were decently nuanced thinkers pick an absolute side in the AI religion, either anti or pro AI and they can't think for themselves and figure out okay, yeah, this isn't all bad or all good as all things in life come on. So let's talk about how to use it for something good here that would aid in your creativity without taking away from your creativity. Because most note taking and second brain software still require manual upkeep. Some of them have an AI chat tacked on which is absolutely useful, but they're missing the most useful application of them all, which is make it so your ideas don't disappear into the void. Because your creative work depends on your ability to resurface them at the right time. So you have two options here and our goal is to just be able to drop an idea in and then find it when we need it when we're writing, creating or just working on a project, whatever your project is. So option one is to use the popular combination like Claude code and obsidian to store your knowledge in one place and retrieve ideas with AI. And then there's option two, which is to use kind of like a modern software like My Mind or Eden, which auto tags, categorizes and embeds your knowledge in meaning space so it can connect seemingly unrelated ideas to birth novel insights. Now there are plenty of tutorials on number one, you can just go on YouTube and you'll see a Claude+Obsidian video. And it's very popular for a reason, because it's a very cool thing. Even though I think that many people swapped their obsession for collecting notion templates to an obsession of collecting Claude skills. And everything that they can do in Claude I need to create. It'll be in the Everything is a Religion video, I think, where I need to create a bell curve meme of AI usage where the first guy, the stupid guy is like, oh, you just like tell it what to do. And then the top is like all the crazy skills and stuff. And then the third guy is just tell it what to do. But the thing there is that in order to be this guy, you need to know what to do, which most people don't. So since there are a ton of tutorials already and I'm not going to teach it as well as them, I'm just going to give you very simple, step by step. Here's what you do. If you want to build Claude plus Obsidian, first is just download Obsidian and Claude. Then you can open Claude code or Claude cowork and select your Obsidian vault folder on your computer as the folder you're working in. Because when you download Obsidian, it's a folder on your computer because it stores files locally, so you can work inside of that folder in Claude or Claude cowork. Now the best way to create prompts or skills or really to do anything with AI is to just ask it, hey, how do I create a skill? How do I create a prompt, A good prompt, right? You don't just ask basic questions. And of course it may not give you the best answer every time, but that doesn't matter because you're not trying to one shot things. Working with AI is as close to working with the process of trial and error itself. Because in order to get a good result with AI, you still have to refine, refine, refine. And if you settle for slop or mediocrity, that's what creates slop or mediocrity. And the anti AI people just think that's all there is that exists. So what you're going to do now inside of Claude is you're just going to create a Save an idea skill, you're going to ask Claude to create a skill that creates a note in an inbox folder with a clear title. And so what that's going to do is it's going to create a skill so whenever you drop an idea or a link or a post or anything inside of Claude, it's going to create that and then turn it into a note or a document inside of your Obsidian folder and it's going to have a clear title. Now, the next thing is to create a process my inbox skill. So you ask Claude to create a skill that goes through your inbox folder, adds tags, moves it to the right folder, and adds backlinks to other related notes within the vault. And then over time, as you drop things in, these two skills are going to work in tandem to keep your second brain growing and organizing, so that when you ask it a question to pull something out, or you're working on a newsletter or writing social posts and you say, hey, what are. What other ideas could work with this?
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Or.
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Or, hey, give me some very unique ideas on this topic, it'll be able to look through your second brain and then pull in certain ideas that you've left in there. And one other useful thing here is to ask Claude to help you define your taxonomy so it knows what tags and categories to use. And that would be something that you look at, you look over and then you approve. And you can iterate on all of this with time. And so it's super simple. Now all you have to do is drop an idea inside of Claude on your phone, on desktop, or you need to drop your writing in there and say, hey, add this to my brain, and then you're good to go. And we're talking about this for the sake of creativity, creative projects. You can of course use this for other use cases, but this is just like idea capture. And so that works for finding most ideas. But good writing and creative work come from novel connections, so not keyword search or the AI brainstorming synonym. So it can try to think that it finds novel connections. So if you don't want to do all of that manually, and frankly, everything shouldn't be done in an AI chat, then you can use a software like My Mind, which allows you to save any link or files I believe, or just a note or quick idea to a large searchable library. You don't have to organize anything, you just drop things in. And so Eden has largely the same things and all of everything that I'm talking about is free. By the way, you can sign up and use the things that I'm talking about for free relating to building your second brain. But the difference is that you also write your newsletters or schedule your social posts inside of here and from your library, it can show you connections to what you're writing. And I can create boards or swipe files where I have YouTube videos, or I just drop all of my ideas and substack articles and Instagram reels that I save and social posts and all of my writing and notes and substack articles. And these are all transcribed. And the other thing that I like quite a bit is that there is a reader mode where I can highlight and then these things are added to my library. And we're going to talk about how to use the ideas or the highlights or anything else that you save. But the way that my mind and Eden differ from something like Claude and Obsidian is that everything you add to your library is categorized, tagged and embedded. So that means you can search and find your ideas without using all of your Claude usage. And if you want to build a second brain or be able to access it with AI, you can just connect Eden to the MCP and not have to do all of the crazy Claude finagling. Now, the reason I bring up the auto tagging and the auto categorizing that my mind and Eden do is because those apps can show you what's nearby. It can show you the novel connections or the novel relations. And that's because each item is embedded with 1500 plus numbers that act as GPS coordinates for an idea. They don't need to keyword match in order to find a related idea. So that's exactly what allows you to drop an idea in, forget about it, and then be able to surface it while you're writing or creating. And you don't have to worry about it either, because you'll know you'll be able to find the right ideas when you need them. And I'm guessing that you don't want to maintain a vector database, an embedding, API, indexing scripts, re embedding when notes change, keeping the index in sync when files are renamed, and caching so you don't repay for unchanged content. That's why you pay for tool. Well, not even pay. It's free for tools and technology. And everyone just thinks, oh, I'm going to build my own app. And it's like, no you're not. You might for the very simple things in your life that you want to build and maintain, and that can be Local apps. But for something like an outlier search for high performing content inside of Eden, you're not going to spend 10 to 20 thousand dollars of your own money to store and maintain the database and continue pulling in and indexing creators content. You can scrape a few creators here and there, sure, but that's why you would use a different tool. So you have your system, one of the systems that you're going to use. Whichever one doesn't, it honestly doesn't really matter. But step two is to capture the ideas that best represent your ideal mind. Because when AI can create anything, curation matters more than ever. You need a curated space for ideas that spark inspiration. The opposite of an endless fire hose of noise we call a social media feed. As a writer creator, someone trying to do independent work, meaning you need to build an audience by attracting them to the ideas you put out. People don't follow you for your content anymore. There's Google, AI and plenty of information that can be found at the click of a button. People follow you for your point of view, your opinion, your interpretation, your personality, your story. And all of those things are downstream of the ideas that compose your worldview, the ideas you use to make sense of the world. As an example, when I get into a conversation about the nature of reality, my mind jumps to ideas about history, integral theory, spiral dynamics and more. Because I've deemed these the most useful lens from which I can view that conversation from. It makes the most sense out of the other ideas I've heard that tend to fall flat. Now, this is a side tangent, but I have made many videos on how you are the niche in content creation in business, especially modern business, as a solopreneur. And I've seen a few pieces of content lately that are like, no, you are not the niche, because they think that you are. The niche just means posting about you, you, you, you, you. No, you're documenting. You're placing your mind in public for people to explore. Your mind is not just your personality traits and the your story and the things about you. It's the ideas that create this web of interconnections that make, how you say, the ideas unique. And so your second brain, or your second subconscious, when used correctly, is an externalization of that that you then take and use as fuel for the things that you put in public. It's a layer between you and your published work. So those are the things that you capture, the things that form your worldview or are powerful enough to eventually form your worldview. You listen to that podcast and you're like, oh wow, that's a really good idea. I like that. That's what you save. So you curate a large set of knowledge that would best represent your ideal mind. Because that's what your fancy note taking system was meant to be, right? You just never got around to solidifying those ideas as a part of yourself. Usually through the act of think writing and sharing in public so that you can receive feedback from the market and let the best ideas win. So how do you actually do this? You read more books. You let your curiosity guide you. You reject doom scrolling and embrace curated lists of authors and thinkers who are dedicated to producing good ideas. You make time for research because as a writer or creator, that's 80% of your job. Notice how I'm not choosing one side with AI? I'm not saying oh, you touch AI and then you're just brain dead head because that's not how it works. Just observe, don't live in your own head and make up fantasies. But I also didn't say that you shouldn't read or that you should outsource your creativity. I'm saying that you still, even with AI, you need. It's just a tool. Stop like over exaggerating it in your head. You still need to do the things that lead to a good mind in life. It is as simple as that. And if AI is taking away from that, then stop using AI for that specific use case or change how you use it. It mind blowing stuff. I know. Now step three is to build your ideal mind through the act of creation. Because we're learning here, right? We're acquiring the knowledge. We're building a more beautiful mind. So we need to close the loop. We have the system for capturing and retrieving knowledge, but now we need the project to apply it to so that it doesn't go to waste. And we still aren't capturing specific knowledge because we don't have a reason to learn. We aren't giving our mind the frame from which it can effectively signal that ideas are important enough to capture. As we discussed. And that's the entire goal we're after. We want to be smarter. We want to retain and remember what we learn. We want to sound articulate for superficial reasons maybe, but also because the outcome of our lives depend on the decisions that we make. And our level of smartness and ability to articulate our own value absolutely contribute positively to that. Now I can't tell you what to create. It can be an image, it can be a design, a Photoshop project. But if you're interested in writing or content like I do. That's why I talk about it. Then I can give you my process that actually recently helped someone else who was struggling to fit all of their ideas into a piece of writing. So for something like writing a substack article, which is becoming very popular lately, and it's good, people are shifting toward long form because they're tired of brainless short form. And this also works for a YouTube script or an X article or anything really. But step one is to just, just choose a topic, obviously. But the best topics are the ones that lie at the intersection of performance and excitement. So performance equals topics that have already proven to do well. You find these by saving social posts that have gone viral or using a research tool that allows you to find outlier content and study creators. Top posts. This is just a constant. This isn't anything new with social media. This is just what you do. Do you think that your favorite artist, and by that I mean musician, became famous by just making little sounds? Or did they have a structure to it? Did they think, how will my audience respond to this? How will the market respond to this? Will it gain popularity? That at least has to come into mind for you. A lot of artists skip the business part and that's why they become starving artists because they supposedly don't care what the market thinks. But that is their downfall. So yes, you need to curate inspiration and save posts that have done well before so that you know what works on the market and you can take the principles and apply it to your own writing that isn't sacrificing your voice in any way because it still runs through your taste filter. This video literally has how to remember everything you read in the title because there have been hundreds of videos titled how to remember everything you read that have gone viral in the past. And so is this the same exact video as them? No, it's actually the complete opposite because I say don't do that. So that's the performance side of the topic. But now we need the excitement part. Excitement equals the topics and ideas that you want to explore more out of curiosity. And your job is to pair the topic you want to write about that probably wouldn't do well on social media with a topic that has already proven to do well so that you can write about what you want and increase its potential to actually gain traction. After that, step two is to brain dump outline and then draft. So you don't just start writing the draft. Writers don't just open one page and then expect all the ideas to linearly fall into place. You start with a brain dump. You write down all potential ideas that could fit under the topic you're writing, look through your notes, ideas and links and add them inside it too. This is where I use a board in Eden. I look through my library, I search through it, I ask the AI chat for certain ideas in it. Then I add all of those to a specific board. So all of my research is there that I can open and reference while I'm writing. And then once you have some ideas, you start to add some structure with an outline. So you take all the ideas in your brain dump and try to fit them into a general storytelling framework, which usually falls within problem, insight, solution. So by that I mean create a new document or do it on paper if you want, and then organize the ideas by what falls under the problem. What makes sense here? What's the main insight that I'm trying to get across, which is usually the exciting idea that you want to talk about. And then what's the solution? Or the step by step step, what do you actually give people to do about it? And then now when you actually create the draft, you have an empty draft. You also have your brain dump. You have all of your ideas and research and you have your outline. And now all you need to do is synthesize them together and actually turn them into sentences. So now step three is to use AI to remove friction. Not right for you. Now I'm going to continue talking about my thoughts around AI writing in future videos, but when I say don't use AI to write for you, what I'm actually saying is don't use AI to articulate your opinions and beliefs. Because I was, I wasn't corrected on this. Someone pointed it out to me recently and was like, hey, didn't you use AI to write this? And the answer was yes. In my viral Twitter article, the most viewed article on Twitter, there was a section that was literally bullet points step or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It was small descriptions of the nine stages of ego development. The nine stages of ego development is from Susan Cook Gruiter. It's not my ideas. Any other writer who would describe what the nine stages are is just going to go to Google and search what they are. And so yes, I asked AI for those because they're not my opinion, they're not my belief. I don't want to mess it up. I want it to be as close to Susan Cook Reuters version of the nine stages of ego development as possible. So yeah, I'm going to copy paste that bullet point in. It doesn't take away from the value of the article. And if you think that I don't. I don't know what to tell you. I have the ideas that I love that I want to focus on because I understand the value of articulating them myself and how it improves my mind and my ability. So the more I can focus on that, the better, I would assume. I don't think it's worth wasting my breath on trying to rewrite what the nine stages of ego development are, because that's just like what you do in school for the sake of memorization. When the very first sentence of this video is, if you need to remember it, it's not important. If it's important, you'll remember it. I absolutely think that there is value in struggling to articulate your own thoughts and opinions because it creates a gap that you can then go learn and fill. So when I say use AI to remove friction, I'm talking about using it like you would use a course or a mentor or an editor while you are learning the skill. Because AI is good at scanning through large swaths of information to give you what you need. Does that mean it's not going to hallucinate? That it's not going to be correct? Of course, sometimes it's not going to be correct. But then what do you do? Do you think everyone just accepts that as law? Or do they question it? It's the same thing as going on Instagram and seeing a human expert who frankly has no idea what they're talking about. Giving opinions that people just soak up up. And that's exactly what happened to the anti AI people's brains. And just to balance it out, the Pro. The all 100 Pro AI people are also dumb as rocks. So how this relates to actually writing an article or newsletter is that if you don't know how to structure your article, ask for a list of structures that your ideas could fit into something that a course would give you anyways. If you don't know what to write next, ask for a few directions the article can go, and then choose your own or choose none of them. If you don't understand something, research it like any writer would in the past with a less efficient method of scouring through the Internet for the right information. Another thing here is that the Internet can provide you with false information too. All in all, I just trust that you have a brain. You are ultimately the one who decides what gets published or what gets written. If it doesn't represent the values, ideas and beliefs you want it to, then refine it until it does or don't post it and I'll leave it at that because I have a lot more to say and I'll just save it for another video. And if you don't know what to write or what to talk about or what your niche would be or how to actually grow on social media, then consider joining the Creator boot camp. It comes free with Eden Pro, so you get both of those in one link to all of those in the description. Thank you for watching. Like subscribe if people still say that. I'll see you in the next one.
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