Commonplace Notes

Below are my notes from Continuous note taking with Obsidian by Nicole van der Hoeven. I watched the video, picked up transcript via tactiq, fed into local LLM to give me the highlights. Then I cleaned up to make it useful for me.

# Key Takeaways from the video:

• Notes help with learning, building knowledge, and showing your worth to others!
• Old "notes for school" style = Useless in real life
• Take notes the way our brains work - interconnected & evolving
• Notes should be CI/CD of learning
• Notes are "low stake, high value" life hack

# Intro

• Nicole (speaker) → Dev Advocate at Grafana Labs (but not a dev!).
• Got into tech & testing roles w/ no tech background (econ major!) – succeeded by learning & taking notes.
• Notes helped her land jobs + show skills that weren’t "official" at first.

# Challenges in Learning Tech

• Tech = SO MUCH to learn, moves crazy fast; can’t keep up with everything.
• Old way of taking notes (like in school):
  • Separated by subject → No overlap or links between topics.
  • Static → Write once, never update.
  • Focus: Passing the exam, not real learning.
  • Temporary → Forget it all after exam or when topic’s done.

# The New Way of Taking Notes

• Take notes the way our brains work – everything's connected & always evolving.
• New system = 4 big changes:
  • Interconnected: Link notes together (ideas, opposites, examples, whatever!).
  • Evolving: Updates as you learn or grow – keep notes alive.
  • Abstract + Contextual: Notes for your immediate needs, but also find big-picture patterns over time.
  • Future-ready: Use formats/tools that won’t disappear; searchable, shareable, and easy to use later.

# Continuous Note-Taking

• Taking notes like CICD for software development (iterative process).
  • Idea: Learn something → process it → take notes → share → get feedback → tweak → keep going.
• Notes = Never "done." They evolve + improve continuously.
• Helps you stay sharp and build long-term knowledge!

# What’s Obsidian?

• Obsidian = Note-taking app → "Your brain, but external."
  • Think of it as your own personal Wikipedia, not like Google Docs.
  • All notes = markdown files (plain text → future-proof).
• Cool features:
  • Local-only: Your notes, fully owned by you. Back ‘em up however you want.
  • Links system: Easy to connect ideas between notes (explicit + implicit links).
  • Graph View: See a map of how your notes/ideas relate. Nerdy, but cool!
  • Plugins: Super customizable → add new features (from the community, too!).

# How to Use Obsidian

1. Daily Notes to Start:
   • Kick off each day in a daily note → Jot down meetings, tasks, random thoughts.
   • Use [[brackets]] to link keywords to other notes.
2. Auto-Linking Magic:
   • Whether you make a link or not, Obsidian tracks mentions of your notes! (Linked + unlinked mentions).
3. Graph View:
   • Fancy visual graph shows connected ideas.

# How Nicole Uses Obsidian

# 1. Logging Stuff (Notes While Working)

• Logs all her testing/learning experiments (e.g., trying tools, approaches).
• Adds tables for results, code snippets, links to dashboards/docs. Super casual, yet useful.

# 2. Learning Made Easy

• Turns those "logs" into clean, polished notes later (e.g., step-by-step guides).
• Examples: Installing tools, learning git/Python, or testing notes → Her own little reference library!

# 3. Sharing & Learning in Public

• Uses earlier notes as foundations for blog posts, YouTube vids, or talks like this one.
• Takes messy notes → Polishes them → Teaches others → Gets feedback → Learns even more!

# 4. Content Creation

• Even this presentation was written in Obsidian using a plugin (Markdown → Presentation!).

# 5. Collab via GitHub

• Obsidian is perfect for team docs! Can open GitHub repos as folders → Write docs w/ linking/search built in.

# 6. Publishing Notes

• Shares polished notes using Obsidian Publish or static site tools like Hugo.
• Example: Her Python, git, testing notes are all public → Makes her learning process visible to others.

# Why Continuous Notes Are Awesome

1. Learn Faster: Writing for future you forces deeper understanding.
2. Small Wins Add Up: Each note might feel "meh," but over time → you build massive knowledge.
3. Never Start Fresh: Notes = backups for your brain. Always something to riff on!
   • E.g., Needs to write about "performance testing"? Search notes → Tons of starting points already there.
4. Learning Exhaust: Share iterative drafts/notes → Helps others, builds your rep, invites feedback.

# Nicole’s Personal Note-Taking Wins

• Her Obsidian vault = 10,000+ notes, all interconnected w/ visual graph view.
• Employers LOVE it – It shows her knowledge/skills in a tangible way.
  • Before notes? Had a hard time "proving" worth for jobs.
  • Now? Notes = Portable proof of expertise and projects!

# Final Takeaways

• Notes = Life hack for learning faster + showing your skills to others (current/future you included).
• Start thinking of note-taking as an evolving, living process (not a "write it and forget it" thing).
• Tools like Obsidian make it easy to build this system → Super worth it for long-term success.

Resources: Nicole’s slides + blog post available on her site: nicolevanderhoeven.com.

Simon Willison describes the "the informal set of guidelines" for running a link blog. I mentioned in Welcome to my commonplace notes,

A commonplace book is a personal compilation of knowledge, ideas, quotations, and observations...from various sources for future reference and reflection.

In that sense, a commonplace notes is lot like a link blog. So guidelines that Simon mentions are applicable to anyone who keeps a commonplace notes or digital garden or by any other name they are called.

Simon mentions: having such notes is "low stakes, high value writing". Since you are only curating, the stakes are extremely low. It is an easy way to get started with blogging.

His guidelines are (I'm paraphrasing):

• Always include names of the people
• Add something extra. Pick out the key idea and highlight it or provide extra context or tie it together to other similar concepts

I have gone back and forth with keeping Twitter or Mastodon or Bluesky as a link blog. Since every social media platform eventually goes through enshitification, I decided to keep my blog itself as a commonplace notes.

I will try to follow Simon's guidelines.

I am not a cricket fan but have always admired Dhoni for his exceptional leadership skills in the IPL. He set high standards for his team and demanded even more from himself.

I have fancied myself in many situations like what Dhoni would behave. I've not gone wrong in those moments. So I listen to his interviews with great interest.

Recently he spoke with Eurogrip. He said,

If I play good cricket, I don't need PR.

Only a confident, skillful player can say that. As Dhoni says further in the interview, focusing on PR could become a distraction that drags your performance.

But Dhoni doesn’t just focus on his own game—he elevates the entire team. When you consistently deliver excellence, social media and PR naturally take a back seat.

His advice? Play the best game you can. Don’t worry too much about social media.

What stands out most is Dhoni’s humility. Toward the end of the interview, the host asked him about the best compliment he’s ever received. His response was classic Dhoni:

My wife saying you've done all right in life. That's a big compliment.

And goes on to say with a smile,

We all are trying to impress our wives

That is what I love about this man. He plays his best game—not for fame, not for accolades—but to impress his wife. That’s the kind of person I want to be.

The word scientific is thrown around a lot . But what is the scientific method?

Science Buddies explains it very well.

The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions.

But it is not all or nothing. Surprisingly, scientific method can't be applied to all areas of science study.

scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star's life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses.

But the basic steps remain the same:

1. Ask a Question
2. Do Background Research
3. Construct a Hypothesis
4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
6. Communicate Your Results

These are my notes from the podcast, Identifying Legendary Start-ups with Josh Buckley. It is a masterclass on gaming as a mental-model for investing in startups. Josh talks about other aspects of investing in the podcast, but for this article, I have limited to "Gaming mental model."

# Gaming as a mental model

• gaming is one lens through which you can view products and companies
• all models are wrong, but some are useful
• This is not a complete model of the world, but certainly a useful one
• Launching a game is 1% of the work
• 99% of work happens post-launch

# Layers of successful games

• explore and optimize these three ideas to the extreme
• the game itself
  • only 30% of the game ecosystem
• community
  • chat room
  • a social network
  • a city within the internet
• shop
  • players spend hundreds, thousands, even millions of dollars on their lifetime

# Flow

• concept from psychology where it creates a sense of immersion where time, ego, and the world fades away
• best games bring you into the flow
• flow is synonymous with fun
• Flow is like ecstasy. It's exhilarating. Athletes call it the zone
• best games create controlled spaces that bring you into that sense of flow
• Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are games, in that sense; 3 billion people are playing them actively

# Elements that make games/apps tick

• Frequency
  • without frequency player get apathetic or bored and fall out of the flow
  • there has to be frequent feedback within the game
• variable outcomes
  • People adapt very quickly to a predictable reward schedule.
  • The term "maybe" is addictive, like nothing else out there.
• sense of control
  • People like to work. People like to work for reward.
  • To stay in the flow, you need some sense of challenge.
  • It's rewarding to build a piece of Ikea furniture

# Meta-game

• the abstraction layer above the game
• provides meaning to the game
• answers the question: why should you stay in that loop?
• it comes down to core human motivation.
• a hard problem to solve since context changes as the player goes through the game; you need to keep the player in flow even as the context changes
• people like to "belong" to a group
• they help their group progress, hit their goals to receive a sense of status from their peers
• meta-game for social media (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram)
  • they have a meta-game around identity, around social status.
  • follower count, high retweets, and perceived influence are examples of meta-game

# Shop

• free-to-play games don't charge a single price rather calibrate the payment according to the level of player's intensity
• only a small percentage of the players buy anything
• a subset (called whales) spend a large amount
• Power Law at work
• making a compelling game with built-in distribution is hard
• best games integrate the shop flow throughout the product. The game and the shop are one.
• players exhibit different characteristics as the context changes
• create different segments of the players and create different offers based on how they engage and spend
• players may hop through segments over time

# Portable idea from game design to business

• understand Power Laws
• understand customers in different segments and how much of your business is driven by the biggest segments;
• you probably don't understand these segments as well as you think
• you're probably underpricing that segment because you don't value the product nearly as they do.
• you probably don't understand how to build effectively for them, because either you don't love the product as much as they do or you don't derive as much value from it as they do
• you can't build a one-size-fits-all product
• There are so many different jobs to be done for a product
• Your product may be a Swiss army knife because you have 10 different segments or 5 different segments.
• each of those segments may both have different things they want from the product and they may have different importance to your own business.
• world is increasingly shifting to a more variable monetization model
• segments that may drive more than half your revenue, but maybe a small base of your customers or users are really important to understand.
• Twilio, where the pricing is usage-based, perfectly captures the power law