Recommended Obsidian Tutorial or Course

Software
12

FWIW, I took the “Zero to Obsidian” course from The Sweet Setup (which is the precursor to their new course) and found it incredibly valuable.

(And I say that as someone who has had mixed results with TSS stuff in the past.)

I’m really looking forward to their full course. And while $150 isn’t cheap, I think it’s well worth it. They also offer a money-back guarantee, and I’ve used it once or twice when I’ve bought something that just did not “click” with me, and can say that they honored their guarantee with no hassle at all.

2 Likes
14

They can save you a huge amount of time watching youtube videos. It’s fun playing around and learning, but not everyone wants that.

15

I’m wondering if that’s a little tincy bit cynical?

I’m sure they see it as helping people.

It takes a huge amount of effort (and risk) to put together a course.

1 Like
17

Do you think, perhaps, that they’re not trying to help you or people like you?

19

Oh, I think we disagree lots.

They help people with a lot of free stuff.
And they charge for some stuff.

I’m very happy if they make a living helping people who are happy to pay for it.
I also enjoy reading their blog.

21

I think they do a brilliant job of helping people, sometimes for free, sometimes paid. It’s how they make the living and, for a lot of people, the free stuff is brilliant and for others the paid stuff is brilliant too.

I make my living in a similar manner. It takes a huge amount of work to provide useful free stuff and even more to effort to creat useful, paid stuff.

If you do poor free stuff or poor paid stuff, you starve.

22

What a bizarre discussion. You can genuinely want to help people and still want make a living doing something you care about. These things are not incompatible. I think Steve Jobs genuinely wanted to make formidable tools to usher people into a new era of technology, and that remains something Apple is attached to today. Doesn’t prevent them from making money.

More generally, artists create the work they care about (hopefully) and still hope to not starve in the process and therefore market themselves and sell their work.

(And I’m saying this not caring much for the turn TSS has taken in recent years)

3 Likes
24

The artist part was about the principle itself in a general manner, not about TSS (no offense to them but it would be indeed a stretch to call them artists)

26

Completely disagree. I don’t find that to be an issue at all. In fact, it seems like the most reasonable and reliable way go.

A review site is perhaps the best place to find people who, having used a wide variety of software, settle on what they find to be the best software.

Having used it, and having learned what each is capable of, they find something great and start to use it.

They grow proficient at it.

They become experts at using it.

They share that expertise.

They get paid for it.

Now, if someone goes to people at The Sweet Setup and says “I want you to make a course about our software” that needs to be disclosed and made clear to people. Does that mean they shouldn’t get paid for it? Not at all. They might get paid by the developers who requested it, or they might not. Either way, I want to learn from people who know what they’re talking about, and I want to get advice from people who know what all of the available options are.

Because I don’t have the time or energy to test it all out myself.

3 Likes
27

I don’t think TSS is doing anything wrong by selling courses. To me they seem like more of an advocate for doing things the best way than a traditional review site; to that end their writing and courses are congruent. So long as that whole category of publication is considered acceptable, they’re okay.

1 Like
29

No. Not at all.

An executive at a company making arrangements for the company to buy products from another company in which the executive has a secret ownership stake is a conflict of interest. An independent software reviewer selling how-to videos regarding software they also review has nothing at all to do with a conflict of interest. The reviewer is not hiding their interest in selling their videos. The reader is not flimflammed into doing something against their will.

The situation might be distasteful for some – for reasons I don’t fathom – but there is nothing wrong with it.

2 Likes
30

Anyone tried the SantiYounger course?

Or the Obsidian Flight School?

Both look quite good

2 Likes
31

Off topic slightly but isn’t the Obsidian Flight School running at risk of incurring the wrath of Lucasarts (well, I guess Disney now!) for copyright infringement? NAL but that looks pretty borderline to me!

32

When I started working in Obsidian early in its development, I had a lot of trouble with the learning curve. I knew how to navigate and create but I knew I was only using a fraction of its potential. Every time I’d try to learn more, the resources were fragmented across the Obsidian subreddit, Discord, Discourse forum, and tons of individual YouTube videos. Nick Milo’s free YouTube content resonated with me the most but I wanted to dive deeper.

I’ve tried every paid Obsidian course so far. I found Santi Younger’s Obsidian course to be a bit underwhelming to the point that I was surprised Bryan Jenks recommended it. I think Santi is incredibly knowledgable but the course it self felt a bit half-baked in structure and content so far. I believe when I bought it it was listed as a work in progress and sold discounted because of that. I took his Logseq course as well as I was curious about integrating it with my Obsidian workflow but that one was even less complete than his Obsidian one (granted, I completed both of these three months ago and haven’t checked progress).

Take that with a grain of salt though, some of my issues might just be my learning style-related…different course structures and instructors can make such a difference! So far, the ones that have worked best for me were To Obsidian and Beyond and Obsidian Flight School.

  • With To Obsidian and Beyond, Mike has a very clear structure in his teaching, broke basic things down very well, and for more complicated aspects such as Dataview - took us through specific workflows he’d already created which helped me understand the overall plugin, the mechanisms that underpin it all, and the potential to build something bigger using JS. I still use some of the structures that his course taught me to build daily in my primary Obsidian vault.

  • With Obsidian Flight School, Nick built the entire course within a vault so you’re constantly working through Obsidian as you’re navigating, customizing, and creating. I was already familiar with Nick’s teaching methods from his YouTube channel and Linking Your Thinking but this is something a lot more hands on. I responded really well to the drills he structured the course with and the overall design is really unique. It’s built like a combination of a choose-your-own-adventure game and X-Wing which isn’t for everyone, but I appreciated the feeling of “leveling up” as I continued in the course and it was a fun space to explore as I continued to learn. Having taken a lot of self-guided courses over the years, I can say that I’ve never worked harder during one than I did in this course but I learned a lot more because of it as well. It’s a much more active learning process.

I believe both offer money back guarantees so hopefully a course hunter these days can find what works for them.

4 Likes
33

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer, this was exactly what I was looking for!

1 Like
34

To be honest, I am more on the side that Obsidian is one of these things that you probably shouldn’t overthink right away and just go with it.

I wanted to search guides, plugins, tutorials and what not as well, ran into the LYT Kit and found this page here: Is LYT For Me

I implore you to approach the LYT Kit with caution. Sure, it’s awesome, but you can’t leap to “11” and bypass counting “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10”. The only structure that can work over time, is the structure that slowly emerges over time—validating its own existence through its use.

This kit shows you how to get there, but DO NOT start structuring your “ultimate” system right now. It will fail you, because it will be fragile, because it wasn’t forged in the fire of practical usage. You will waste time and enthusiasm—and could possibly burn out.

Let the links do the work.

So Trust the Process and enjoy the incremental journey of structure emerging organically. As you run into Mental Squeeze Points tools keep these principles in mind. Keep them handy. But try to stop yourself from over-designing everything today. It won’t be helpful. If that’s not enough of a warning, please review Gall’s Law.

More specifically this part:

This kit shows you how to get there, but DO NOT start structuring your “ultimate” system right now. It will fail you, because it will be fragile, because it wasn’t forged in the fire of practical usage. You will waste time and enthusiasm—and could possibly burn out.

So I stopped reading tutorials and just wrote down notes when I wanted to write down notes. When I wanted to link them, I linked them.

Obsidian can be so wide in functionality that you can spend hours on hours tweaking it which isn’t good. Just go with what you feel is the best.

For me personally what worked is:

  • Keep notes small and concise
  • Always name them by the question they answer (“How do I setup X”, “What is Y”)
  • Create general MOCs (Map of Content) that group them when needed. EG: Create a “Music MOC” that links to all notes that contain music.

I access everything in Obsidian through the quick searcher and don’t even try to bother with folders and tags, because I know I will overthink them. Maybe at one point they’ll feel natural and I’ll add them to my flow.

2 Likes
35

Wanted to echo what @fairlydoughnut said. I don’t use tags, I don’t use folders, I just use links. Have rethought and restructured how I organize things in Obsidian at least 4 times, in the middle of my 5th, and I think developing your system as you go along is the best way to go.

For something as personal as a “second brain”, why copy somebody else’s method? Build it as your first brain was built: iteratively.

3 Likes
36

For something as personal as a “second brain”, why copy somebody else’s method? Build it as your first brain was built: iteratively.

Yeah! My approach of just having a pile of unorganized notes that I access with quick switcher by title may sound like a mess. And it kind of is and I wish I could conjure up a nice folder structure, but this right now works incredibly for my brain. I tab into obsidian, find everything I want to find and know exactly how to put down new information (just write the title with the question it answers, write the answer in it, link it to a MOC if existent, done).

1 Like
37

This!

Just from casual scanning of the offerings, it seems that number of these courses go beyond basic-out-of-the-box Obsidian features to delve into third-party software (Obsidian plugins or themes), or the author’s favorite ism (zettelkastenism, MOCism, PKEism, EffectiveNoteTakingism).

4 Likes
38

A year late to the party, I took the TSS Obsidian course. It has some good information but not a great ROI.

FWIW I’ve gone off TSS having spent a fair chunk of money.

1 Like