Sönke Ahrens From Highlight to Insight—Making Your Experience Count

Sönke Ahrens: From Highlight to Insight—Making Your Experience Count

Nigel Rawlins: Sönke, welcome to the Wisepreneurs Podcast. Can you tell us where you are and something about yourself?

Sönke Ahrens: Thank you for having me. I'm currently in Hamburg, my hometown, at my office. Um, I used to be an academic, spent most of my time in university, and since a couple of years I am now freelancer and I am focusing on my own writing uh, without the constraints of, um, the institution. And I am am the author of How to Take Smart Notes and Experiment and Exploration and just finished a course on How to Take Smart Notes with Obsidian, um, which we might talk a bit about. And yeah, I think that that's just the gist.

Nigel Rawlins: I was in Hamburg in 1980, so that's a long time ago.

Sönke Ahrens: I think it has changed a little bit.

Nigel Rawlins: it was very interesting those days. Do the Germans still like to drink lots of beer?

Sönke Ahrens: Uh, they do, yes. But, um, the Brits even more when they come to visit Hamburg.

Nigel Rawlins: Ah, okay. Because I traveled for a year with my wife at the time and we, we met a lot of people and they'd often invite us back, so we stayed with people in Munich and Hamburg, but Hamburg, we went out to the beer halls. So it was very friendly. It was lovely. I really enjoyed Germany. I thought it was a very organized country. We are a bit messy in Australia, I think.

Sönke Ahrens: That part has changed for sure. But Hamburg is still a lovely city and green at the water we have the harbor to look at.

Nigel Rawlins: Now you have an office that you share. I thought you were still an academic, so in terms of that, you don't work from home, you go to an office.

Sönke Ahrens: Most of the time I work from office. Um, I do have my home office as well. I need a special place to work at. When I travel, I often miss my books, um, which is always an issue, uh, I like working remotely. I like working from cafes even, but there's still something about the physicality of your environment, that yeah, makes it necessary to have at least a base. I, um, lived for a couple of years in Asia and go back in Autumn, hopefully reconnect with some people. That's certainly a place, um, close to my heart and, um, probably the only place which feels like home as well.

Nigel Rawlins: Which country is that?

Sönke Ahrens: Um, well I was based in Bangkok, Thailand and traveled from there a lot. So now in Autum, will go back to Bangkok and then visit colleagues in China, um, who are currently translating the course.

And my publisher in, uh, Bangkok, which is fantastic publisher, young student organization actually, very involved in the democratic movement there. So I'm really honored that they, um, published my book there and help to be somewhat supportive, uh, going there, doing a talk, something like that. Um, looking forward to that.

Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: Mm, they're interesting countries. Okay. I tend to focus on older, independent professionals, mostly women, often 60 plus. So the issue for them is they've probably got a lot of knowledge. What I think we, we know is crystallized intelligence. So they've got a lifetime of career capital and they've got a lot of wisdom.

One of the problems they have, for example, if they decide to stop working and they decide they want to continue working for themselves, they've been in an organization and now they're gonna work for themselves. One of their issues is they need to do some marketing. In other words, they need to put out some information about themselves.

So one of the problems they have is reclaiming and activating that knowledge that they have, the skills they've got in order to share their insights. And as we know, having read your book, we talk about it as intellectual assets. They have to become thought leaders and they have to be able to define their niche.

And you talk about the Zettelcasten as a way to do that. Can you talk about how maybe a person later in their life who probably hasn't done a lot of note taking can use the  Zettelcasten system to maybe help spread their insights or, uh, mine the knowledge that they've got.

Sönke Ahrens: Yeah, I think that Zettelkasten, and maybe we go, um, a little bit more into how it works and what it is, but basically it is your personal space to collect, combine, develop your own knowledge, and that puts the focus on knowledge that really went through your understanding, and is enriched by your experience and that enlarges this personal knowledge space, you then can think and and develop something else from. If you don't have something like that, you are confronted with the whole bunch of information out there and have to rely on your mind and what it is capable to process only. Of course, we all have some kind of external spaces like journals, notebooks, we have the trail of emails and conversations, but the Zettelkasten is really about structuring this personal thinking space in a way that first of all, you always know where to put a new good idea into and that it expands on what you already have. Um, that doesn't always mean to add a piece more to it. It often also means to confront one piece of information with another piece of information.

You know it's somehow related, but then actively putting these two things together makes you aware of differences and you are prompted by the system to figure out are these contradictions, um, are these maybe two different things that look the same? And it prompts you to basically engage in proper thinking in writing.

And I think we cannot underestimate how much easier it is to work on something intellectually when you have it in front of you instead of trying to do it all in your head. So it's like an expansion of your personal space in which you only have things you already thought through, somehow. And when it comes to those with a lot of life experience, I think they are very well aware that information in itself isn't worth much.

You have to enrich it with experience. Um, we all know these quotes taken out of context you find on calendars or on top of blog posts and that they sound good, but often trivial. And the opposite can be also true. Only if you put some experience to it and know how to apply that they become meaningful.

And I think with young people often they struggle the most with their personal take on information. While when you have a little bit more experience probably a little bit bolder in, um, being selective and not taking on something new right away. But, thinking through it and figuring out what that really means, and the Zettelkasten is all about making that easier in a structured manner.

Nigel Rawlins: So it's basically a disciplined way of doing something with any notes that you've taken, 'cause there's a good chance if somebody's starting out from scratch in their sixties, they may have some notebooks or maybe they haven't read anything for a while, or maybe they've got some books and they've scratched some notes in it.

Because whatever they're going to do as an independent professional, um, they have to have a position or a niche that they may want to earn some money in, and to stand out they have to be able to write. And it's better to have some notes that they've been thinking about, which is what we're talking about here, but the Zettelcasten is a disciplined way of not just having a mass of notes notes, but to interrogate those thoughts and come up with a clear idea, isn't it?

Sönke Ahrens: Yes, and I wouldn't stress the disciplined part too much because I'm not a very disciplined person. In a way it helps me to have these outer structure, to not have to be so disciplined, um, because I know once I put something into my external brain, my Zettelkasten, the structure is there.

I, I don't need to discipline myself too much and I can leave a topic for a while, come back to it, pick up where I left it. But yes, it's about putting ideas into words, developing them, and breaking down the sometimes overwhelming task of writing longer pieces into smaller steps and developing ideas.

Not only for one project, but maybe over multiple projects, and hopefully combining them in a way that the mere act of bringing ideas together sparks new ideas.

Nigel Rawlins: Which is the insights that we, that would make people stand out because there's a lot of general writing out there, which is just ho hum. But if you're going to stand out as somebody who's going to make a difference, you need to have insights, to say, well, here's a way to think about it, that maybe you haven't been thinking about it.

And that's where I think the ideas come in. I was thinking about your whole thing about Zettelkasten and came from Niklas Luhmann, was it? That guy must have been some incredible, I don't know, genius, 'cause apparently he wrote hundreds of notes.

Sönke Ahrens: Well, 90,000 I think is the number of, um, index cards or paper slips, he had amassed, but yeah, he was the one I studied the most at university because I'm most interested in his theory of social systems. So he is a, a system thinker and wasn't really that aware of his Zettelkasten method.

It came later when I wondered how on earth someone can be that productive without repeating himself too often and producing genuinely interesting things in multiple disciplines at the same time. So in Germany at least, and some other countries, he never really picked up that much in the Anglosphere.

He was massively influential, not only in sociology, his home discipline, but also in pedagogy, in law, in political theory, basically written on all aspects of society because that was his thing, um, developing a theory of society. And obviously that's a hugely complex project and can easily go wrong.

But he managed to externalize the complexity of this project in his Zettelkasten. So naturally I became interested in the practicalities of his daily writing routine. And I wasn't especially intrigued when he said in an interview, about the discipline, he really never forces himself to do anything.

So whenever he stops feeling like doing something, he does something else. And the interviewer asks him, well, what, what do you do then? Well, I write another book. So he constantly had multiple manuscripts in the making and he made it sound easy, what I struggled with a lot, um, that that was intriguing to me.

Nigel Rawlins: But he wrote many books and many papers based on all of these notes that he had.

Sönke Ahrens: He did. And when you look at the manuscripts and look at, uh, the notes, compare them, you see that whole passages of the book are already in writing. Almost, not, not identical, but you see where it comes from. You see very well crafted passages in the notes, which stretch over multiple notes, obviously.

But that makes you realize he took seriously the in-between step. We often skip or often writing guides gloss over. The in-between step of writing is writing, but not writing on the final manuscript and doing X pages a day. But the in between step is the messy place where you write a lot.

But no, it's not going to be in the final manuscript. So I can still experiment with ideas. I can add new stuff in, even though I'm not sure if it really should go in the final manuscript. Um, so it relieves you a little bit of the pressure, and it makes you realize, well, the actual writing of the manuscript is not the big thing in writing.

Not, not when you put thought into it. What takes most of the time is everything that comes before, the reading, the thinking, the trying out stuff, um, shuffling things around and giving that a place. This in between step is where the Zettelcasten comes into play. So in the end, you have your notes, which are not perfect, but in the end, you only have to rewrite what you have already written when you go to your final manuscript, which is so much easier than staring at a blank page and dreading the moment you don't know what, what sentence should come next. Having the notes you can turn to and rephrase them, it's much easier.

Nigel Rawlins: A lot of these people who've been working maybe in a corporate environment, they do a lot of planning, but it's top down planning. But the Zettelkasten is about things that emerge, uh, through the connections but the Zettelkasten is a bottom up system of finding things to write about.

Could you explain what that means?

Sönke Ahrens: Yes, when you look at writing guides, they often have this imaginary, um, multi-step, uh, description. You have an idea what you want to write about, then you do some research on that. Then you extract what you found, you put it into order, and then you write the final manuscript. That sounds good, but it's rarely what actually happens because the moment you start reading something, you realize, oh, my initial idea wasn't that good actually.

Um, the problem is slightly different. Then you start writing and you realize, oh, um, I, I need to explain something more. And then you start writing something else. So it's a much more circular and messy process, uh, which is often driven by insight that comes in moments, you are not at your computer writing, but when you have a walk or a conversation, that inspires you.

So the Zettelkasten then is about lowering the threshold of capturing these ideas because you only have to take a note. And later when you have the time and the focus, you then take that idea and look what you already have. And see how it fits. In my experience, often I realize, oh, I already had this idea.

Um, but that's an insight too. And then you take what you have and by looking at it structure emerges over time. So that has the advantage of being a much more natural way of writing. But it also has the advantage that when you collect your ideas, um, let structure emerge and then write from what you have, you have the material already there. I. When you start with an idea, you have nothing. You go and search only to realize it might not fit, and suddenly you, um, you have this trade off between I want to get this done, even though I realize in the process another direction would actually be better. But that would mean I have to go back to reading, doing a little bit more research, and suddenly you, you kind of alienated from your, um, writing project because you can't really adjust it that much anymore because it gets in the way of getting it done.

A bottom up process i much more allows you to adjust it along the way. And in the end when you put things together you put it together from the material you gathered along the way, and you have a surplus of ideas which won't go into the project, the blog posts, the article you've written because that's the nature of, um, of writing and doing research that you always have a surplus.

But the good thing is then it's not tied to this project alone. You don't have to chuck it and start from scratch all over again. You can use what you have for your next piece of writing and of course, when you work for many years, like Luhmann did you have such a mass of notes? It's easy to, to write multiple, um, articles drawing from that pool.

Nigel Rawlins: We should say that he made connections. As part of his system he had connections between the, the notes, so they were linked in many ways. And today we can do that with, um, digital programs, which we will talk about. So I'm assuming that some of those notes are just an idea that you might have had when you were walking along and that's the thing we don't always do is capture those little ideas. They disappear. By the time you get home, you've forgotten it. And it could have been a good idea that goes into these little notes systems. But he did connect those notes, didn't he?

Sönke Ahrens: Yeah, and that maybe stresses as the bottom up approach as well because we tend to start with a structure. I, I have my different topics, I have my different, um, uh, ideas and then I collect underneath what I found. So that's a folder structure you have on your computer. His method is different in that the structure emerges.

So the links between the notes are slightly different to the hyperlinks on the internet, uh, or different to Wiki links, which link to somehow related ideas or ideas that fit categorically. Here it's much more about linking to an idea that directly expands on what you already have. So it's more about this building of note sequences that you can branch out when you feel okay, that goes into another direction.

So it's a rhizomatic structure, a little bit like, like a tree with your branches, you branch out from, and then you put leaves onto it and that brings you closer to the linearity of the output, which might also be a helpful image that you usually start with linear text. You read a book, which is linear, but your thinking is not linear.

You, um, reflect on stuff. You go back to it. It's, it's more an iteration process. You have this question you always come back to, always a little bit enriched through a new understanding. So the Zettelkasten is non-linear. With all the links in between it enables you to, um, take different ideas into consideration. But they have this note sequencing, um, where ideas are expanded upon. Which in the end becomes a linear text again, which is often a challenge to put nonlinear ideas in, in a linear way. But that's then the writing of the manuscript, um, process. Yeah, that's his linking system was in analog form.

Very, um, unique. First note just had the number one, the second, number two, the third, number three. But if you want to add between one and two, another one, because it expands on the first note, you would branch it out by giving it an one A, and then you have one B, one C with another branch and. You don't need that kind of unique ID-ing system anymore with the apps we have nowadays.

But nevertheless, the analog, the paper and writing by hand still has an attraction to me. And, is something that the digital still hasn't fully, replicated yet.

But still the advantages of the digital are so great that it's still worth doing it in digital form, I think.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, a very different world from when we were younger. One of the problems I found is from my reading I , took lots of notes in books, and never looked at them again, could never find what I wanted. Had multiple books. And I read heaps of stuff on my Kindle and because I use Readwise, any highlight feeds into Readwise and then feeds into my note taking app, which is Obsidian at the moment.

But I read all sorts of stuff, articles I read about marketing, I read about websites, I read about cognitive science, I read about consciousness. I read about philosophy. I do read about business as well, but, uh, I don't always like to read about business. What I've realized I've done is basically I've got a notetaking system full of archived notes.

They're not something I've really processed like the Zettelkasten , where he has one simple idea where you've actually put it into your own words. You make a distinction between that archivist mindset and a writing mindset. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

Sönke Ahrens: Yeah, I mean, it grew out of my own frustration facing similar challenges and realizing I, I, I read so much. I underline in books. I make comment in the margins. I collect a lot of articles and, um, have post-its on them. But I, I realize I, I mean, it's such a small percentage I really, encounter later again. I rarely went through my old books to look for something. And when you try to get writing done in whatever output form that might be, you have to rely on your brain to remember in which book, on which page you highlighted something. Even in digital form, when you go to Readwise, you have at least to remember, okay, where, where can I find that?

And you have to remember that you highlighted something somewhere, and my brain is not capable of doing even a fraction of that. So to me, it was like most of what I read and processed somehow by highlighting, underlining, commenting was lost. And turning it into notes that go into the Zettelkasten doesn't mean you are able to capture everything that seems interesting. It, it's impossible, but that those highlights or ideas you read and take from other people you feel could inform something you are working on or want to work on in the future. They go into my inbox in Obsedian.

I look at them. Ideally in a timely manner where I did not forget what the context was. And then I wonder, okay, um, to what I already have, is this relevant for and in what way? And only in this moment where I then do something with it. And doing something with the piece of information means looking for what I already have, where it might fit into, and how I could connect two pieces of information.

I feel like now I've done an actual step of bringing my own ideas forward. It's not just an idea of, oh, that's interesting, but it's actually doing something with it that brings my own thinking in writing forward and is there to be integrated in, in my work. So nowadays when I just highlight something, I physically feel okay, that's not enough.

I, I need to bring it into context, otherwise it's lost. Of course, reading is never a waste of time and it always does something with your understanding, but when you are a creator, when you are someone who wants to share what you have in your mind, whatever that is, you need to go this step of actually doing something with the information, otherwise reading is a very personal thing, which can be good. But when you're a creator, when you want to put something out in the world, you need to go one step further.

Nigel Rawlins: I think the main thing is to be discerning about what you've read or what you're reading. What's happened is, for me is my Kindle is just full of books that looked interesting, but I don't know if I'm going to get to them, and I think I have to be a bit smarter nowadays to say, well, I'm nearly 70 now.

How much you know, how much more am I gonna be able to read and actually use? I mean, it might be time for me to start adding some depth to those. Now I started five years ago with Roam Research, which was an online new high tech note taking system at that time. I was an early adopter, so I paid for five years.

That finished this year and I didn't want to continue 'cause it was too technical and, and I couldn't recommend it to anyone because of how technical it was. I did use Obsidian and then I found it difficult to understand, so I tried Logseq but that didn't have enough power. So I moved back to Obsidian and then I'm still learning Obsidian.

And then, I've tried a couple others, one called Reflect, which is an AI one and one called Craft, which I'm just playing with, but I think Obsidian is going to be the one. So what we're talking about with our note taking system is to get stuff out of our heads. It's like a, a cognitive extension of our brains.

So the issue is digital systems, these can be intimidating. And I mean, I've been using, uh, technology and digital tools for something like 20 years now, but for somebody new it's gonna be quite a challenge. Do you wanna talk a little bit about how they can focus on the principles using a note taking app like Obsidian, and then we should say, where does AI fit into it?

Sönke Ahrens: Okay. Well, I, I had a similar journey. I also used Roam for a while. I'm not sure if it's too techy, but I, I felt it kept me in a distance from my own notes and my own thinking and thinking about the technology interfered with what I actually wanted to think about. And that is the content.

And I looked at Obsidian, found it a little bit too difficult to wrap my head around first too, but then immersed myself for week-end and then it suddenly clicked. And I think the difficulty with Obsidian is that it's so open to all kinds of structures. It's basically a canvas. You need to figure out how to give yourself a scaffold.

You can add your notes to first before you can get into the flow of writing. But after I figured out how to have a basic structure in Obisidan, the, the technology disappears into the background. And with Obsidian, I feel way more than with Roam or other tech I tried out, immersed in my own thoughts. I feel it's much more natural for writing.

I can see multiple notes that belong together. I have different ways of accessing my pool of ideas. I have a simple query that shows me all the unprocessed, Readwise highlights I have. But I set it up in a way that it only shows me the ones from the last 30 days. Everything else just disappears from my view.

So it never feels overwhelming to me. It's a bit cheating, but I don't remember wh ere I read it, but the idea of you should treat the reading and information less than a bucket you need to empty, but more like a river you can pick stuff from. I find that quite liberating actually.

So Obsidian needs an initial step of setting up a structure, but once you figure that out as a technology, to me at least it fades into the background and allows you to be immersed in your own ideas. And that led for me to not being interested in trying out other note taking systems anymore.

I, I really don't feel the urge to look for the new shiny thing. Well, that was the reason I, I did the course because many people ask, well, how do you put the structure of the Zettelkasten in Obsedian? And giving others a shortcut to not have to go through the long phase of figuring it out, experimenting with stuff only to notice after a few thousand notes it doesn't work with a complex Zettelkasten anymore. I wanted to provide someone a, a short path into using Obsidian as a Zettelkasten and I think you can do it in a weekend. And then you find your way around it. Yeah, and it allows you to do things like having Readwise feed into it, but keep it separate internally so you are not filling up your Obsedian vault with external stuff.

But, just giving you the option to pick from preselected pieces of information. Still have the context only a click away, which I think it's, it's so great that you, you can use Readwise to go back to the original source and look at the paragraph before, the paragraph behind, 'cause often when you highlight stuff itself, it's not, not that meaningful. It's only meaningful within the context. And then you can recontextualize it into your own thoughts and think, okay, what, what does this idea mean to what I already have? So that is my experience with Obsidian and I feel most people geared towards Obsedian at the moment.

So I hear a lot of stories from people here, try different apps out and there are practical reasons, but I mean, practical reasons, like it's locally stored. You have full control over your data. It's not online and you have to worry about where it might end up. It's basically free. You can always find ways to support the developers, but, you are not locked into a system. So there are multiple practical reasons, but I think why most people seem to migrate to Obsidian or back to Obsidian is because it feels intuitively un-techy in a way, techy in the beginning, but it fades into the background. I think it's this intuitive thing in the end that is crucial for the decision with what you work with.

Nigel Rawlins: We, we should say that when we put the notes into obsidian, we can actually highlight and tag some of those words so they're connected to other articles using that word. So you can pull out a range of notes that have the same keyword or the same tag.

Sönke Ahrens: Yes, I do not use tags for, uh, organizing my content though. I use tags that have a function that indicate a certain type of note, but I try to use links only for organizing the content . So if I have a special keyword, like writing tools, for example, I would put that into the square brackets that turn them into a link to a note called writing tools.

And then on that note, it listed everything else I linked to that note from, and also it shows you all the unlinked notes which have that particular keyword on them. I call that index notes. But I think the main linking feature are links that are very descriptive that highlight the connection between two notes.

So I always try to embed links in full sentences so I immediately see how two things are connected, not just by association, but in terms of reasoning.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, I think that's the way to go. Again, that's the difference between me being an archivist and you being a writer, that you are figuring out a way that you can get that note back out at some stage, uh, on a project. Well, this is a long game, taking these notes, it's not something that's going to, well, it might have some fruition in the first couple of weeks if you put a lot of notes in and you know what you're doing.

But it is a long game, so there's a different mindset for this. It's, uh, something that will compound over time. It's a continuous conversation with our notes. How can people come to value doing that, because it's obviously, whether I call it a discipline or a habit, to continuously work with those notes and feed the notes.

Sönke Ahrens: I think not having the focus on having the goal of having a huge amount of notes, um, and then you can start turning it into writing. I think it's a better way to look at it is you change your habit, you, you change the ways in which you take notes, which can be immediately beneficial. In two ways. First of all, you have to write anyway, so it's just a different form of writing, and you can start with only writing what you would write anyway for a particular project, and then it generates a surplus along the way. But you, you don't have to treat it as filling up a space first and then extracting from it, you can right away think, well, I only write for the project I have in mind, and I start to do it in a different way. That's one way of looking at it. And the other way is on focusing more on thinking and understanding. So you maybe have literature you find challenging or you immerse yourself in a new topic, where you still need to find your way around. Then you can use writing as a form of deliberate practice of understanding and focus on what writing notes can do for, for your, for your brain. So, it makes a difference if you read something or if you read something and try to put into words, into your own words what you understand this text was all about.

It's this very similar to the experience of explaining someone else what you just read. I think we all know the difference between we read something and think, yeah, okay, totally makes sense. And someone asks, what's it about you, you're reading there and then you suddenly struggle because there is a difference between understanding and actually understand it and explaining something to someone else, um, is like a feedback loop that puts the finger on everything you haven't really figured out yet. And writing is like a, like a small, personal, uh, equivalent to that. Just trying to put into your own words. Um, your understanding of something you read, confronts you with missing pieces where you just thought you understand, but really don't.

And that often leads to going back to the original source and reading a little bit more closely realizing, ah, I think I, I saw something in there, what wasn't actually there. So it's like a deliberate practice of understanding and you can just use it as, as a tool like an external tutor, so to speak, your personal, uh, tutor.

I, I mean that's, that's the importance of writing that so many thinkers often stress. You, you cannot properly think without writing, uh, Luhmann said, uh, and I think there is some truth to it.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, if starting can be a barrier, so what would you recommend as a first step or habit to start, somebody who's starting from zero?

Sönke Ahrens: Well, if you have decided you want to do something like that, I think a good first step is to realize what you already have achieved and what you already have on your mind and don't need to figure out anymore. Start with some kind of brain dump. Write down everything you are interested in developing in the future of writing, in the future, of thinking about in the future. Don't make the mistake of trying to replicate what's in your head. Just write what you're currently interested in, in deepening, and then you have your, your, your notes on, on, on what you had on your mind. You can sort it into a few main areas of interest and you can use that as the initial scaffold to then hang new ideas onto.

And sometimes it's good to have some initial notes that are a little bit more extensive, um, like open questions you want to explore further or maybe, deeply held beliefs about something you want to challenge, something that works well as a good starting point, um, to develop something from it. And you don't need to write anything down, which is self-explanatory for yourself, which you already fully understand. So you can liberate yourself from reorganizing everything you have. You can just start a new habit of writing with new encounters of ideas from your own brain or from the brain of others, um, through the means of books and articles, et cetera.

Um, I think that lowers the threshold considerably.

Nigel Rawlins: think that's a great way to start. I never thought of that and I think that's excellent. Well, we, um, one of my earlier guests was Eliška Šestáková , who spoke about note taking as well. And you together produced a course?

Sönke Ahrens: Eliška was very helpful in in the development of the course and she wanted to take over when I finished the recordings, she now has a little kid and is building a house and has her own projects. So we are still collaborating, but not as closely as in the beginning. She is the Zettelkasten expert in the Czech Republic and she's really good at explaining stuff. So, in, in a way, I, I would love to have live sessions with her, um, making introductions, because in, in many ways she's better than myself in, um, explaining things to, to people. But yes, she's using Roam, um, much more than I do, and she is much more an expert in Roam.

So if you still use Roam, um, or plan to do that, I think she's the person to turn to. And maybe one day we do a course on Roam as well. But she's working with Obsidian more now because of the course. And we discussed, um, the pros and cons. Maybe she'll come around as well.

Nigel Rawlins: So tell me about the course.

Sönke Ahrens: Yeah, it's, as I mentioned before, um, the attempt to give people a shortcut to a fully functioning Zettelkasten system in digital form with Obsidian. It is for people who might or might not have used Obsedian before. In some ways it might be easier for people who haven't used Obsidian because then you don't have your own system, which might collide with what I suggest.

So it, it walks you through the basics of, Obsidian, how to install it, how to set the basic structure up and how to edit notes and how it works. But then it goes into the details of how to apply the principles of the original Zettelkasten in digital form. So how to take the best of both worlds, the analog and the digital without the complicated Luhmann numbering system.

And in a way that is pragmatic enough, uh, to get you into a flow of writing and thinking so that you quickly get to the point where you don't have to think about the technology that much anymore. There is a little part on how to integrate Readwise. That would be actually the only paid system, uh, because everything else can be used for free.

And it's only because Readwise is, um, so beloved in the note taking community. And I think it has so many advantages it's actually worth using. It has a part on how to implement an external reference manager. We use the example of Zotero. This is probably more interesting for people who work a little bit more academically, who need to properly site sources. But I feel, that might be my, my academic bias. Even non-academics can benefit from having one dedicated reference system where you have all your sources in a standardized way. So you can always give account of where an idea came from. So it it, it prevents you from mistaking other people's ideas with your own, which so easily happen.

So when, when I read something intensely, um, I sometimes believe some of the ideas were my own and only to realize when I look in my Zettelkasten oh shit, that that was someone else. So it prevents you from accidental plagiarism as well. And so it describes how to integrate that into into your system.

But then, the main focus is of course on building note sequences, um, that gets you closer to output and hopefully makes you realize when you make the step to your manuscript and deciding you want to write now the blog post, the article, the book you had on your mind, that most of the work is already done. So that that's the hope that your blank page was never really blank, but is already prefilled with your own writing that only needs to be rewritten and edited, and then probably multiple times, because that's the process of writing.

Nigel Rawlins: think that's it, because the problem is, I think we've gotta be aware, especially if we're older, that there are so much things on our mind that we wanna make things simple. And it's not always gonna be simple, but we need something we could just plug in and use rather than have to go through the learning curve.

Now obviously with your course, there's a little bit of a learning curve, getting set up, getting systems in place, but you are putting in the packages. So if you are reading on a Kindle and you're using Readwise, that it'll feed into Obsidian and then you've got your note taking system in there.

That's all people need. Now a problem with being an independent professional is you're constantly having to learn stuff, how to use a tool and, and I think that's one of the things you write about in your book. You know, it's all very well having a tool, but you've gotta be able to use it. And this is part and parcel, all of this.

So if you are going to stand out in your field, you do have to write, but you, you need to have ideas that are original or sourced and, and obviously Zotero, I did try using it on Roam but it seemed to break. So if you've got Zotero working on Obsidian, I think that's really good. 'cause if we are writing articles, I think it's really good if we put some of the sources.

And I'll always do that when I'm writing an article, where I got it from. And, I try and read all the books from all the people I speak to, it's driving me mad at the moment 'cause they've got another one on Friday, coming up in a couple of days and there's no way I'm gonna be able to read that one.

And it's a very interesting topic. The next topic is menopause, believe it or not. Sönke , this has been a great conversation. I'm hoping people understand how important it is. If you are an independent professional, working for yourself, you do need to stand out. You, you can't just, well un unless you're so famous that you don't have to chase work, um, you still have to stand out and, and this is to counter ageism as well when we're older that you can write good materials. So Sönke , where can they find the course and where can they find out more about you online?

Sönke Ahrens: I'm on Twitter, but rarely tweet. I'm on LinkedIn but rarely post something, but these are probably the ways to find me.

Nigel Rawlins: That's great. I'll put the links to the course in the show notes. And I would recommend doing the course 'cause I think Obsidian is nice and easy. It's free, especially as you're older and, and unfortunately when you start running a business, you've got all these subscriptions and often they're in American dollars that are expensive. So something that's free and very useful is fantastic.

Well, Sönke , thank you very much for being my guest.

Sönke Ahrens: Well, thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.