I’ll write more about productivity and useful tech at my newsletter, ‘Dabi Notes’! ✨sign up for free at davidliu.ck.page/a992e970c9 EDIT: THE 999K VIEWS SECOND BRAIN On 10 May 2024 i.e. the time of writing, the video is at 999K views. So this is the last chance I have to write a comment before this video hits 1M views, which will be my first ever video to do so. Firstly, just want to say thanks for needing out with me. The story behind this video I find kind of interesting: the main reason I just said “screw it, make it free” was actually just because it really was a paid course…and it made a grand total of one sale. It seemed like a waste, given it probably took somewhere around 30-40 hours to make and edit (the details are fuzzy). So throwing it on KZfaq for free was this crazy experiment of, “maybe this will be useful to someone anyway.” I’m super grateful for your time spent here and I genuinely hope this video proves useful for the rest of your life, not just in Obsidian specifically, but in this new style of thinking about thinking. I’m slow to post, but there are indeed videos in the works, so please look forward to them. ✨ And in case anyone was wondering…yep, I still use Obsidian every day, in pretty much exactly the same way as I detailed in the video. Maybe one small difference is that I’ll title my notes something like “Interview - Nathan Barry x Thomas Frank - Literature Notes”. Also I tend to use AI a heck of a lot more for full transcription of things, as well as actionable summaries when I’m time poor. But I’ll be sure to talk about that in future videos. ;) 📚 READWISE: Lets you automatically save notes to your Obsidian from your Kindle highlights 📚 www.readwise.io/dabi Very convenient and I literally use this all the time to save from both Kindle and Twitter. 🙏 THANKS: Thank you so much for watching this video! I didn't realise this many people would want to watch content about Obsidian, but I'm glad that you get to be here to nerd out with me. :) ~~ CORRECTIONS/ADDED NOTES ~~ READWISE ALTERNATIVES: @Susan Pearson - “If you don't want to pay for Readwise you can also use Matter or Glasp. I use them both for different things. (Glasp works with KZfaq transcript notes as well).” DATAVIEW AND GETTING AROUND IT (1:22:35): @PigPog - “Great stuff - I learned plenty of tricks and tipshere, thanks, Dabi. The Dataview bit failed because of the smart quotes - looks like a plugin changed the quotes, and Dataview wants 'normal' straight quotes, not the fancy stuff. @MichaelMigdolSJ "At 1:22, you are talking about problems pasting code into a dataview. I think the problem you were having was that the source text has stylized quotes, like “this” instead of "this" -- if you look carefully you can see it in the paste that had problems. Probably when you "fixed" it, you actually did a "paste as plain text"." @PedroGomez: "I think the reason your example at 1:22:35 wasn't working is because the quotation marks around "Queryable Database" need to have the formatting removed. CTRL + SHIFT + V will allow you to paste without formatting.” BACKUPS AND GIT: @PigPog: Oh, and sync is not the same as a backup. Your setup does give you both, by archiving everything in Git with versioning. But just using iCloud or Obsidian Sync alone won't necessarily let you restore previous versions (well, I think Obsidian Sync actually might, I haven't used it). Simplest way is just to regularly zip up the whole vault folder, rename it with the date, and dump it in a folder somewhere safe - preferably in the cloud or another machine.” LINKING: @joaoa.soares772: "A quite useful plugin is rich links, it's designed for saving bookmarks on Obsidian just like Notion format for bookmarks." CHECKBOXES: @virgulilla9469 1:11:36 "If you press ctrl + L you can make a checkbox faster" OTHER: @alu3000 "we all die alone"

Approximately a year and a half ago, I watched your tutorial and thought, "Yes, this is for me!" Now, I can confidently say that I'm a power user in Obsidian. I'm grateful that you took the time to create these tutorials, as I'm now referring my employees to watch your video. This decision has been life-changing for both my personal and professional note-taking. Thank you very much.

00:00:00 - Once $97, now a KZfaq video! 00:00:36 - Introduction: Pages and Links 00:23:31 - Hashtags 00:27:52 - Links vs Hashtags 00:38:47 - The Obsidian Zettelkasten 00:53:46 - Search 01:07:14 - Special Formatting 01:16:33 - Dataviews in Obsidian 01:27:45 - Version Control 01:37:03 - Templates 01:40:43 - Backing Up Obsidian Files 01:42:49 - PDFs in Obsidian 01:45:31 - Plugins in Obsidian 01:58:02 - Yay, finished! Already in the Video Description.!!!

I wish I'd had Obsidian and this course 40 years ago when I was in school... The amount of stuff I've forgotten that I wish I hadn't is overwhelming. Thank you.

Hats off to you for making such a useful course available for free. You have worked incredibly hard to make this and it pays off! All the best!

The hero we need, but don't deserve. Good stuff Dabidooo

I don't usually write comments, but this time I need to. Congratulations on making this video and make it open source. I see you on a good track. I have started using Obsidian for the last 3 days, and I see nothing more powerful and potential as this regarding the competence. Finally, I can organize my thoughts in a synaptic way.

TYSM! I am so appreciative of the time and energy that you’ve put in to this. I now feel confident in my switch from Notion to Obsidian. 🎉

Great job in giving us beginners the entire Obsidian on youtube. I have had this for sometime and am still grappling with many things that i don't understand. Thanks a lot.

Thank you for making this course freely available. You have a natural teaching style that makes learning fun and easy to follow.

Thank you so much for this video. As someone with ADHD, I have a million thoughts a day and no way of capturing of them. I plan on going back to school to get a masters and do neuroscience research. Tools like Zettlekasten, obsidian and notion are really life-changing for me. I can finally organize all those great thoughts in one place!Thank you very much!

Excellent video, Dabi! I’ve been using Obsidian for a while but never comprehended it’s full power up till now. Thank you for the time and effort put into getting this video out😊

damn, this really is a full tutorial, he walked us through every thing, out of leaning the app user interface, he showed how he actually uses obsidian in his actual practical life, thank you @dabi this is better than any 4hr udemy tutorial

Man, it's so sad to hear that you were going to become a doctor and that you left that profession in order to work on your youtube channel. Well, I believe that your time and effort dedicated to making videos will be worth it in the end. I don't believe anything special can be achieved without sacrifice and I see how large yours is. Thanks for putting out this free content. I wish you the best in making it to 10k subs.

I switched from Milanote to Obisdian after realizing it was precisely the type of system I needed for my history notes! I have a hard time remembering dates, places, events and how they all correspond to each other and what Obsidian does is forces me to find relationships between the isolated facts and link them together. It's inspired me to even deep dive into subjects to make proper backgrounds on eac subject. Keeping Mila for Storyboard and Game Dev/Comic Creation but Obsidian is my go-to study tool. So sad I didn't discover it before. This is my last History course and I needed it years prior. But I am definitely gonna use it for my novel ideas and song writing to help fix all my randon audio recordings and perhaps created a proper song! Even use it for character design ideas and environment design! The list is endless! Thanks so much for making this tutorial free becuase it was a breakthroug development and I needed someone to break it down beautifully and you did excatly that.

Thanks you Dabi for making this wonderful video. I sometimes struggle to release the whole power of obsidian and find it's hard to comprehensively understand obsidian's potential. After watching this tutorial, I think I am more confident to utilize obsidian into my life, and some tricks you shared in the tutorial is so cool! Thanks again!

I expected at least a million or so subs for content like this. Thanks for showing us the world of Obsidian, in 1 day I've managed to finally get my thoughts together in a single app

Thank you for sharing your invaluable knowledge to us on the internet. I can’t believe that you are just starting off (relatively new), but I really enjoy the structure and the high quality of your KZfaq videos. You’ve earned a devoted follower. Wish you all the best in your lucrative journey! I’m sure you’ll have lots of fun and insights on the way.

This is exactly what I needed! I've always struggled with consistently organizing and elaborating on topics I'm researching / studying. Because of my thinking pattern, this was 10x more difficult. It's obvious you put a lot of hard work into your content. Looking forward to seeing your channel grow, Dabi!

Really grateful for making this course free. This by far the most comprehensive tutorial on Obsidian available on YT

Dabi I love your laugh!!!! It's so warmhearting and bright. Thank you for the great content also. I've been using Obsidian for roughly a year now but it's nice to watch this type of content from time to time to see if there's any other hidden bits about obsidian i haven't uncovered yet, and you've succeeded in making that happen! :)

Wow blown away by this extensive in depth tutorial. It’s definitely not a beginner’s beginner guide, I’d say it’s aimed at an advanced beginner. Someone who has been toying and tinkering already, so after the initial basics are starting to become familiar. Beginners use the search term tutorial the most, so you might do some expectations management in the title. The YT algo brought your video and I was shocked at about an hour in when I noticed how few subs you had, just as I was subscribing. Such quality, very information dense, excellent explanations. Good luck on your path. Hope your wishes may come true.

You are really something, Dabi. Thank you so much man! You deserve a standing ovation. I'd like to see more courses from you-free and paid. Your gifted talent for teaching is remarkable. 🚀

Thank you Dabi for putting the effort into making this course and sharing it for free. I found it very useful and really enjoyed how you demonstrated the tool and it's capabilities. I really appreciate it and look forward to checking out more of your content.

I just installed Obsidian and is still trying to familiarize myself with how to use it. This was such a big help. Thank you so much and congratulations for creating a well-done and well-thought out guide. Rooting for you!

I have to write a comment this time. You're absolutely right, this is the only obsidian tutorial we'll all ever need. Learning with thanks.

Coming back to this once in a while as learning Obsidian, thank you!

I am so grateful for the guidance provided by this tutorial. It has transformed the way we approached planning and researching for our project. It has made everything much more organized, efficient and streamlined. This app is truly a game changer for journaling, researching and connecting all the different aspects of our project. We have primarily been utilizing Obsidian for our work-related tasks and even though I am yet to master the art of creating a "second brain" with Obsidian, it has proven to be an invaluable tool for our team. I cannot express enough gratitude towards the creators of Obsidian. It has been a lifesaver! Here a summarized quote for it: "Unlock the power of Obsidian and experience the revolution in the way you journal, plan, and research. Say goodbye to scattered thoughts and disorganized projects and hello to efficiency, clarity and success."

I really hope making this video free on YT has provided you the well deserved boost on your channel! I’ve been in Obsidian for 1.5 years, but this connected SO many dots for me, thank you for this amazing content! Two items: 1. The Extract Highlights plugin may help in how you create links in Literature notes 2. I think the reason your example at 1:22:35 wasn’t working is because the quotation marks around “Queryable Database” need to have the formatting removed. CTRL + SHIFT + V will allow you to paste without formatting. Thanks again for this wonderful video and best of luck to you with your channel…I’ll be following :)

This is the first video of you that I am seeing and hats off to your teaching style. It is very fluid and comprehensive. Keep it up mate! You have huge potential

Really good video. Great length. Great audio. I usually listen in the car but some videos are not loud enough. This video is different, it’s loud and clear. I can hear it at a decent level with my window down too. Thanks for this. Great work.

Omggg thank youu! I’ve been so confused on where to start or what there is to even learn about. This really saved my time 😭 appreciate it so much 🙏✨

god this is awesome thank you so much. your thoroughness and expertise is really incredible, i've always been writing memos down everywhere and obsessively journaling to try and document and sort my mind out but i could never quite organize, this is huge for me thank you

finally someone who knows obsidian and making sense

hey man thanks for making this it’s been super helpful

Very comprehensive!! Thank you so much for making this😊

Thank you for the video boss. I just got out of hospital and want to do research again like i did in the old days, and with your video I feel like im set up for success. Thank you!

THANK YOU SO MUCH DABI! You have empowered me with the tools to get my thinking, life, and goals more organized. I have only learned about data view today and I am mad that I didn't discover it sooner. There are so many powerful community plugins that I've been too daunted to try, but your video gives me the confidence and inspiration to try the many that I've heard about. Thank you for showing me how I can transform my life with Obsidian's potential. You are saving lives in a different way as a KZfaqr haha.

I stumbled upon Obsidian for the first time yesterday. And I'm glad that KZfaq recommended your vid to me. Thank you!

Thank you for providing such a useful course for free ! keep up the good work!

I'm really glad that I sat down and watched this (while taking notes on Obsidian of course). This is some great video and I'm really happy I came across it. Thanks Dabi

Thank you for posting this long detailed tutorial. Ill come back to this often. Very helpful 🤯

Excellent tutorial, Dabi. Thank you very much for all the hard work you put into it.

Thanks for making your tutorial free on KZfaq, I'm new to note-taking apps and needing to use them to organize school notes and keep everything in one place. This was super helpful.

at every job I start I go back and watch this video once more just to make sure I got most of the basics down! legit changed my life and made it far easier to be tracked and get things done faster! tysm

Thank you so much Dabi! You've done great work! Thank you for this hard work!💫

Thank you so much for this, i've been so lost in organizing myself and I feel like I've gained a superpower!!

Thank you so much for sharing this video for free. That was the most helpful video on obsidian I've found on KZfaq. I also intuitively think your approach is likely to work best for me

on my quest to find a method that helps me organize myself better I stumbled across your video / channel Thank you for putting so much time into explaining the concepts of Obsidian and how to use it in a proper way. I applauded your way of explaining concepts and simplifying complex processes / boiling it down to key principles. Well done, and thank you!

I finally decided to try obsidian after watching this video. Thanks for the amazing video, your attention to detail is much appreciated!

So hype I found this channel. You’re awesome. Thank you!

Wow I will have to sit down sometime and go through this. Thanks so much for posting this. Truly appreciate!

Dude, this is such a thorough and quality run down, thank you!

Awesome work! Thank you for sharing your knowledge !

Incredible overview. Thanks. I just discovered Obsidian and wanted to know everything it can do -- I feel like this really answered that question.

Actually priceless, considering that I have recently started to self-study. 🔥

Thank you so much, Dabi, for this immensely useful and engaging tutorial! I watched every part of it and like your sense of humour. Onward! 😃

This was super helpful as a total Obsidian noob. Thanks so much for putting this out!

I'm from brazil and i really think you would feel good to know that your content is helping people all around the wolrd. Thanks! All that effort is going to worth it

This was super useful! Thank you for the detail-orientation and practical application. I really need to see a process in full in order to understand concepts. Most of the other tutorials I’ve seen so far stop once they’ve given us the key information, so seeing how you’ve utilised Obsidian's features for your personal notes was a great teaching method :))

This KZfaqr deserves a million subs. Hats off mate! Such an informative course! Please continue on doing this 🙌

Hey Dabi I have went through your entire course and I can say it was worth every minute. Thanks for giving me a second brain

I am not much of a techie but I wanted to give Obsidian a try, again it was really intimidating at first because it has so many options and so many features but this video really really helped me setting it up. Thank You so much for helping out and i really hope you hit a million subscribers. You are amazing.

Thank you so much for this video!!

Congrats on hitting 1 mil views Dabi!! Thank you for being so generous with this tutorial 🥹🙏

This is brilliant and exactly what I was looking for! A brilliantly constructed course and so useful. Thanks

Every couple of years I get introduced to a new technique that is going to change everything. First there was pamodoro and then Anki, now obsidian. They can only help you as much as you can help yourself by doing stuff.

Amazing-amazing principles! Thank you for your time and efforts in collecting it all together! Really helpful!

Thank you I love you This is by far the single best KZfaq video I have layed my eyes upon.

thank you, I have been trying to create an effective system in notion for quite a while and now I discoverd obsidian and you helped me discover so much!! thanks bro

Your Channel is criminally underrated, thank you for putting this valuable course out here for free. 🙌🏻

Big thank you, David. Well done and appreciate all your effort.

Thank you for creating this free tutorial, learned some new and useful stuff on how to optimise my note taking in Obsidian. And all the best with your channel!

Thank you soo much for making this course available for free.

This video isawesome man. keep the good work i am sure you will accomplish your goals. this video is so far the best to get someone started on obsidian

Thank you, great video 🤩 So much value!!

Solid video. I've been using obsidian for a short while but am having difficulties solidifying my note patterns. This video helps a lot. Looking forward to the rest of the content! Subbed!

Watched the whole video and took notes. Ended up deleting my git desktop/repository because my windows command line wasn't recognizing the git command, this in turn deleted my vault. But hey, that's whatever. Great video, glad I have this info saved in my brain at least haha.

Thanks so much for showing me this! i've been using trello for a long time but needed something like this!

Wow! An amazing material quality for such a small channel! I hope you will grow big. Please continue making more videos!

Very helpful! Thanks!

Excellent video. Gave a good idea about the features of Obsidian. Mainly search

Hey, I just finished the Harvard CS50 course for AI with python taking extensive notes with obsidian. Before I started watching that I watched this video to get me up to speed with using obsidian. This video was really helpful, I appreciate the hard work you put into this.

Thank you so much Dabi !

Awesome video Dabi, thank you so much, looking forward to using Obsidian to organize my life and my research more effectively 👌

Excelent video! Very useful for beginners in Obsidian. The first half explains the basics very clearly, the second half offers a "city tour" of the main useful resources and plugins. Nice idea to join many videos in one course! Thank you for the great job!

Thank you! Very helpful to discover your way to use Obsidian.

That you for creating this. A real deep dive into using this wonderful program.

Just finished watching and I’m sure I’ll need to go back and review some sections! Thank you SO much for putting out this great helpful content. 🙏🙏🙏🙏

You win a subscriber and a future follower for every content you spit out! I will be constantly checking your videos :)

Totally worth it ! thank you dabi.

Obsidian is a very powerful app. I used your video to make transcript and then put it in "Chat with Any PDF". Now your video is a good text book for Chat GPT to teach me how to use Obsidian. Thnnks.

Thank you. I found this incredibly helpful. I have saved it to my favorites.

Amazing value on this content and such a good explanation!! Loved the video!

Excellent tutorial.. This overview was definitely a deep dive for me, but one I'll definitely link in my notes to comeback to ;). Android user here and since I'm already using syncthing for my phone back up to my unraid NAS, I just added folders for Obsidian. So now I have a 3 way sync going on between my galaxy, home pc, and office pc.

Life saving! Thanks man!

Thank you so much for making this video!

bro you are amazing! Thank you so much for all the effort you have put into this and making it free for us to learn!

Really great helpful video. Thank you!

This was so impressive. I am massively thrilled about your effort, your skill and particular your communication skills. KZfaq has never really been my thing, to be honest. But notetaking is :) So I am very excited about the fact that your video has shown me A) How youtube can be used for proper teaching and learning and B) How to be more skilled in Obsidian (which currently is af huge interest of mine) Lot of high fives from Denmark :)