Tiago shares his beginner's experience learning Obsidian from Evernote, recommending the Web Clipper and Refactor Notes plugin. He then outlines ways to join Fortelabs: help with the Spanish Foundation course, or wait for a facilitator training program that's been postponed due to a family move to Mexico.
Chapters
Who else? What do you got? Tomas.
Hey, Diego, how are you doing?
Good, really good.
Well, first, thank you for the takeaways of the knowledge that you brought, the fluidity of the apps on how this is also stepping, how use you are using Obsidian right now, it's kind of, for me, resonated like stepping outside of your comfort zone. So that's a cool framework.
Totally. That's another good reason to do it. That alone, right? I noticed this morning I was getting frustrated. There was so much friction. I was like, I don't know any of the shortcuts. I was doing things in a way like I would have done them in Evernote. For like half an hour and then discovering there was a much faster way. And like, that's— and then you're like, oh, I'm so stupid. Why didn't I, you know, know about this? But then I realized, oh, this is actually putting me back in that beginner's mind, you know, of like being a beginner once again and not knowing how to do things, which is valuable in its own way.
Yeah, it's kind of learning a new language itself.
It is. It very much is. Yeah, which, which then challenges things, you know, like I, I, I realized, in fact, one of my notes here, this may be, uh, good. One of my notes here that I started is learning Obsidian. So these are just lessons that I learned basically this morning. Mm-hmm. You know, for example, I went and downloaded the Web Clipper and discovered that there were a few different options., and this is the one that I decided to use. Um, you know, I realized, oh, pasting from one to the other in plain text yields much better results. But then I realized there's an exception. There's a couple exceptions if you need to preserve the formatting or if you wanna preserve the paragraph break. So like, this is the kind of lessons no one can teach you. Like, even if someone tried to teach this to me, I'd be like, what? You may be thinking this now. What are you talking about? That doesn't even make sense. Like, what do you mean? It's only by experience that you learn this kind of stuff.
Yeah, and experimenting. And I think, yeah, it may help you. I don't know if you came across the Refactor Notes plugin. That might be a help. You start writing and from inside the note, you can create another note just from a shortcut.
Oh, nice. So let me capture that. Refactored Notes plugin?
Yes.
All right, let's check it out.
Cool. Okay, so my question is more kind of a meta question. It's how can I become part of Fortelabs team?
Yeah, great one. Say more. Why is that interesting to you?
Yeah, first of all, it's, I like the way that all the frameworks and all the knowledge that from you itself and from the Building a Second Brain and the PARA and all the books is structured in my mind. So I see that I can be of help and of value for the team. And also to have the chance to work side by side with you, it's just sort of such a privilege to have this time with you. So it's kind of, okay. And I also have some kind of some projects that I think that can be an upgrade to the team.
Awesome. Yeah, those are great motivations. Great motivations. Well, One thing that comes to mind is we're launching the Foundation course in Spanish. Maria is actually leading that. So if you wanted to get involved, I mean, now, now, that would be a great way to jump in. There's all sorts of needs related to that from, you know, we're using AI to generate, to translate the videos. So there's some like reviewing it to make sure it's, you know, not making too many mistakes. There's web pages to create, there's marketing to do, there's social media accounts to, you know, promote it to, et cetera. Uh, but generally this is actually something that I'm, I've been thinking about a long time is the way I think of it is it's sort of like there's a market being created for second brains or PKM that is huge. Like that's the result of, you know, my books and other people's books and all the YouTubers and all the creators is they're creating this demand for people that want the results that are promised, but don't necessarily want to take a 5-week cohort-based course or even read a book, right? So there's a demand for everything, consultants, teachers, coaches, like implement it for me, contractors, content creators, all that kind of stuff. And then there's our tiny team, which cannot afford, like we're really not set up to be a service provider,, right? We're a very small team that is really just designed to create content and, and courses. And so I'm trying to connect to those two, trying to connect people, say, like all of you in our, in the membership, in our community more broadly with the, the huge market that's being created. We had planned on running a facilitator training program in like July, July, August, and September. We've just decided to postpone that. We've just decided to postpone it because we just didn't have the bandwidth. We're also moving to Mexico as a family in August. That was largely the reason we kind of made a pretty, not impromptu, but, um, kind of unexpected decision to move this summer instead of next summer. Uh, and so we just didn't have the bandwidth to run what is essentially like a 12-week cohort. But next year I'm planning on it. Next year I'm planning on it. So I would say just stay in the loop. Stay part of the community like you're doing here. We probably won't even open up applications for that to the public. It'll just be people on these calls, people in the membership, on Circle, people that we already know, honestly, and have already interacted with are going to be the first people to be invited to that. Uh, so if any of you are interested in, in, in that, and when I say facilitator program, it's facilitator very widely defined. Like, I think some people, you know, are big extroverts, they want to be on stage and do public speaking. There's actually a lot of public speaking gigs available. I, I turn them down all the time. Maybe you're like a hardcore software developer and you want to like go into organizations and design like a custom implementation of their, you know, whatever knowledge management app. That too. Uh, maybe you are a coach and you want to do, you know, coaching by the hour. Like there's a lot of models that can work. Uh, what we're trying to do is just basically be able to certify and say this person is legit. They know what they're talking about, they are trusted by us, they know, like, we're gonna, we're gonna have, like, some practicums and some, like, sort of milestones and even, like, tests, like, teaching tests that you have to pass so that we can essentially send you leads. And then there's probably going to be some sort of, like, licensing fee or certification fee that you pay to fund all the work and support that we're going to be doing on our end. So Unfortunately, I can't announce that right now or in the next few months, but it is something we're working on and have on the horizon. So thank you.
