delightful that's not the word most people think of when they think of a note application but recently that's what Andre karpathy had to say about obsidian now Andre was the previous director of AI at Tesla and also part of the founding team at open AI so when he talks people tend to listen and here's what he had to say about obsidian Love Letter to obsidian to which I very happily switch to for my personal notes and he goes on to make many important points before summing it up with tldr this is what software could be
private secur delightful free of dark patterns fully aligned with the user where you retain full control and ownership over your data in simple Universal formats where tools can be extended and composed so why is yet another public figure going out of their way to profess their love to a piece of software especially one where you just write notes what is so special about obsidian I'd like to boil it down to four reasons that you might not expect this is my love letter number one a custom home for your notes we want the things that matter
to us to be brighter with more contrast we want it to feel personal we want this space to feel like us like it's our digital home obsidian does that by taking the basic text file that you own on your computer and it allows you to do anything with it jot down a list save an idea learn a language write an essay or connect that essay to part of a bigger effort of yours to write a book something that I'm doing right now and it does all of that without compromising your privacy or holding your notes
hostage which we'll get to next now when I first discovered obsidian in the first month of its beta in March of 2020 I immediately knew something was different I knew that this could be my lifelong digital home that I could make it my own and that's because it was unlike these other apps that forced me to fit their idea of how I should think it's like how would they know what's the chance that their oniz fits-all approach is the exact solution to my needs the more time that I spend in this space that we'll call
management the more I realize the only solution that works is the one that we customize to work for ourselves an obsidian gives us the environment to create our own custom digital home number two no one else owns your stuff we want to own our stuff our private personal thoughts can you imagine writing in a note app for years getting comfortable with it trusting it then one day the owners of the app tell you they're changing a few things and if you want to see your notes you'll have to pay them for Access and if you
even think think about leaving them there's going to be hell to pay well I don't have to imagine it because I've used Evernote it was around 2015 that my notes felt more like the DMV cold crowded and just generally unpleasant so I left Evernote and I paid for it with thousands of notes with really broken formatting and it took years to get my notes back to being usable again but now now I own them and no one else does they are simple plain text markdown files they are stored locally on my computer they are not
trapped in any untrustworthy software and let's go further with this companies like obsidian are massively accelerating the simple files Movement by building tools like obsidian to work on top of them the CEO of obsidian capano he calls this philosophy file over app and this is basically the manifesto statement from him right here if you want to create digital artifacts that last they must be files you can control in formats that are easy to retrieve and read use tools that give you this Freedom give people ownership over their data obsidian it has no lockin they don't
own your notes they just give you ways to look at them number three it improves your thinking and creative work obsidian allows you to link notes not just stuff them into folders and it turns out that linking your thinking is a revolutionary way of using digital notes not as a filing cabinet but as a bicycle for the mind every time you link a note to another note you don't just make a connection in your notes you make it in your mind literally it gives us a fun and easy way to play with the ideas that
resonate with us to link our own thoughts together and especially to coax out our own insights and it gives us this reliable way then to develop our best work over time and in the process of linking digital notes together one by one over time you will build something Priceless a highly personalized Universe of ideas that grows in value over time it's your personal idea verse and unlike the rest of the internet this this is a private space where your mind can fully take charge and let loose it's kind of like Mindcraft for the mind it's
the perfect environment to bring your ideas to life I mean for me in the past year alone I've written over half a million words I've LED and presented over 100 live sessions and I'm in the process of writing a book but it's the internal effects that I'm even more excited about I'm thinking better I have way more calm and I'm feeling more creative than ever in a sustainable way I'm truly making the most of my mind and I just can't tell you how wonderful of a feeling that that is to have on a day in
day out basis and the last reason in my love letter to obsidian is number four your notes will last a lifetime your notes are truly an extension of your mind and if you lose them you lose a lot more than just a few megabits of text you lose access to a part of yourself I know this firsthand it was painful when I left Evernote in 2015 but but I left because it was painful to stay especially knowing that my notes my private thoughts they were locked in this proprietary format but now my notes are simple
plain text files I know they are safe and secure and they are going to last me a lifetime this Universal file format means that the notes on my computer they can be viewed by tons of other apps not just obsidian what that means is my notes are as future proof as is possible that's something you just won't get from most of the other apps out there and obs obsidian goes even further inse security when I sync my notes across all my devices the data is end to endend encrypted that's huge that means the random person
working at ever node or notion they can't peek into my notes or more likely given enough time that means that if their servers are ever hacked my data will not be exposed we don't put an emphasis on that we think it'll never happen but Black Swan events like that will happen it's just a matter of when and we won't expect it but we can plan for it obs obsidian is the first app I feel comfortable to grow with and because I feel safe I think I'll be here a while perhaps a lifetime now my love
for obsidian it goes beyond the four reasons that I've talked about today there's the warm Community there's the modular plug-in system which allows a lot of this magic to happen and the wise developers now if you want to start with obsidian I encourage you to check out my obsidian 4 beginners series it's been viewed I think about over 2 million times and until I update it it's the best starting point to learn not just the what is obsidian but also the how and why of making digital notes or if you're already using obsidian make sure
to check out my idea verse for obsidian series you can download my idee starter kit and get a done for you system of notes and this can give you some structure as you make the most of your mind and until next time everyone stay connected
