Most people coast through life.

Following what others have told them without questioning it.

Repeating the same day, over and over.

Waking up. Commute. 9-5. Eat. Consume. Sleep. Repeat.

They will accept it, thinking that’s what life is supposed to be. Finding comfort in the meager pleasure they can find, clinging to whatever dopamine hit they can trigger.

They will die without ever experiencing the feeling of purpose and fulfillment that pursuing a greater goal provides.

And if your brain is remotely wired like mine, this is your greatest nightmare.

I’ve always been fascinated by humans who don’t settle for the minimum. Humans who reject the status quo, despise mediocrity, and seek mastery in their craft, whether it’s in writing, art, or entrepreneurship.

I can’t think of a greater way to spend your life than honing your skills and pursuing mastery. (Next to founding a happy family and being great parents).

What I’ve observed is that there is one driving force behind all great historical figures who achieved mastery and left their mark on history:

Obsession.

Obsession is the root force that allowed all great historical figures to achieve greatness.

But it’s also the source behind a fulfilling and meaningful life. You don’t have to change the world or become the greatest artist or athlete to benefit from it. Just pursuing goals that are realistic and meaningful to you and immersing all of your being into that pursuit is enough to make your life 10x more enjoyable and without it feeling like a grind.

That’s why in this article, I want to help you (re)kindle your flame of Obsession that may be weak or completely extinguished at the moment so you can take back control over your life, reconnect with the feeling of fulfillment that pursuing mastery provides, and break free from all physical and modern poison that society constantly throws at us.

I’ll start by showing you 7 profound ideas about Obsession, then showing you a 2-step system to reverse engineer Obsession in your life and get back into that divine, driven state.

7 Ideas About Obsession

1) Talent is overrated. Obsession is the true root of greatness.

Most people think talent is what matters the most when it comes to becoming great at something.

But it’s not.

Obsession is the true root of greatness. Every artist, every entrepreneur, every creator who influenced our world and left their mark in human history, stood out because they had a relentless obsession toward a higher purpose.

A classic example of this is to compare the life of Francis Galton with his older cousin: Charles Darwin.

Galton was considered an unmatched genius by his peers and went on to have an illustrious scientific career. But nobody remembers him. The truth is, you probably never heard of “Francis Galton” before opening this article. But you all know about Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin, on the other hand, wasn’t a genius.

He admitted himself that he was a “very ordinary boy”, rather “below the common standard in intellect”, with “no great quickness of apprehension”. But he had one power that differentiated him from his cousin and allowed him to forever change the course of human history:

His ability to follow his obsession with unrelenting focus and courage for a very long period of time.

As a child, Darwin could be considered a weirdo.

He had one overriding passion that granted him this honorific title: collecting biological specimens. That’s why, at 22 years old, when one of his former professors told him that the HMS Beagle would soon leave the port to set sail around the world, and they needed a biologist to collect specimens and send them back to England, Darwin obviously said yes. (Despite the protest of his disappointed father)

This opportunity was a heavenly match for Darwin’s Obsession.

Darwin spent the next 5 years sailing around the world, collecting and studying an astoundingly vast array of diverse specimens and fossils, to the point that a crazy but fascinating theory started to emerge in his mind.

After those 5 years, he went back to England with only one goal:

Prove his initial hunch about his theory of evolution. And that process wasn’t pretty. Darwin had to deal with a lot of bullsh*t to get recognized. For example, he studied barnacles for 8 years just to establish his credentials as a biologist. Then he dealt with intricate politics and mastered the social skills necessary to handle all the prejudice against such a theory at that time.

But what sustained him throughout this dreadful ordeal was his intense love and obsession with this subject.

2) Your Shower Thoughts Determine Your Future Success

The greatest way to audit where you’re at on the scale of obsession is to analyze your shower thoughts.

When you’re in the shower, your brain is in what scientists call the brain’s “default mode network”. This mode is associated with daydreaming, creativity, recalling autobiographical memories, and planning for the future.

Those are thoughts that naturally arise when you’re relaxed and not consciously thinking about something. This is where you’ll naturally receive creative inspiration or “downloads from the source” as woo-woo spirituals like to call it. And they aren’t wrong. It’s in this mode that you’ll receive your best ideas.

The problem is that most people’s thoughts aren’t their own.

They’re constantly being brainwashed by the latest drama on social media or the news. They can’t form their own thoughts because they don’t have clear goals to follow through. Thus, their shower thoughts are constantly plagued by meaningless stuff and can’t contribute to the improvement of their life.

You don’t want to be most people.

If your thoughts in the shower aren’t related to your goals and the current problems you’re trying to solve in your life, then it means your brain is being hijacked by external sources. You need first to delete all of these parasites’ frequency so you can listen to your own in peace.

You’ll know you’re following your Obsession when all of your shower thoughts are related to the concrete improvement of your life and solving the current challenges you’re facing.

3) Obsession Allows Exponential Results.

If you invest 80% of your energy, you’ll get 80% back.

But if you invest 100%, you’ll get 200%.

It seems like the math doesn’t add up, but everyone who has already experienced the feeling of being deeply immersed in their work knows that it’s true.

There is something magical that happens when your entire being is immersed in one goal. You start filtering the entire world through the lens of that goal. Everything becomes an inspiration for your work. You find ideas and solutions to problems from seemingly unrelated stuff. Just watching people walking down the street can trigger a breakthrough in your work. It’s like your entire life becomes a constant flow state toward your higher mission.

The best entrepreneurs, artists and creators that you admire are able to create outstanding work because they’re all in.

That’s how they’re able to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd and stand out. You can feel it in your bones when someone is putting out work that comes from their deepest being. There is an inexplicable resonance that occurs.

This is especially true in writing.

You can create a piece that looks good with AI, but you’ll never be able to create something that grabs the reader by the throat and reminds him of his human existence. Even if you have the best ideas and a different perspective, you won’t be able to create that resonance.

How you present things is as, if not more, important than the message in itself.

When you’re entering into that state of Obsession, you’ll be able to create work that is undeniably you, and that has the potential to resonate with the world.

4) Motivation < Discipline < Obsession.

Everyone knows that relying on motivation is fleeting.

That’s why you need to be disciplined and raise your standards. Motivation reduces friction to start a task, whereas Discipline is about accepting the friction and starting the task anyway.

But Obsession is infinitely more powerful than discipline.

Because it inverts the friction. Instead of feeling resistance to start the task, you start to feel an irresistible pull toward your work. Your Obsession consumes you and makes it impossible for you to procrastinate.

The hard part isn’t starting anymore, but stopping.

How can people compete with you when you’re in that state?

When everyone is using willpower and discipline to progress, you’re so in love with the game that you can’t stop playing it. This puts you in a position that is infinitely more powerful than discipline. The feeling of drive and fulfilment becomes enough to hold you through any challenges and any work block, because it comes from a place of genuine love, curiosity and passion.

5) Balance is a lie sold to you by people who made it unbalanced

Balance is the greatest scam sold to ambitious people that wants to fulfill their potential.

First of all, most people’s definition of balance is flawed. Being perfectly balanced means being mid everywhere. You can maintain your life with balance, but you can’t break through it. What you should seek instead is harmony.

Harmony is accepting the different cycles of life and embracing them fully.

If your current season is about embracing your Obsession and relentlessly pursuing it, then do it. Don’t try to bridle yourself. Following your Obsession is a blessing given by the heaven. When you feel the pull of Obsession, fully dive into it instead of trying to repress it. Don’t be afraid to drown inside.

Successful people who tell you that balance is important aren’t purposefully trying to lie to you.

But when trying to reach greatness, you must study what has been done to get there, not what the person says. Most people that inspire you made it by being “unbalanced” for a certain period of time. The reason why they’re now preaching balance is that they are in a new season of life. They made it in the material realm, and now they want to focus on other things. Maybe it’s family, maybe it’s health.

But you can be sure that they weren’t concerned about balance when they were doing their best to make it in their field.

If you try to drastically change the trajectory of your life and your loved ones, 2 years of relentless Obsession will have 10 times more impact than 10 years of “balanced” work. Some opportunities require Speed and Intensity and can only be grabbed and leveraged when you’re putting your entire being on the line.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that you must be sacrificing your life, your family, and all your relationships to the altar of work and status.

I’m not preaching hustle culture here.

What I’m preaching is a state of mind where your entire being and focus are directed toward one clear goal and purpose. You can pursue your obsession while working 5 hours a day, spending quality time with your family, and taking care of your health. That’s actually what I would recommend and what would be the most efficient because the law of diminishing returns applies to everything in life, especially work.

When following Obsession, you’ll have some 12-hour workday that the hustle bro’s love to brag about anyway. They’ll naturally happen because they will be a direct consequence of your love and drive for your purpose.

This is the healthy way to sprint, because it’s not forced.

6) What people call “Enjoying Their Life” is disguised self-destruction

When you’re on the path of following your Obsession, people will do their absolute best to snap you out of it.

They will tell you that it’s too extreme. That you must live life. That you’re going to die of something anyway, so you should relax and drink that beer and smoke that joint.

The truth is, when people are talking about “You should enjoy your life” they’re often doing this because they’re trying to rationalize their own self-destructive behaviors and want you to endorse them too so you can validate that they’re not wrong.

These people will never talk about “Enjoying their life” as going on a 4-hour hike with your friends and sleeping under the stars. Or doing a 2-hour workout and savouring the feeling of self-transcendence that breaking your PR on 200mg of caffeine and phonk music provides. Or having a deep conversation with your loved ones by the sea.

They will always use it as an excuse for some degenerative behaviors like drinking, partying, smoking, or quick-dopamine sources like watching Netflix or playing video games.

But when you’re following your obsession, you don’t need all of this anymore. Because work doesn’t feel like work. It feels like play. Improving and challenging yourself become the new norm. It becomes your new addiction.

But for people who are still in the paradigm of cheap dopamine, this seems inconceivable.

Don’t be deceived by these people. Be extreme. Be okay with making those people uncomfortable. You only have one shot at life, so it’s better to be considered a weirdo by people than dying with regrets on your deathbed, crushed by the weight of your wasted potential.

But remember to be compassionate to these people as well.

They haven’t found their obsession yet, and they’re being deceived by all the intricate psychological traps that society created to keep us enslaved in endless consumption. We all have been there. And we will probably be back there as well during other seasons of our lives. I can even bet that the more attracted you are toward embracing your Obsession and fulfilling your potential, the more you have indulged in these self-destructive behaviors as well. It’s part of the process of understanding yourself and what really matters to you.

Once you’re really ready to leave this old identity behind to fully embrace the identity of the “you” who is following his obsession, these behaviors won’t seduce you as much.

But be wary of the whispers of your old self that will sometimes try to get you back to your old habits.

7) Develop A Healthy Ego

Cultivating your obsession also means developing your ego.

But by ego I don’t mean being a dick and looking down on people.

I mean building genuine self-esteem by giving yourself proof of your own achievements. The higher your self-esteem, the lower the gap between who you are and who you think you should be to achieve your goals is.

Every time you do something that you’ll never have done before, you prove to yourself that you’re able. You connect with that feeling of being limitless. You’re fulfilling your potential in real time.

This feeling is a drug. Imbue yourself in it.

The more you do it, the more you’ll prove to yourself that you can live up to your obsession and find joy in it, which will create a positive feedback loop that will keep you fulfilled.

Don’t trust people who tell you that you need to “be humble”.

They’re just trying to lower your standards, so you stay at their level and don’t challenge them. Kobe wasn’t humble. Jordan wasn’t humble. But they were greatness incarnate; nobody can refute that. Don’t be afraid of being motivated by becoming more powerful, more charismatic, and generating more respect from others as well.

Society created a taboo of money, power, and success.

Most people repress these desires because they’re afraid of becoming arrogant assholes. But you can totally find joy in improving yourself, becoming more powerful and successful, without looking down on others.

To achieve this, you must exit the paradigm of judgment. You must stop putting an arbitrary value on yourself and people. You must become like Alexander the Great, who, despite being the most powerful man living at that time, said that if he wasn’t himself, he would be Diogenes.

Become delusionally self-confident. Build unshakeable belief in yourself. Don’t be afraid of your own light and power. Don’t repress your materialistic desire despite what those who value being “morally right” more than achieving anything say.

Keep pushing past what you thought you were able to so you can build a bank of memories that serves as undeniable proof of your own infinite power. Do this without feeding the need of your brain to classify things as superior or inferior. It’s not real.

Finally, trust your values. Trust that this desire for greatness, power and success is to better serve your family and make the world a better place.

How To Reverse-Engineer Obsession

Obsession can be hard to experience.

Some people say that you can’t force it and that it chooses you instead. And it might be true. But I don’t like to give power to things outside of my control zone.

I choose to believe that obsession can be engineered by creating an environment that makes it the default state.

And the more you’re able to stay in that environment, the easier it will be for you to experience Obsession, until the perfect alignment between your skills and goals will appear and allow you to experience it at an even deeper level.

Step 1) Delete All Sources Of Cheap Dopamine

Yes. We’re back to the most over-used concept of self-improvement online: the infamous Dopamine Detox.

But this shit works. Anybody who has truly done it in their life can testify.

You can’t experience obsession if you’re constantly being distracted by other people’s thoughts and following other people’s goals. You need to create mental and physical space for you to be able to receive different types of thoughts that will make you feel, and thus act, differently.

Dopamine Detoxing will lower your baseline for stimulation, allowing you to enjoy less-stimulating activities again.

Reading, writing, working out, meditating, clearing the dishes mindfully, painting, walking, running. All of these things are very hard to enjoy when your dopamine baseline is fucked up by endless stimulation from no-effort activities.

But once you remove them, you become able to enjoy the discomfort of silence again. And behind that discomfort hides way more profound emotions, like curiosity, fulfilment, and gratitude.

This step is a prerequisite to enter the Obsession state.

If you can’t do this, how do you expect to achieve anything meaningful in life?

If you can’t make sacrifices to achieve your deepest dream, your deepest dream will become the sacrifice. That’s the harsh reality.

I know it’s hard and that you have dozens of very valid excuses to keep doing what you know deep down you should stop doing.

But don’t worry, it becomes easier to stop when you become fed up with always feeling tired and not driven and realize the root cause is all those activities that you can’t seem to stop because you “enjoy them so much”.

You don’t even enjoy doing these activities; it’s just that you’re addicted. Let’s take smoking. Everybody knows that smoking is awful. The taste is awful, the smell is awful, everything is awful. And I say this as someone who has been on and off of smoking for 7 years now and was smoking a pack a day at his prime.

Smokers never enjoy smoking; they enjoy the feeling of relief that smoking provides because they’re addicted to nicotine in the first place. But it’s like wearing tight shoes all day-long so you can feel relief when you remove them at the end of the day. It’s not love. It’s addiction. That same logic applies to all of the effortless dopamine sources.

Here are the most common cheap-dopamine sources that prevent you from reaching Obsession and that I invite you to delete asap:

1) Social Media.

Short-form content is the greatest mass control tool created. It’s the ultimate psy-op. Reels, TikToks, Shorts, it’s all the same. I don’t care.

As long as you have these apps installed on your phone, you’ll scroll. You can’t avoid it. Stop trying to limit it and just delete all these apps instead.

If you’re a creator, install Eden App and use the Discover feature to find inspiration, or block a dedicated time period to study what works every week.

The mental clarity, creativity, and time you’ll free up just by deleting these apps is crazy. Just stop for a week, and you’ll never go back again.

If you want to look at stories and scroll a bit, just look at Instagram on your computer. The user experience is so bad that you won’t do it for more than 10 minutes. I’m convinced the computer UX is bad because they want you to consume on the phone to keep you as addicted as possible.

Anyway. Just. Delete. All. Apps. No exception possible.

2) Video Games.

I’m an avid gamer.

I’ve been playing video games since I was 8. I have more than 10k hours in dozens of JRPGS. I have 3k hours playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate competitively. I work and go to sleep every night listening to game OSTs.

I genuinely love video games and believe it’s the ultimate art form.

But it’s absolutely impossible to play video games and be obsessed at the same time for a very simple reason.

Video Games become the Obsession.

You can’t be obsessed with your goals, because video games will give you clear goals to pursue and your brain will automatically rewire to them. You’ll think about how you can level up your character in the shower. You’ll watch YouTube guides and tutorials to learn techs and tricks to farm more exp effectively.

It will consume you and won’t leave you any space for other meaningful goals you can have. Yes it’s a lot of fun, but all the time I’ve spent playing video games has left me with nothing to show for it.

All the loot, all the grind, all the exp, nothing is real. It won’t help your family. It won’t make you grow as a human. It won’t secure your future.

So stop it and start treating your own life as a video game and see yourself as the character you need to level up.

3) YouTube.

YouTube is an amazing platform to learn and grow.

But it is also endless stimulation.

A lot of people aren’t trying to learn on it; they’re just filling the void. Watching videos while eating, walking, or working.

Just stop consuming on autopilot.

Only watch videos when you truly want to learn something that is related to the current challenges you need to solve.

If you want to learn for the sake of learning and leisure, read instead.

4) Phone.

Our phones are our greatest enemy.

It’s stealing your focus and attention and preventing you from achieving anything.

The greatest way to protect yourself from your phone is to remove all social media apps and games. Yes, even Substack.

Turn it into a dumb phone that only serves as a GPS and messaging people, and keep it on Do Not Disturb all day long, far away from your reach most of the day.

5) Netflix.

Same thing as YouTube.

Watching an episode or two once in a while is fine.

But compulsively watching for 3 hours every day before going to sleep isn’t.

Just stop and replace it with reading instead.

6) Nicotine.

Nicotine is the biggest scam on planet earth.

It’s the most evil industry on earth, and I say this as someone who used to smoke quite a lot. (I’m French so what did you expect).

Some “biohackers” use nicotine to improve focus without realizing that the increase in focus they feel is just coming from the feeling of relief that the addiction creates. Nicotine is creating a need that didn’t exist before and makes you feel good when you solve it. It turns you into a slave.

They would be more focused without nicotine because they wouldn’t feel the need to stop in the middle of a flow state to light a quick one.

I could write for hours about how evil and vicious nicotine is, but I won’t for the sake of clarity of this letter.

But I know how hard stopping smoking is, because I stopped at least a dozens of time. Reading Allen Carr’s book “Easy Way to Stop Smoking” is a great start. Everything becomes easier after reading that book. Even if you relapse, stopping becomes way easier.

So if you’re a smoker, I beg you to go read that book. You won’t need to stop while reading. Just smoke and read it, and after reading it you will naturally want to stop, and it won’t feel like hell. Trust me on this one.

7) Partying.

Most parties are just a disguised way of indulging in drugs without feeling bad because it’s shared.

Most of your partying friends are uninteresting people the second you stop drinking or taking drugs with them. Just stop wasting time and energy on partying.

Of course we all need to do it for some period of time to experience it, not have FOMO, and get fed up with it, but yeah, once you’ve done it enough you just realize how shallow it is and then you can just stop and keep it for very special occasions a few times a year.

Now I want to keep your attention on something in particular:

Have you realized how all of these habits are things people try to manage in their life by creating limits? They install apps to limit their screen time. They create timers. They set up rules.

But have you ever wondered why you need these limits in the first place?

Yes. Because you’re addicted.

The truth is, no human being ever had to put limits on the things they truly loved and fulfilled them. Artists don’t need to limit themselves to draw. Writers don’t need to limit themselves to write. Only addicts need to limit themselves.

The need for having to control something and the reluctance you feel while reading these lines to delete and stop all of these things is proof enough that they are controlling you and stopping you from reaching a higher state of consciousness.

So stop trying to do damage control and finally cut all of the things holding you back so you can finally get to experience feeling alive and driven again.

I could have written more and gotten into more details about each of these activities, but this letter is already long.

The main principle here to understand is that everything that allows you to trigger your dopamine receptors without any effort is a trap that is making you addicted. We are humans, but in reality we aren’t much more than dumb monkeys. If you have something that can push the button of your monkey brain with no effort, you will keep pushing it again and again.

That’s how we are. You can’t control it. You don’t lack willpower; it’s just how we’re wired.

Delete everything that distracts you.

99% of humanity didn’t have screens and endless stimulation all the time. You’ll manage without. Replace it with reading, working out, walking, meditating, working, and enjoying quality and mindful time with loved ones. You only need those activities to live a fulfilling and meaningful life.

And once you do, the only thing that will be left will be your obsession. Every distraction that you remove becomes fuel that will light the fire of your obsession. And the feeling of obsession is infinitely more fulfilling and enjoyable than any amount of quick dopamine will ever provide you.

Step 2: Pursue Meaningful Goals

Now that we created a favorable environment to pursue your obsession, we must answer the following question:

What should you do?

And of course, the answer is unique to everyone.

As an entrepreneur, my own answers are simple:

Growing and scaling my business through writing. Building great products. Being an amazing man for my lover. Developing my strength and physical capabilities with daily mobility sessions and workouts. Learning boxing. Pursuing what Obsession means by embodying this idea to its fullest every day.

Those are my current answers. But yours will be different.

To help you find meaningful goals to pursue, here are 4 steps I invite you to follow

1) Start from your anti-vision.

Knowing what you want out of life is hard.

But you know what’s not hard? Knowing what you DON’T want out of life.

Start there. Write everything you don’t want to experience anymore in your life. Bad relationships. Feeling tired. Addiction. Boredom. Negativity. All the ugly stuff you want to remove.

Once it’s done, it’s time to apply the Inversion Principle from Charlie Munger. What’s the contrary of your anti-vision? This becomes your new vision and will guide you on what to pursue.

2) Train in sports.

Physical mastery is one of the greatest things you can pursue as a human, and it’s universal. You can’t go wrong by trying to get stronger, more flexible, more explosive, or more endurant.

Sport is also one of the greatest ways to get out of your mind and into your body, generate energy, and get your best creative ideas. I can’t imagine a life without any physical activity and movement.

As humans, we were born to move. A stiff body is a stiff mind. A weak body is a weak mind. You get the point.

I personally find great pleasure in improving in calisthenics and boxing. Learning tricks and skills is also something I love. Skateboarding, gymnastics, freestyle calisthenics, going to the gym, martial arts, improving in all of these bring me a lot of fulfillment and joy.

I highly recommend you find the sport that makes you want to improve and learn, whether it’s basketball, running, CrossFit, tennis, jump rope, powerlifting, yoga, or whatever.

What matters is that you get your daily dose of movement and progress. This will also greatly contribute to developing a healthy ego and improving your self-esteem and confidence.

3) Find a creative outlet.

Whether it’s writing, drawing, or playing music, pursuing mastery in a creative practice has been a meaningful obsession for a lot of human beings throughout the ages.

Find yours and devote yourself to learning and mastering it.

You were born to create and make art and share your unique gifts to the world.

4) Start a business.

Being an entrepreneur is the ultimate freedom in life.

There is nothing that will kill your desire to greatness and obsession more than a boring, mind-numbing job that sucks out all of your time and energy from you.

Building your own business and achieving financial freedom through it is also one of the best vessels for cultivating obsession. It’s not necessary, but you can turn your creative outlet into a business. Art and Entrepreneurship are deeply connected.

But it’s not mandatory.

Some creative outlets are best kept outside of entrepreneurship and can make you lose sight of what you love when the need for monetization arises.

But writing can be an amazing skill to build a business around, whether it’s writing for others, starting a paid newsletter, or using your own writing to get known and sell your own products.

It’s up to you to decide how and what creative practice you turn into a business.

Conclusion

I believe building obsession must come from a place of inner choice.

It can’t be forced. It can’t be something you provoke because you think you should have it. It must come because you want to feel it.

Most often, it happens when you become tired of mediocrity. Tired of being tired. Tired of repeating the same day again and again, and finding pleasure only by pushing the dopamine button again and again.

Once you are fed up with all the bullshit, following obsession becomes easy.

Because that desire comes from within. It’s not something you do because you’re trying to be someone else, but because you want it deep inside.

My last thoughts for you are to also think about how you can put your obsession at the service of others.

Obsession + love become devotion, which I think is even more powerful. Self-improvement is great, but it doesn’t solve the existential crisis of our over-individualist society that plagues our generation.

So don’t only focus on improving yourself, but also serving others, whether it’s your family, your clients, a mission, or God. Putting yourself as a servant will unlock another level of fulfillment and drive.

It’s my conclusion at the moment. Feel free to leave a comment if you have questions or want to share your perspective on this topic. I would love to get more insights about this subject.

I wish you the best in your own personal journey,

And as always…

Welcome to Noah’s Ark.

Noah.

February 2021. We had yet another lockdown in France that lasted around a month.
Because it was lockdown, I decided to make a “funny” experiment:
Everything started from this simple question I had:

What would happen if I removed ALL dopamine sources in my life, except from work?
What if I pushed the concept of Dopamine Detox to its extremes?
What effect would it have on me and my brain?

So I did the experiment.
And I cut EVERYTHING.
So of course, no video games, no social media and no YouTube videos...
But I even went farther than that, and stopped listening to music at all.
(except for brain.fm while working for increased focus)
At this point, there were only 2 things I was allowed to do in my life:
Work and read.

So that’s what I did.
I also implemented one of the most extreme and crazy routines I’ve ever tried:
Waking up at 5 am.
Coffee + reading 15mn.
Mobility training + 5 sets of max push-ups.
Cold shower.
20mn meditation.

Then after that I entered deep work mode:
50mn work. 10mn rest.
During rest time I was doing 5mn of cardiac coherence breathing (5s inhale, 5s exhale)
Until it was time to eat.
So I ate, read for 15mn, sometimes took a power nap with some hypnosis audio, then went back to my deep work cycle.
50mn work. 10mn rest.
Until 8 pm.

To give you a bit of context, at that time, I was 19, and I was building a Facebook Ads agency while documenting my journey on YouTube.
I had a lot of ups & downs, but at this point, after more than a year and a half of painful struggle to sign clients, overcome my fears of selling and get skilled…
I was making around 5k per month with my agency.

And while I was documenting my journey on YouTube...
My audience gradually grew to the point where I had around 600 email subscribers on my list.
And so at this point, I thought it was time to build my first real course to sell to my audience.
So during that lockdown period with that crazy-a** routine, I was building my first course on Facebook Ads, while managing my existing clients’ ads.

But the reason I’m telling you all of this...
Is because that experiment worked.
It actually more than worked:
It made me completely crazy about work.
I was waking at 5am, but I actually couldn’t wake up later.
I was so excited to work to grow my business, that often times I was waking up at 3 or 4am and went on my day like this.

I was in a complete frenzy.
Every night I was dreaming of success and progress.
And even though I was critically lacking sleep, my mental drive was so high that I didn’t care at all.
Everyday I was clocking-in 8 to 12 hours of deep work a day.
Most people don’t realize how INSANE that was.
I’m not talking about shallow work where you’re 8 to 12h a day pretending you’re working in front of your computer with 12 tabs open at the same time.

No, I’m talking about DEEP WORK, where I had no notifications, no distractions and nothing stopping me.
I was in a real flow state all day long.
I was chopping down an insane amount of work with relentless intensity and drive.
I’ve never experienced this amount of drive in my life again in my life.
And it lasted for exactly 30 days.
After that? I broke the cycle.

One of the reasons I wasn’t able to hold that intensity is that I ended up too tired.
During those 30 days, I took no day off at all.
It was 30 days straight of 10/12h of deep work and 6h of sleep.
So I ended up tired af, and because I was too young, I made the mistake of re-integrating cheap dopamine in my life.
So I went back to playing some video games, did parties with my friends where I drank and smoked cuz lockdown was finished and ended up destroying the level of focus and drive I had.
Btw, this first launch with the course made around 2 to 3k and it was pretty good considering I had only around 600 email subscribers.

But anyway, the reason I told you all of that, is because that time period made me experience the most insane mind-state ever:
Obsession.
That’s the word that describes that mindset the best.
I was obsessed, with my goals, about the current project I was working on, about progress...
I was intense and relentless and giving it my best every day.

But more importantly...
I was happy. Fulfilled. I felt like a f*cking war machine.
I was also feeling proud of myself and the intensity I was putting in.
I was proving to myself that I was able to be deeply focused and work hard, and enjoy the process at the same time.

Because let’s be honest:
It’s impossible to keep that rhythm in the long run if you’re not loving it.
If you’re forcing yourself, you’ll just give up. Willpower can only maintain you for so long before it expires.
But the only way to get in the mindset where you love that kind of rhythm is to cut down everything that is distracting you from your goals.
Social media, video games, partying, doomscrolling.
Anything in life that gives you a quick dopamine boost for no effort will prevent you from reaching that state.

But as long as you manage to build an environment that makes it so work, sport and reading are your only main dopamine sources in life...
You’ll become unstoppable.

Now I know what you’re thinking: (and I thought that too)
It’s too extreme. It’s not sustainable in the long run. I can’t do it. It’s not realistic.
And in a way, you’re right.
At least, the way I did it in the story I told you above was definitely a bit too hardcore.
I wasn’t sleeping enough, so even though the mental drive had kept me awake for a while, it became too much, and I lost that mental motivation and then ended up rebounding hard in the opposite side.
(I also think that one of the reasons I lost the motivation was because I finished the course, which was the big project that was keeping me stimulated and I had to find another one. There is a lesson in that as well)

But now, 5 years later, I can say with confidence, after trying a lot of ways to live my life and ways to manage the balance between dopamine and work, that there is no balance possible.
You’re either Obsessed or you’re not.
You’re either distracted or you’re fully focused on your mission.
There is no in-between.

And when you experience that state of Obsession once in your life, you can’t go back to living a normal life.
I mean, you can, but it will always feel dull compared to that feeling of obsession.
You’ll feel satisfied with the dopamine, but deep down, you’ll know inside that something is missing.
Obsession is the most beautiful feeling you can experience and I wish you to experience it in your life if you haven’t.

That doesn’t mean you need to work 12 hours a day and sacrifice everything.
You can be obsessed and work 4 hours a day and spend the rest of the day working out, walking, reading, and enjoying time with your family.
(no quick dopamine allowed though)
But it means that your entire being and thoughts are channeled into one clear goal and project where you’re giving it your all.

And the cool thing is that Obsession can be reverse engineered.
You just need to:

1. Have some goals or project that will keep you mentally stimulated (like growing your business / progressing in sports)

2. Delete everything that is distracting you from pursuing these goals/projects with all your might and intensity (Social media, video games, doomscrolling, youtube and consumption in general, except for books)

As long as you have both criteria completed, you’ll reach that state.
And then the longer you’re able to maintain it, the more your drive will compound, because you’ll experience the bliss of going to sleep every night fulfilled and proud of yourself and all the progress you’re making.
It’s also during that state that you’ll make the most insane breakthrough of your life.
Whatever plateau you’re facing right now, I can guarantee with my life that being obsessed is the surest way to absolutely shatter it.

Which is why, these past 3 weeks, I’ve been rebuilding myself to that state:

• I stopped any nicotine intake

• I stopped playing video games

• I stopped watching gaming youtube videos and unfollowed any channels related to that

And at the same time:

• I’ve been working out everyday

• Built a new complete functional training plan

• Doing a mobility routine everyday

• Breathwork everyday

• Reading every day

• Ran for 45 min for the first time on a whim, even with my negative cardio

• Managed to get a 15sec handstand hold for the first time

• Passed my theory exam for my driving license in 5 days

In less than 3 weeks, the difference in drive, focus, energy, and fulfilment has been night and day.
My girlfriend has been noticing the difference as well, even though we’re apart at the moment, but just from my voice notes I’ve been sending her, I’ve inspired her to aim higher as well, and she deleted Instagram from her phone.

I’m 25 now.
I’ve had enough of doing the bare minimum and chasing quick dopamine.
I’ve done it enough.
Yes, I know it will distract me and numb me enough during the day to feel “good”.
But I know it will never truly fulfil me.
It will never truly make me feel proud of myself like those 30 days of intensity did.
And it will also never allow me to reach higher goals for myself and my family.

It’s been 8 years since I’m in online entrepreneurship now.
I’ve had some ups & downs.
I made some 5-figure months.
But I’ve never scaled higher or been able to maintain high levels of revenue in the long term.

And the reason behind that is simple.
I wasn’t intense enough. I wasn’t obsessed enough. I didn’t want it badly enough.
I was okay “making a living”. Making a few k’s a month and having enough to sustain my needs and then have plenty of free time to “enjoy my life”.
(”Enjoying your life” was basically just distracting myself like a monkey with an endless amount of dopamine from varying sources)

I was okay doing only “what’s needed” to grow and make money.
AI, of course, helped a lot in that regard as I had attained a level of productivity and efficiency with my AI second brain and voice notes that was absolutely crazy.
But I don’t want to live this lifestyle anymore.

I want to feel alive and driven by my goals.
I want to aim higher.
I want to feel obsessed.
I don’t want to just “sustain my needs” as an individual anymore, but create endless abundance for me and my family.

That’s why I believe that now, I’m okay with releasing my “old identity”.
The identity of Noah who was growing at his pace, not pushing himself too hard, doing what was needed...
To fully embody the identity of Noah, as a man, doing it’s absolute best in every area of life, and striving relentlessly to become a better man, a better son, a better entrepreneur, a better coach, a better writer, a better creator and a better husband (even though I’m not married but it’s just that I don’t want to be just a “boyfriend”).

This email is a commitment to myself to strive with Obsession.
And I want to keep sharing that commitment on Noah’s Ark, and write about Obsession to my readers, as a constant reminder for myself.

Because I know the hardest part isn’t starting.
It’s maintaining that drive and intensity over time.
It’s’s to keep saying “no” to cheap dopamine and all the things that sedate us as humans that the world is constantly pushing upon ourselves.

Because it’s easy to fall back to your old state and identity.
One cigarette.
One announcement from a new game that looks cool.
One day where you feel like “oh it’s okay if I scroll a bit today”.
That’s all it takes to destroy months of consistency and make you fall back to your old ways.
I know because I’ve lived this cycle a lot of times.

And I believe one of the reasons I was falling back to my old identity is because I wasn’t yet ready to let go of the “boy” in me.
The part of me that wants comfort and security more than progress and drive.
And honestly, it was fair, because I was still young.

But now, at 25, after experimenting with different lifestyles and different “balances”, my conclusion is clear:
Obsession is the only way of living my life that is worthwhile and will allow me to die without regrets and feeling like I’ve wasted my potential and creative energy.
That’s my conclusion after playing with both extremes of the spectrum.
If, like me, you’re ambitious, creative, and feel like there is “more to life” than what society sold you...
Then I beg you to try to reach this Obsessive state toward your higher purpose.
Because if you’re like me, you’ll probably come to the same conclusion that it’s the f*cking best way to live your life.

Thanks for reading this 42nd episode of the Ark Digest™️.
As always, I wish you the best on your own journey…
And welcome back to the Ark,
Noah.

P.S: I wrote this email in one hour of deep work, completely focused, just me and my Obsidian. 2337 words. Flow state. And now I’m gonna go to the gym to destroy myself with my new chest workout, drinking monster white and listening to underground Memphis rap and phonk. Life feels amazing. And I feel fulfilled writing these lines. More than just maintaining consistency for my business with AI just for the sake of it. It’s harder, but it’s worth it.

Most note-taking apps have the same problem. Your notes live on someone else’s server, stored in a format you don’t control. Switching apps means hoping the export works. Connecting AI means relying on whatever the company decided to build on top of their own system.

Obsidian is a different category entirely.

Your notes live on your computer as plain markdown files. An AI agent can read them directly, with no translation layer and no API overhead. Every note you add makes your system more powerful and more personal. The vault compounds over time in a way no cloud-based tool can match.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to start using Obsidian from scratch. We’ll cover the interface, note creation, markdown, wikilinks, properties, bases, templates, graph view, syncing, web clipper, plugins, and themes. By the end, you’ll have a complete picture of what Obsidian can do and how to use it as a creator or knowledge worker.

Prefer to watch? I walk through the full Obsidian setup live, with screen demos of every feature covered in this article:

Get the free vault: The Sovereign Creator OS Lite is a ready-to-open Obsidian vault with every category, template, and base pre-configured. Download it here: Sovereign Creator OS Lite

Why Obsidian Is the Best Second Brain App in 2026

Before opening the app, it’s worth understanding why this tool is worth your time. Three reasons make Obsidian stand apart from everything else.

Your Notes Belong to You

Every note in Obsidian is a plain text file stored on your computer. You don’t need an account. Your data does not go to a cloud. Your files live on your machine.

Open your vault folder in Finder or Windows Explorer and you’ll see a list of markdown files. That’s all they are: plain text, nothing proprietary. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be there. You could open them in any text editor and keep going. That’s full data sovereignty over your second brain.

It’s Free

Obsidian is free for personal use and runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. There’s also a large plugin ecosystem built by the community, adding calendars, AI integration, spaced repetition, kanban boards, and mind maps. My recommendation: start with zero plugins and add one only when you hit a specific friction point you want to solve.

It’s AI-Ready by Design

Most apps store your notes on their servers in a proprietary format. When you connect AI to those apps, every interaction requires an API call, format conversion, and processing overhead. With Obsidian, your notes are files on your hard drive. An AI agent reads them directly, like opening a file in a text editor. There’s no middleman, no overhead.

Your AI knows your entire system the moment it opens your vault. The more you build the vault, the more powerful and personal your AI becomes. I have a full video on combining Claude Code with Obsidian if you want to go deeper on that side: How to Build Your AI Second Brain with Obsidian + Claude Code.

The Interface: Three Zones, One Workspace

Obsidian has three main zones.

The left sidebar is your file explorer, with search, bookmarks, and plugin panels. At the bottom left, a small icon lets you switch between different vaults on your computer. The settings panel is accessible from there as well.

The center editor is where you read and write. You can have multiple tabs open simultaneously, just like a browser. Command T on Mac opens a new tab. You create notes, write inside them, and switch between them freely.

The right sidebar holds contextual panels for the note you’re currently viewing: backlinks, outgoing links, tags, properties, and the note’s heading outline. The outline is especially useful for navigating long notes. You scroll through the heading structure in the sidebar instead of scrolling through the full document.

Your Two Power Keys: Quick Switcher and Command Palette

You won’t spend much time clicking through the sidebar. Two keyboard tools handle almost all navigation.

The Quick Switcher opens with Command O on Mac or Ctrl O on Windows. Type a few letters from any note name and Obsidian finds it instantly using fuzzy search. This is your primary navigation tool. It’s faster than any sidebar interaction and works from anywhere in the vault.

The Command Palette opens with Command P on Mac or Ctrl P on Windows. It gives you access to every action in Obsidian: inserting templates, opening graph view, showing backlinks, folding headings, formatting text, and more. If you don’t know a shortcut, type what you want to do and you’ll find the command. Plugins add their own commands here as well.

Panes and Tabs: Working on Multiple Notes at Once

You can have multiple notes open as tabs simultaneously. You can also split the editor to work on two notes side by side by right-clicking any tab and selecting Split Right. This is useful when writing a new note while referencing an existing one.

Click and hold any tab to drag it and rearrange your workspace into whatever layout you need. Closing the sidebars gives you a cleaner writing interface when you want to focus without distractions.

Creating Notes and Writing in Markdown

Command N on Mac or Ctrl N on Windows creates a new note instantly. The note title is the file name as it appears on your computer. When you rename a note, Obsidian automatically updates every link pointing to it across the entire vault. You can rename freely without breaking anything.

Every note is written in Markdown: a simple formatting language that uses symbols to create structure. The key symbols are straightforward. Headings use hashtags: one hashtag for Heading 1, two for Heading 2, three for Heading 3. Bullet points start with a hyphen. Command B on Mac makes text bold. Command I makes it italic. Checkboxes use a hyphen, a space, and a square bracket with a space inside.

Obsidian renders everything in real time. You write the symbols and see the formatted output immediately. You can also fold headings to collapse sections and make long notes shorter, turning each heading into a toggle.

If you don’t remember a formatting shortcut, right-click inside any note to access a context menu with options for task list, numbered list, footnote, table, callout, and more. You don’t need to memorize every markdown symbol upfront. Learn the most-used ones and reach for the right-click menu for anything else.

Three Editing Modes

Obsidian has three editing modes. Knowing them prevents a lot of confusion.

Live Preview is the default. Markdown renders as you type. When you click on formatted text, you briefly see the markdown symbols underneath. This is the mode you’ll use 99% of the time.

Reading View gives you a fully rendered output with no editing available. Toggle it with Command E. Use it when you want a clean read, for presentations, or when you just want to see how a note looks fully formatted.

Source Mode shows the note as raw markdown with no rendering at all. Every symbol is visible exactly as it sits in the file. You won’t use this often. If you find yourself in it by accident, your formatting will look broken and unrendered. If a note appears unformatted and strange, check whether you’ve ended up in Source Mode. You can switch back from the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the editor.

Wikilinks: How Knowledge Connects

A wikilink is an internal link between two notes. The syntax is double square brackets around the note name. On Mac, the shortcut for double brackets is Option Shift 5.

Start typing inside the brackets and Obsidian autocompletes from your existing notes. Links are bidirectional: link note A to note B, and note B automatically knows that note A points to it. You don’t need to do anything extra for that to work.

Hold Command and hover over any wikilink to see a preview of the linked note without leaving your current one.

In the right sidebar, the backlinks panel shows every note in your vault that points to the one you’re currently reading. Outgoing links shows every note your current note points to. This linking system is one of the core features that sets Obsidian apart: your knowledge builds as a connected network, not a list of isolated files.

Properties: Structured Metadata for Every Note

Every note in Obsidian can have properties: structured metadata that lives at the top of the note, above your content. Properties are key-value pairs. A key is the field name, and the value is what you assign to it.

Obsidian supports text, number, date, checkbox, list, and wikilink value types. You can store an author property with a linked note, a rating, a status, or a creation date. Obsidian renders properties as a clean panel at the top of every note. You click any field to edit it and never touch the underlying format by hand.

To add a property: open the Command Palette, type “add file property,” and select it. Any property you’ve already created in the vault appears as an autocomplete option. You can also create new properties on the spot.

Properties can hold wikilinks directly. If you set a source property to link to an author note using double brackets, Obsidian registers that as a real link between the two notes, not just plain text.

Bases: Filtered Views of Your Vault

A base is a filtered, sortable view of your notes. Think of it as a live spreadsheet where each row is a note and each column is a property.

You define filter rules, and the base surfaces every note that matches your criteria. The base stores nothing. It reads your existing notes and displays the ones that meet your filters. If you delete a base, your notes are completely untouched. The base is just a lens onto your vault.

To create a base: open the Command Palette, type “base,” and select Create New Base. You’ll see every note in your vault displayed in a table, and you can then add filters to narrow the view based on any property. You can also insert a base directly inside a note using Insert Base from the palette, which embeds the filtered view inside your document rather than as a separate file.

How I Organize Without Folders

Notes can belong to multiple places at once, but folders force you to choose one. If you have a script that’s also a sales reference, a folder system makes you pick: does it go in the script folder or the sales reference folder? Either you duplicate the file or you lose it to one category.

Folders also stop scaling. With dozens of notes it’s manageable. With thousands, navigating nested subfolders becomes slower than just searching, and things get buried.

My approach uses Properties and Bases instead. I add a categories property to every note. The value of that property is a wikilink pointing to a category note. For example, a note about a newsletter gets categories set to link to “Newsletters.”

Each category is its own note in the vault. That category note contains one embedded base with one filter: file.hasLink(this.file). That filter dynamically surfaces every note in the vault that links to this category note. When I set the newsletter category on a new note, it appears in the newsletter base immediately, with no dragging or manual sorting required.

Because categories live in a property field rather than a physical folder, a note can belong to multiple categories at once. A YouTube script can have both “YouTube Videos” and “Scripts” in its categories property and appear in both bases simultaneously. That’s impossible with folders.

To create a new category, I duplicate an existing category note and rename it. Then I duplicate any template, update the categories property to link to the new category note, and adjust the body structure. From that point on, any note using that template appears in the new category automatically.

If you want to see the full architecture behind this system, including how categories, subjects, and the navigation layer work together across a full vault, I have a dedicated video: How I Organize My Second Brain With Obsidian Bases and Claude Code.

Templates: One Action, Fully Filed

A template is a file with preset contents. Apply it to any new note and the content copies instantly into that note.

Templates have two layers. The first is pre-filled properties: the categories field is already set, so the note appears in the right base the moment you apply the template. The created date fills in automatically with today’s date. The second layer is a pre-built body structure: sections already laid out for you to fill in. A book template has spaces for summary, key takeaways, and quotes. A newsletter template has the outline structure ready and waiting.

To apply a template: create a new note, open the Command Palette, type “insert template,” and choose the one you want. You can also assign a hotkey for this in settings to make it a single keystroke.

The first-time setup requires telling Obsidian where your templates folder lives. Go to Settings, then Templates, and set the template folder location. Once configured, every template in that folder appears in the command palette when you search for “insert template.”

A note without a template has no categories property. It exists in the vault but never appears in any base. In my system, that makes it invisible to navigation. The workflow is always: create note, apply template, and the note is immediately filed and findable.

Graph View: Visualizing Your Knowledge

Graph View is a visual map of your vault. Every note is a node. Every wikilink between two notes is an edge connecting them. The more connections a note has, the more central it appears in the graph.

Open the global graph with Command G on Mac or Ctrl G on Windows. You get a bird’s eye view of every note and every connection across your vault. You can zoom in to see clusters of related ideas, click any node to open that note, and identify which notes are isolated hubs and which are deeply connected.

The graph supports customization. You can filter by properties, group notes by color, and highlight specific clusters. Setting all notes with a specific category to display in a distinct color lets you see how your content is distributed at a glance.

For a closer look at one note’s connections, use the local graph. Open any note, open the Command Palette, and search for “local graph.” The local graph shows every note connected to the one you have open. Increasing the depth filter also shows connections of connections, expanding the view outward through your linked network.

Graph View is an exploration tool, not a daily navigation tool. Use it occasionally to discover forgotten connections, find isolated notes that need linking, or see how a topic is represented across your vault. For day-to-day navigation, the Quick Switcher and bases are faster and more reliable.

Syncing to Your Phone

Obsidian is a local app, so syncing across devices requires a one-time setup. Two main options cover most situations.

Obsidian Sync is the native solution. It’s end-to-end encrypted and costs $4 per month. Go to Settings, then Sync, subscribe, create a remote vault, and connect your phone. Changes appear on all devices within seconds. This is what I use and what I recommend.

Cloud folder keeps the entire setup free. Move your vault folder into iCloud, Dropbox, or OneDrive and the cloud handles the syncing. Install the Obsidian mobile app and open the synced folder as your vault. The rule: close Obsidian on one device before opening it on another. Let the sync complete before writing on the second device to avoid file conflicts. It works well, but it requires slightly more discipline and is often slower than the native sync option.

Web Clipper: Bringing the Web Into Your Vault

The Obsidian Web Clipper is a free browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. When you find an article, research page, or YouTube video you want to save, click the extension. It creates a new note in your vault with the page content already formatted in markdown: title, source URL, and full body.

Your web research lives in your vault, searchable, linkable, and readable by your AI. You can pre-configure templates in the extension settings to automatically assign the right categories property to everything you clip, so clipped content appears in the correct base immediately with no extra steps.

Community Plugins: Extend Only What You Need

Obsidian is intentionally minimal. Community plugins extend it with new capabilities: calendars, kanban boards, spaced repetition, AI integration, graph enhancements. They’re completely optional, and a vault with zero plugins works perfectly.

To install a plugin: go to Settings, then Community Plugins. Disable Safe Mode to unlock the browser, search for what you need, click Install, then Enable. The plugin is now active and configurable from its own tab in Settings.

Install plugins with intention. Look for plugins from developers with a clear track record, recent updates, and a real user base. Only install a plugin when you have a specific friction point it solves. A vault with five well-chosen plugins is faster and easier to maintain than one with thirty running in the background. Every plugin is code from another developer running inside your vault, so choose accordingly.

Themes: Customize the Look Without Touching Your Notes

Themes let you customize how Obsidian looks without affecting your notes or data. Options include dark modes, minimal interfaces, and paper-like aesthetics, with hundreds of community-built options available.

To install a theme: go to Settings, then Appearance, then Manage. Browse, preview, and click Use. The theme applies instantly. Themes are purely cosmetic and don’t change a single note in your vault.

The Minimal theme is the most popular and the one I use. When your setup starts to feel familiar to the point of invisibility, a new theme refreshes the experience completely without any system change.

Conclusion: The Vault Is Where Everything Starts

Mastering Obsidian means building a knowledge base that compounds over time. Every note you take connects to the ones before it. Every book, article, and idea you capture adds a layer of knowledge that belongs entirely to you.

After six months of consistent use, your vault becomes a library of your own thinking, a perspective that no one else has. That perspective is the foundation of everything you create: newsletters, videos, courses. The knowledge you build this month funds the content you produce next month. That’s the leverage every creator is looking for, and it starts with the vault.

If you want to skip the setup and open a system that’s already built, the Sovereign Creator OS Lite is a completely free, ready-to-open Obsidian vault. Categories, subjects, templates for every note type, and Claude Code configuration files are all pre-configured. Download it, open it in Obsidian, configure three settings, and you have a fully operational second brain in under five minutes.

Subscribe for weekly content on building your AI second brain and turning it into a profitable, purposeful creator business.

Welcome back to Noah’s Ark. See you soon.

Introduction: The AI You Use Doesn’t Know You

Every time you open a new chat, you start from zero.

You explain who you are. You describe your audience, your voice, your project. You ask your question. You get a decent answer. You close the window. And the next time, you do the exact same thing.

The AI has no idea who you are. And because of that, the output stays generic no matter how much time you spend prompting.

The fix is not a better prompt. The fix is a different architecture.

When you run Claude Code inside an Obsidian vault, the AI has access to everything you have built: your notes, your content, your projects, your clients, your past decisions, your writing rules. It reads your system before your first message in every session. You do not re-explain anything. And the more you build your vault, the more powerful and personal the AI becomes.

This is the combination I use to manage all my learning and run my creator business. In this article, I am going to show you exactly how it works and why it is the most powerful setup available today for creators and knowledge workers.

Prefer to watch? Watch the full video with live demos of every feature described in this article:

Get the free vault: The Sovereign Creator OS Lite is a ready-to-open Obsidian vault with everything pre-configured. Download it here: Sovereign Creator OS Lite

Obsidian: Sovereign Files That Any AI Can Read

Obsidian is a note-taking app that reads markdown files stored on your computer.

Markdown is open, simple, and universal. Any text editor can read it. It worked on computers built in the 1960s, it works today, and it will work in ten years. Your notes belong to you. They live on your hard drive and they are readable without Obsidian, without an account, without a subscription.

Apps like Notion and Evernote use proprietary formats. Your notes are tied to the platform. If the company shuts down or changes its pricing, extracting your second brain is painful and incomplete. With Obsidian, if the app disappears tomorrow, you open your notes in any text editor and keep going. That is what data sovereignty actually means.

When you want to build a second brain that will last for years, even decades, full ownership matters. It matters especially if you want your knowledge to outlast you, as a legacy for the people you leave behind.

Customization Without Complexity

Obsidian has a large plugin ecosystem that extends the app in any direction you need: Kanban boards, calendar views, spaced repetition, mind maps, citation managers. Whatever workflow you have in mind, there is probably a plugin already built for it.

My recommendation: start with zero plugins, and add one only when you have a specific problem to solve. I use three or four. The goal is a fast, focused tool, not the most elaborate setup possible.

Graph View: Watch Your Thinking Develop

Obsidian lets you link notes together through wikilinks, and visualize all those connections in the Graph View.

When you create links between notes, you build connections between ideas. The Graph View renders all those connections as a navigable network. Over time, you can see how your thinking develops, identify recurring patterns, and build a body of thought that is entirely yours.

That is how knowledge compounds. Ideas connect to other ideas. A unique perspective emerges from that, one that drives readers to your brand and creates the kind of true-fan audience that turns a creator into a business.

If you want to see a specific note’s connections in isolation, the Local Graph View shows only the notes directly linked to the one you have open. I have this on a hotkey. When I sit down to write, I open a concept note and immediately see every related idea I have already captured. Writing from that context is completely different from writing from a blank page.

Obsidian Bases: Databases Built From Your Notes

Bases is a core Obsidian feature that requires no extra plugin.

It turns your notes into filtered database views. You can instantly surface every newsletter you have written, every video by status, every coaching note by client, every permanent note in your Zettelkasten. Any metadata property you add to a note can become a filter, a column, or a sort.

The performance advantage over apps like Notion is significant. The underlying files are lightweight markdown stored on your machine. There is no cloud latency, no sync delay. Everything is instant.

Syncing Your Vault Across Devices

Because Obsidian files are stored locally, you need to set up sync across devices.

Option one is Obsidian Sync, the official plugin. It is end-to-end encrypted, takes about five minutes to configure, and costs around €4 per month. Obsidian itself is free, so this is an optional extra if you want the cleanest purpose-built solution.

Option two: use iCloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive. If you already use one of these, create your vault folder inside it and point Obsidian at that folder. The sync runs automatically between your computer and your phone. Obsidian runs on both iPhone and Android. Ideas you capture on a walk sync back to your desktop without any action on your part.

Claude Code: The AI Agent That Lives Inside Your Vault

Claude is Anthropic’s AI. Anthropic is OpenAI’s main competitor, and they are genuinely leading the market right now for this kind of agentic work.

Beyond the standard chat interface, Anthropic builds agentic AI tools: agents that take concrete actions on your computer and inside your apps. You speak to them in natural language, and they organize your files, create notes, and execute processes across your tools.

Two of these agents are relevant here.

Claude Desktop runs inside the Claude desktop app. No terminal, no developer tooling required. You can do the vast majority of what you need as a creator or knowledge worker directly from there. If you are new to agentic AI, this is the right entry point.

Claude Code is the more powerful and flexible version. It was built for developers, but it works extremely well for creators and knowledge workers too. It runs in the terminal, which is the command-line interface on your computer. That is what gives it full file system access and the ability to install plugins and unlock more advanced automations.

The Terminal Takes Five Minutes

The terminal looks intimidating. It is a text interface rather than a visual one. But for this setup, you need exactly three steps.

First, install Claude Code: copy the install command from the Claude website, paste it in the terminal, and the installation handles itself. Second, navigate to your vault: either type cd followed by your vault folder name, or right-click the vault folder in Finder and select “Open in Terminal.” Third, type claude and Claude opens inside your vault with access to every file in that folder.

That is the entire setup. Five minutes from zero to a working AI agent running inside your second brain.

MCP: Claude Connected to Your Other Apps

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a standard that lets Claude connect to external applications and take actions inside them on your behalf.

You configure the connection once per tool. From that point, Claude can act across your entire stack from a single prompt in the terminal: create calendar events, schedule social media posts, update tasks, fetch transcripts. Anything you do manually today inside a specific app, Claude can do for you without you leaving the terminal.

The practical result is that you stop context-switching between apps. You issue one prompt. Claude handles the rest.

How the System Works Together

Obsidian’s decision not to rush into native AI, when Notion AI, Evernote AI, and others launched in 2023 and 2024, turned out to be the right call.

By keeping AI integration open rather than baked in, Obsidian became the best AI-compatible app available. Running Claude directly inside your vault gives you maximum AI capability with maximum data sovereignty. Every app that hosts your data on its servers cannot offer both. And because those apps route AI through their own APIs and need margins to operate, you pay more and get less.

With Claude Code in Obsidian, your vault stays on your hard drive. Claude processes your files locally. If absolute privacy is your top priority, you can run a fully local AI model inside Obsidian as well. But Claude sits at a good balance between privacy and computing power, which is why I use it.

Vault Architecture: Zero Organizational Decisions

My vault uses a flat folder structure. All notes live in a single folder with no subfolders.

I use Obsidian Bases to assign a category to every note I create. Filtered views then surface every note in any given category instantly. I also assign subjects to notes, which cuts across all categories as a second navigation layer.

The result: when I create a note, I never ask myself where it should go. When I need to find something, I open the relevant category or subject view, or use the quick switcher to search directly. The system surfaces what I need. I start to work.

Categories and Subjects in Practice

A category is a type of note: newsletter, YouTube video, tweet, permanent note, client note. A subject is a theme that cuts across categories: business, psychology, productivity, creativity, health.

A newsletter about psychology gets both. The category is Newsletter. The subject is Psychology. It appears in the Newsletter view alongside all my other newsletters, and it appears in the Psychology view alongside every psychology note I have ever written: my permanent notes, tweets, and video scripts all together in one view. One note, multiple entry points, zero manual sorting.

Permanent Notes and the Zettelkasten Method

One of the most powerful categories in my system is permanent notes. I apply the Zettelkasten method: every idea I study gets its own atomic note, connected to related notes.

I currently have over 500 permanent notes, each interconnected with others. When I want to create content on a topic, Claude has direct access to all of them. It searches my vault, retrieves the relevant notes, surfaces connections I had missed, and produces output that a generic AI working from a blank context simply cannot match. The depth of the output scales with the depth of your knowledge base.

CLAUDE.md: The File That Replaces Onboarding

At the root of my vault, and inside each major folder, there is a CLAUDE.md file.

Every time Claude opens a folder, it reads this file automatically before doing anything else. It tells Claude exactly how the system works: the folder architecture, the category structure, routing rules, how notes should be formatted, what to avoid, what to prioritize.

You configure this once. From that point forward, Claude knows how to navigate your vault, create new notes with the right format, and update existing ones in every session. No re-explanation. No onboarding from scratch. The context is persistent because it lives in a file you control.

Memory and Session Logs: Continuity Over Time

Claude has a memory file where it stores context across sessions: preferences, past decisions, ongoing work, rules established over time. Every time you work with Claude in the terminal, it updates this file. The next session starts from where the last one ended.

For long projects spread across multiple weeks, I create session logs. These are structured notes that capture what was done, what was decided, and what to pick up next. When I return to a project after two weeks away, Claude reads the session log and picks up exactly where we left off.

The system becomes more precise with every session. Claude becomes more useful the more I use it.

Skills: Every Recurring Task Becomes One Command

Skills are Claude Code’s command system for recurring processes.

Every week I schedule 21 social media posts. One command fetches every ready note from my vault, schedules them to Typefully at the right times via MCP, and updates the status on each note in the vault. I do not copy, paste, or open any scheduling software.

After every coaching call, one command fetches the transcript from my AI note taker, creates a structured coaching note in my vault, links it to the right client file, and generates a reference summary I can send to the client. All in minutes, from a single command.

The more I use a skill, the more I refine it. When there is something I want to adjust about the output, I tell Claude to update the skill accordingly. Over time, the quality of every output goes up and the time to produce goes down. Every recurring task in your business eventually becomes a single command you run from the terminal.

The Maintenance Problem: Solved

Most people who try to build a second brain go through the same cycle.

They start excited. The system is organized, the notes are clean, everything is in its place. Then the maintenance begins: updating tags, keeping properties consistent, reorganizing the structure every time it evolves. That is extra work on top of an already full workload. So you start skipping it. The system degrades. Navigation breaks down. You go back to Apple Notes or Google Docs, because at least those are fast.

A few weeks later, your notes are scattered with no connections and no way to compound them. So you want to rebuild a proper second brain. But the cycle repeats. Most people have been through this loop several times.

Claude breaks the cycle.

If you want to change how your categories work, one prompt updates every affected note in your vault. If you captured ideas on your phone without tagging them, one prompt assigns the right category and subject across all of them. Because Claude reads your CLAUDE.md files, it can also create new notes entirely on its own, with the right categories, the right subjects, the right structure, linked in the right places.

The system stays clean automatically. Maintenance stops being your job.

And if you already have an old system, whether in Notion, Roam, or any tool that exports markdown, Claude can handle the migration. It adds the right properties, reorganizes the structure, and brings everything into your new vault. Even if you have hundreds of existing notes, Claude processes them in minutes.

Conclusion: The Foundation Changes Everything

The Obsidian and Claude Code combination gives you something no generic AI setup can offer: an AI that already knows you.

Your notes are sovereign files that live on your hard drive and compound in value the more you add to them. Claude reads your system before the first prompt of every session. The more you build your vault, the more intelligent and personal the AI becomes. Every recurring task in your business becomes a single command. And the maintenance problem that kills most second brain projects disappears.

If you want to get started, the fastest path is the Sovereign Creator OS Lite: a free, pre-configured Obsidian vault with categories and subjects already set up, templates for every note type, and a CLAUDE.md in every folder so Claude understands your system from the very first session. Download it, open it in Obsidian, and you have a fully operational second brain in under five minutes. The system works on its own. Add Claude Code and you unlock the full combination.

For a deeper walkthrough of how I organize my vault using Obsidian Bases and Claude Code, this video covers the full system in detail.

Follow for more content on sovereign AI second brains and building a profitable and purposeful creator business.

Welcome back to Noah’s Ark. See you soon.

Every time you create a note, you pay a tax.

You write the idea down. Then you freeze. Is this a project? A resource? An area? Which folder does it actually belong in? You spend thirty seconds deciding. You pick one. You move on. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you know you picked wrong, or at least that you could have picked differently.

That tax is small each time. But it happens hundreds of times a week for anyone who works with knowledge seriously. And there is a second tax, paid on retrieval: you have to remember not just what you wrote, but where you put it. You open folders, scan subfolders, and come back empty.

The system that was supposed to free up your thinking is consuming it instead.

I spent years inside that loop. I tried PARA. I tried Zettelkasten. I tried building a hybrid of both. The systems were smart, but they were all built for the same flawed assumption: that notes belong in locations. I finally found a way out when I stopped thinking about where notes go and started thinking about what notes are.

This article walks through the exact system I use today. It is built on Obsidian Bases and Claude Code. By the end you will understand the full architecture, how to navigate it, and how to get a pre-built version of the entire vault for free.

Prefer to watch? The full walkthrough with live demos of every section in this article is on YouTube:

Get the free vault: The Sovereign Creator OS Lite is a ready-to-open Obsidian vault with everything pre-configured. Download it here: Sovereign Creator OS Lite

Why PARA Was Never Going to Work

My previous system was a hybrid I called IPARAG: Inbox, Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives, and Galaxy. The PARA part came from Tiago Forte and handled project and resource management. The Galaxy was my Zettelkasten layer where I kept all my permanent notes in a flat file structure, connected through wikilinks.

The Galaxy was genuinely powerful. Once I had enough atomic notes linked to each other, content creation became fast. I could pull from my own thinking instead of starting from scratch every time. That part worked.

The rest had a structural flaw that no amount of refinement could fix.

The flaw is this: a single note can belong in multiple places at once. Is a note about content strategy a Project file or a Resource? Is it in the Business area or the Content folder? PARA does not answer that question. It forces you to pick one and live with the doubt. Every time you retrieve something, you have to guess whether past-you filed it correctly.

The system was also built for folder-based tools. I was using Kortex and Eden to manage my second brain at the time. In a folder-based world, PARA is probably the best solution available. But the tool I’m now using is Obsidian, and Obsidian has recently released a feature that changes everything: Bases.

I spent a week learning how to use it, mostly by studying how Kepano approaches it. Kepano is the founder of Obsidian himself. After that week, I rebuilt my entire vault from scratch. The result is what I am going to walk you through here.

The Architecture: Five Folders, No Hierarchy

The entire system runs on five folders.

The Inbox is the capture zone. Everything unprocessed lands here. Random ideas, downloaded files, voice memos, web clips. You do not sort anything into Inbox. You just dump it in and process it later. Claude Code processes mine automatically, but I will get to that.

The Notes folder is where every single note in the system lives. One flat folder, no subfolders, no exceptions. Nine hundred files and counting, all at the same level. This is not chaos. It is intentional, and the reason it works is the next two folders.

Categories and Subjects are the navigation layer. They are not storage. Notes do not live there. These folders contain container notes that surface and organize notes from the flat Notes folder dynamically. The details of how this works are the core of the system.

The System folder holds templates, attachments, dashboards, etc. All that’s needed for maintaining the system.

The core philosophy shift this architecture represents is simple: folder systems require you to decide where a note belongs before you can store it. This system asks only one question: what is this note? Once you answer that, the system finds it for you.

How Categories Work: A Filter, Not a Folder

A category is a type of object that exists in your vault. Permanent notes, newsletters, YouTube videos, tweets, SOPs, reviews, AI prompts, projects, products. Every note belongs to at least one category.

The critical difference from folders: a note can belong to multiple categories simultaneously. A YouTube script can be both a YouTube Video and a Script. A newsletter can be both a Newsletter and a Swipe File. The note lives once, in the flat Notes folder. The categories just describe what it is.

To make this work, each category is a container note with an Obsidian Bases view embedded inside it. Bases is a core plugin built into Obsidian. You do not need to download anything. It turns your notes into a database, similar to what Notion does, but with plain markdown files on your local machine.

The database view inside each category container has one rule: show me every note in this vault that links to this category.

The link works through YAML frontmatter, which is the block of metadata at the top of every note. A newsletter has this in its metadata: categories: “[[Newsletters]]”. That one line is a wikilink to the Newsletters container. The moment you add it, the note appears inside the Newsletter container with zero additional action. No sorting, no dragging, no filing.

This is what PARA could never achieve. A note is not stuck in one location. It can be found from any angle you think to look.

How Subjects Work: The Second Navigation Layer

Categories answer one question: what type of note is this? Subjects answer a different one: what is this about?

Subjects are themes that cut across all categories. Business, creativity, psychology, philosophy, health, productivity, relationships, etc. Any note can have subjects in addition to a category. A newsletter about psychology gets two properties: categories: [[Newsletters]] and subjects: [[Psychology]].

That newsletter appears inside the Newsletters container alongside every other newsletter. It also appears inside the Psychology subject container alongside every other psychology note in the vault, including permanent notes, tweets, videos, and anything else with that subject property. The same note, surfaced from two completely different angles, with one addition to its metadata.

This replaces the entire tag system I used before. Tags in Obsidian work technically, but they are invisible. You forget what tags exist. They pile up. You have no easy way to browse or explore them. Subject containers are visible, named, and navigable. You open them like a page. It is a cleaner and more powerful way to navigate a knowledge base.

How Capture Works: One Action, Fully Organized

The daily capture workflow is straightforward.

You create a note. It lands automatically in the flat Notes folder. You apply the matching template. Newsletter, Tweet, Permanent Note, YouTube Video, each category has its own template. The template auto-fills the YAML frontmatter: the category link, the status, the type. You do not write any of that yourself. You just apply the template and start writing.

The moment you apply the template, the note appears in the correct category container. The system is already organized.

A template is nothing more than a pre-written YAML block plus a content structure. When you apply the Newsletter template, it adds the category link and sets the status to “idea”. You get a blank document ready to fill, pre-routed to the right place.

The moment this clicked for me was when I realized I had stopped thinking about where to put notes entirely. I was only thinking about what I was writing. That shift sounds small. It is not. Friction at the capture stage is what kills second brain systems. Most people build something, use it for a few weeks, and abandon it because every capture requires a decision. Remove the decision and you actually use the system.

What Changes When Claude Code Lives in Your Vault

Claude Code is an AI agent that runs directly inside your Obsidian folder. It reads your files, writes files, and understands your system from the first prompt of every session.

The reason it always understands your system is the CLAUDE.md files. Every folder in the vault has one. These files explain what lives in that folder, what the categories mean, and how notes should be structured. Claude reads them automatically at the start of each session. You configure them once. Claude picks them up every time.

The practical result is a maintenance layer you never have to think about.

You can ask it to create a newsletter note about any topic, and Claude will create the file with the correct YAML, the right template, and the right status already set. You can say “process my inbox,” and Claude reads every file in the Inbox folder, assigns the correct category and subject, and moves it to Notes. You can say “add the Psychology subject to every newsletter that mentions mental models,” and Claude updates thirty notes in twenty seconds.

The combination is precise: Obsidian Bases organizes your knowledge visually. Claude Code maintains it automatically. You use the system. Claude runs it. I have not manually managed my database since I set this up.

The other dimension this unlocks is content creation. Because Claude has access to your entire second brain, every note you have ever taken and every piece of content you have ever created, it uses that as context and source material. For Example, you can ask Claude to write a newsletter, and it will synthesize five relevant notes from your vault, write in your voice, and use your own ideas as source material. Generic prompts with generic AI produce generic output. AI with full context over a well-organized knowledge base produces something else entirely.

Get the Vault Pre-Built

You do not have to build any of this from scratch. I did it for you.

The Sovereign Creator OS Lite is a ready-to-open Obsidian vault with the full system already configured. It includes 10 category containers with Bases queries already set up, 7 subject containers, templates with YAML pre-filled, 8 AI prompts ready to paste into Claude, 3 SOPs covering the complete workflow from capturing content to publishing it, and CLAUDE.md files in every folder so Claude Code understands your system from day one.

To get it, follow this link: Sovereign Creator OS Lite (free). Create a free account, log into the course platform, download the zip, and open it in Obsidian. Configure three settings. Done. Under five minutes from download to a fully operational second brain.

Why This Matters Beyond the System

The goal here is not to have a beautiful vault. A beautiful vault you never use is just a more aesthetically pleasing version of the same problem.

The goal is to build a second brain that compounds over time. Every note you write, every idea you capture, every piece of content you create: it all connects inside this system. The knowledge you build today funds the content you create next month. The ideas you capture this year become the product you launch next year. The system makes that compounding automatic, so you are not rebuilding from scratch every time you sit down to create.

The bigger picture I am working toward with Noah’s Ark is a three-act progression. Act one: build a sovereign second brain. Own your knowledge. Own your tools. Own your data. Act two: turn that knowledge into a profitable creator business. Act three: use the system to fulfill your potential in every area of life. This vault is the foundation. Everything else builds on top of it.

Conclusion

The problem with folder systems was never the folders themselves. It was the assumption underneath them: that notes belong in locations, and that you should be the one deciding where.

Categories and Bases replace that assumption with something better: notes belong to what they are. You describe them. The system finds them. And with Claude Code running inside the vault, even the describing gets automated.

The Sovereign Creator OS Lite gives you the complete pre-built version of this system for free. Download it, open it in Obsidian, and start using it today: Sovereign Creator OS Lite.

Subscribe to the newsletter and follow me if you want more on building AI-powered second brains and turning your knowledge into a creator business. If you have questions, reply to any of my emails or ask in the comments below.

Welcome back to Noah’s Ark. See you soon.

You’ve been here before.

You discover a second brain system. Zettelkasten, PARA, it does not matter which. The benefits are obvious: you never lose a good idea, you learn faster, you think more clearly, you create better content. So you pick a tool, usually Notion, and you spend a weekend building your system. Databases, templates, color-coded tags, everything. It looks beautiful and you feel genuinely productive.

Two weeks later, the whole thing collapses.

The system requires more maintenance than you expected. You have 47 half-filled databases and an inbox with 200 unprocessed items. Processing a single note now takes longer than just writing in Apple Notes. So you stop using it, not all at once, but gradually. One day you realize you haven’t opened it in three weeks.

You go back to Apple Notes or Google Docs. At least it is fast. But your original problem comes back immediately: notes scattered everywhere, no connections, no retrieval, no compounding of your knowledge.

Six months later, someone mentions second brain systems again. The excitement returns. The cycle begins once again.

Here is what I want to make clear before anything else: the problem is not you. The problem is the tool. Most second brain apps were designed for teams and project managers, not for individual thinking and knowledge compounding. They demand constant maintenance just to stay functional. Obsidian was built differently. And with Claude Code inside it, the maintenance problem disappears entirely.

This article breaks down the five reasons why this combination wins, and what it looks like in practice.

Prefer to watch? Click here to watch the video with live demos:

Reason 1: You Own Everything

The core philosophy of Obsidian is “file over app.” Your files matter more than the application.

Every note you write in Obsidian is a plain markdown file on your computer. You can open it in any text editor, in any other app, on any device. The format will never change. Your notes are always readable, whether Obsidian exists or not.

This is data sovereignty. Your vault lives on your hard drive, not on Obsidian’s servers, not in anyone’s cloud. Obsidian has no access to your files. Nobody does unless you choose to sync them. If you want sync across devices, Obsidian Sync is an optional paid feature. You can also use iCloud, Dropbox, or any drive system you already use. You can even put your vault in a GitHub repository and use version control. The choice is entirely yours.

Obsidian is also future-proof by design. What happens if Obsidian shuts down tomorrow? Nothing. Your files are still on your computer. You open them in VS Code, in Typora, in any markdown editor. You can migrate to any future tool that reads markdown, and every major app being built today reads markdown natively, including AI agents. And if everything fails, with AI advancing this fast, you could vibe-code your own note-taking app in a weekend and use it to read your files. That is not a hypothetical. It is a real option.

Obsidian is just a visualizer for markdown files. The files are what matter, and they are yours.

Why Notion Is a Trap

Notion stores your notes in its own proprietary format. You are not writing in an open standard. You are writing inside their system.

Exporting from Notion produces messy HTML or broken markdown with significant formatting loss. If Notion shuts down or changes its pricing, extracting your second brain is a painful, incomplete process. You lose data. You lose years of thinking.

Your notes, your databases, your years of accumulated knowledge are all tied to their platform. You pay their subscription to access your own thinking. And if you want AI in Notion, you pay extra for their proprietary AI on top of that. Yes, you can connect Claude to Notion via MCP, but that is far less effective than running Claude Code directly inside your files. Within their own ecosystem, you lose model choice, you lose privacy, and you remain bound to their terms.

There is also a product direction problem. Notion started as a note-taking app. Today it is a project management platform, a wiki, a CRM, a spreadsheet, a website builder. Every new feature makes it slower and more complex. The more powerful it becomes for teams, the worse it gets for individual thinkers. You end up maintaining your tool instead of thinking inside it. If you have ever built a Notion workspace with rollups, custom formulas, and linked databases, you know exactly what painfully slow feels like. That is not a bug. That is the consequence of choosing a team tool for personal thinking.

Obsidian’s Killer Features

1) Bases: Databases Without Lock-In

Obsidian Bases is a native database system built directly on your files. You can track any object type: books you have read, newsletters you have written, notes by status, videos by project. You can filter, sort, and group. Everything Notion promised, built on plain text files.

The performance difference is immediate. Bases are fast because the underlying files are lightweight markdown. Even with 400 permanent notes in a base, navigation is instant. And if Obsidian ever disappears, your files remain in plain text. Another app reads them without effort.

To give you a concrete example: I have a YouTube Videos base that shows every video I have ever created, with columns for type, status, creation date, and published date. I can switch between views to see only scripts, only metadata files, or only published videos. I have a Permanent Notes base with over 400 notes from my Zettelkasten, filterable by concept type. I have a Newsletters base with every issue I have written, organized by subject and status. All of it is instant. All of it sits on plain markdown files.

2) Graph View: Your Knowledge Made Visible

Every note in Obsidian can link to another via wikilinks. The Graph View visualizes all those connections as a network. You see clusters of related ideas, gaps in your knowledge, and unexpected bridges between topics.

This is how your brain actually works. The brain does not think in hierarchical folders. It thinks in associative connections. Graph View makes those connections visible. One note leads to three others, and new connections surface as you navigate. When you want to write a newsletter, create a video script, or write a book, you open Graph View, navigate through your concepts, find the connections between them, and the ideas are already there. You never start from a blank page.

3) The Plugin Ecosystem

Thousands of community plugins extend Obsidian in any direction you need. Kanban boards, calendar views, spaced repetition, citation managers, mind maps. The ecosystem is vast.

My rule: start with zero plugins and add one only when you have a specific problem. A vault with 50 plugins is a system waiting to break itself. Stay minimal. And be thoughtful about which community plugins you install — they are coded by independent developers, and supply chain security risks apply. For most use cases, the core Obsidian features are more than enough.

The plugin I find most useful is Smart Connections. It shows how different notes in your vault relate to a note you have open. If you are writing a newsletter and want to find existing notes that could add depth to it, you open Smart Connections and it surfaces relevant notes instantly. That is the only plugin I use regularly.

Reason 4: The AI Paradox

Every second brain app rushed to add native AI in 2023 and 2024. Notion AI, Evernote AI, all of them added AI as a layer on top of their proprietary format.

Obsidian said no.

Obsidian’s position: AI is not our priority. Privacy comes first. AI integration is available through plugins, but we are not building it natively. That decision looked like a weakness at the time. Paradoxically, it made Obsidian the best AI app available.

Why? Because AI works best with plain text files. Markdown. Exactly what Obsidian reads and creates on your computer.

When you run Claude Code inside your Obsidian vault, Claude reads your notes directly. No API overhead, no format translation, no workaround. Claude opens the same folder you work in and reads the same files in the same format. The AI and your second brain are the same system. No secondary app that hosts your data on a proprietary server can offer this.

And because Obsidian is an open platform, you choose the intelligence you bring to it. I use Claude because it is currently the most capable AI agent available at the moment. But if you want a local model for privacy, you can install Ollama and connect it via plugin. If a better model comes out next year, you switch. Obsidian does not lock you into any AI provider.

On privacy: Claude Code processes your files locally, and files are only transmitted when you explicitly send them. Anthropic does retain session data for a limited period for legal compliance, and you can configure data collection settings. This is not perfect privacy, but it is the best available balance between capability and privacy. For context: Notion AI processes your notes on their servers using their own terms. Your second brain is your most private intellectual asset. It should stay as private as you need it to be, and this setup gives you the most control.

Reason 5: Claude Code Eliminates the Maintenance Problem

The real reason second brain systems fail is not the methodology. It is the maintenance overhead.

Building a second brain used to mean learning the tool, setting up templates, establishing naming conventions, designing tag taxonomies, building folder hierarchies. Every time you wanted to change something, you faced hours of manual reorganization. You spent more time tending to the system than thinking inside it.

Claude Code lives inside your vault. It reads every file, understands the structure, knows your categories, your templates, and your writing style. Every session it picks up exactly where you left off.

What this means in practice: you can create a new base for a content type you have never tracked before, with one prompt. You can rename a property across 400 files in minutes. You can reorganize a folder structure without breaking any links. You can update tags, add frontmatter, connect orphan notes, process your inbox, all through natural language commands. The maintenance that used to take hours now takes minutes.

A personal example: I recently migrated my entire vault from a folder-based system to a property-based system using Obsidian Bases. That meant updating over 549 notes with new YAML frontmatter, moving almost 1,000 files to the correct folder structure, creating all the base files, and rebuilding all the templates. I gave Claude Code the architecture plan, it executed, I reviewed and validated. That migration would have taken weeks of manual work. It took less than 30 minutes.

What This Means for Getting Started

You no longer need to build the perfect system before you start.

Start with a folder and a few notes. Then tell Claude Code: “Help me build a system around what I already have.” It will interview you, propose a structure, and you validate it. As your needs evolve, you evolve the system with one prompt. The barrier that broke every previous second brain attempt is gone.

The Obsidian CLI makes this even more powerful. The CLI (Command Line Interface) lets Claude navigate your vault using native commands rather than reading markdown files one by one. It is dramatically more efficient and gives Claude a complete structural understanding of your system. One setting, activated once.

Conclusion: Why Obsidian Won

Obsidian won the second brain competition by refusing to play the same game as everyone else.

No proprietary lock-in. No forced AI. No cloud dependency. No bloated feature set. A minimal, open, future-proof platform where you bring your own intelligence. And when you bring Claude Code, the maintenance problem disappears, the system compounds, and the second brain actually becomes useful.

The combination solves the loop I described at the start. File over app means your notes belong to you permanently. Bases give you the database power of Notion without any lock-in. Graph View makes your knowledge visible and navigable. The AI paradox means you have the best AI integration available precisely because Obsidian refused to build one. And Claude Code means the system works for you, not the other way around.

If you want to get the full setup running, I built a complete video showing how to install Obsidian, connect Claude Code, and download my free vault template. Everything you need is below. The setup takes under 20 minutes and is entirely free to start.

→ Full setup video — Build Your AI Second Brain with Obsidian + Claude Code

→ Noah’s Ark Bank — free vault template

If this article changed how you think about your second brain: share it with someone who is still stuck in the loop. And subscribe for weekly content on second brain systems and building a profitable and purposeful creator business.

Drop your biggest question in the comments. I read and answer every single one.

Welcome back to Noah’s Ark. See you soon.

You probably consume a lot.

Books, articles, videos, podcasts. You take notes. You save highlights. You maybe even have a second brain somewhere, a folder system you were excited about for three weeks before it turned into a digital junk drawer.

A week after consuming something, you could not explain what you learned if your life depended on it. The notes exist. The highlights are there. But you never use any of it.

Here is the truth: the problem is not that you consume too little. The problem is that you consume too much with no system to turn it into something. So you end up with a beautifully organized graveyard.

Then AI arrived and was supposed to fix this.

It did not.

You open ChatGPT, explain your context, get a decent answer, close the tab. Next session: explain it all again from zero. The AI does not know you. It cannot know you. It has no access to your notes, your projects, your voice. So you give it generic context and you get generic output. You can spend weeks obsessing over your prompts and still get mediocre answers.

And the second brain methods — PARA, Zettelkasten, MOCs — they are all valid. But they all require months of learning before they work. Most people spend more time building the system than using it.

So here is the promise of this article: a fully functional AI second brain, from scratch, entirely free, set up in under 15 minutes. An AI that reads your notes, organizes your inbox, finds connections, and creates content from your own thinking. One that gets smarter every session automatically.

Prefer to watch? The full setup with live screen demo is on YouTube:

What You Need: Two Tools

The entire setup is built on two tools. That is all.

Obsidian is where your second brain lives. It is free, requires no subscription, and your files live on your computer as plain markdown. You own your data completely. Unlike Notion, Evernote, or any proprietary tool, there is no lock-in. And because your notes are plain text files, AI reads them natively, with no API overhead, no workaround.

Claude Code is the AI agent that lives inside your vault. The Claude app is free to download. You will need a Claude subscription (around €20/month) to use it fully. That is the entire cost of the setup.

Part 1: Set Up Your Second Brain Structure

Step 1 — Download Obsidian

Go to obsidian.md and download the app. It is free, no subscription needed. Open it and you will see the interface.

Step 2 — Get the Vault Template from Noah’s Ark Bank

Instead of building the folder structure from scratch, I built one for you. Go to Noah’s Ark Bank — you can find the link below and it is completely free.

→ Noah’s Ark Bank — free vault template

You will find the LIFE OS vault zip file there. Download it, unzip it, open Obsidian, go to Manage Vaults, and open the unzipped folder as a vault.

That is it. You now have a complete second brain structure ready to use.

What Is Inside the Vault

The vault follows the IPARAG structure: six folders, each with a clear purpose.

• Inbox — everything lands here before you process it. The rule: process to zero regularly.

• Projects — time-bound outcomes with a finish line. A deadline, a completion criterion.

• Areas — ongoing responsibilities with no end date. Health, business, relationships.

• Resources — reference material, templates, guides, SOPs.

• Archives — completed projects, past content, historical records.

• Galaxy — your Zettelkasten. One note per concept, flat structure, growing forever.

The first five folders are based on the PARA method: organize by what you are going to do with the content, not by topic. That single question routes every note to the right place.

The Galaxy folder is different. It is your knowledge base, permanently connected through wikilinks, with no subfolders. Ever. Over time, the Galaxy becomes the most valuable part of your entire second brain because it compounds. Every note you add connects to existing ones and creates new value.

The template also includes a complete flat tag system to organize by type, status, and subject. This makes retrieval easy: you find things by what they are and what they are about, not just where they are stored.

If you want to go deeper on the full IPARAG system and the Zettelkasten method, I have a video that covers everything: How to Build Your Second Brain in 2026

But the key point is this: Claude will already be trained on all of it. You do not need months of learning before the system works. The AI handles the methodology for you.

Part 2: Connect Claude to Your Vault

Step 1 — Download the Claude App

Go to claude.ai/download and install the desktop app. Once open, find the Code section inside the app. This is different from the standard chat interface. It is where Claude Code lives: an AI agent with direct access to your file system.

Step 2 — Open Your Vault in Claude Code

Inside the Code section, click to select a folder and point it at your Obsidian vault folder. That is all. Claude Code is now connected to your vault and has permission to read, write, and navigate your files.

Step 3 — Enable the Obsidian CLI

Inside Obsidian, go to Settings and find the Command Line Interface option. Enable it.

This lets Claude navigate your vault using native commands rather than reading raw markdown files one by one. It is dramatically more token-efficient and gives Claude a complete structural understanding of your system. One setting, activated once, and Claude becomes significantly smarter inside your vault.

Part 3: Configure Your CLAUDE.md File

The vault template already includes a CLAUDE.md file at the root. Claude reads this file at every session startup, automatically, before anything else. It already contains the full IPARAG structure, routing rules, note format, and tag taxonomy — Claude knows how your system works from day one.

What it does not have yet is your personal context: who you are, what you do, what you are building, what your current focus is.

The best way to fill that in: open Claude Code and ask it to interview you.

Type something like: “I want to personalize the CLAUDE.md file at the root of this vault. Start an interview — ask me everything you need to know to create a powerful and efficient AI second brain for me.”

Claude will ask you questions. You answer. It writes and updates the file automatically.

My tip: use a voice dictation tool like Whisper Flow to answer out loud instead of typing. You give Claude ten times more context in a quarter of the time. Whisper works inside any text field on your computer, including Claude Code.

Once the CLAUDE.md is filled in, that context loads automatically every single session. Claude knows your system from the first prompt, every time.

The Compounding Effect

The first time you use Claude Code, it knows your folder structure. After a week, it knows your projects and current focus. After a month, it becomes your personalized operating system. It knows more about your knowledge base than you can consciously remember at any given moment.

The more you use your second brain, the smarter your AI gets. Automatically.

Five Use Cases to Start With

1. Automatic Inbox Triage

Drop files, notes, and highlights into your inbox. Tell Claude: “Process my inbox for me.”

Claude reads every item, routes each file to the correct IPARAG folder, and asks when it is unsure. Your inbox goes to zero. You did nothing.

Any time you want to update your folder structure or change how the system works, you ask Claude to update it. The maintenance work that used to eat your time is now a single sentence.

2. Book Learning Coach

You finish a book and have highlights and a literature note. Tell Claude: “Help me work through this book.”

Claude reads your highlights, asks which concepts surprised you, which ones challenge what you already believe, and suggests which ideas are worth turning into permanent notes. You decide and you write. Claude helps you extract signal from noise, because not every highlight deserves a permanent note.

You can also ask Claude to quiz you on the key concepts a week later for spaced repetition.

And because Claude is inside your vault, it can find unexpected connections between this book and other notes you already have on other topics. That is something you could not do easily in a chat interface.

3. Connection Finding

As your Galaxy grows, you stop seeing all the connections manually. With 300 notes, you cannot remember everything that links to everything else.

Tell Claude: “What notes in my vault relate to this concept?” Claude searches the entire vault, surfaces notes you had forgotten, and suggests new links to create. Your knowledge base stays alive and connected instead of siloed.

4. Writing Partner

If you want to write a newsletter or a video script, tell Claude the topic.

Claude will scan your entire vault: past content for voice reference, Galaxy notes on the concept, structures you already use. It surfaces related ideas you had forgotten and suggests a structure aligned with how you already write. It gives you the context, the connections, and the scaffolding. Then you write.

The voice is yours. The thinking is yours. But you have an AI that elevates your notes into content without replacing your original thinking.

An AI that knows your vault produces output that sounds like you, built from what you actually think — not from generic training data.

5. Journaling Pattern Analysis

If you journal regularly inside your vault, over time you can ask Claude to analyze all your entries. It will find recurring themes, emotional patterns, blind spots, the same blocks showing up under different names.

Your second brain becomes a mirror. An AI-powered journal that helps you understand yourself better over time.

One Rule for All of This

I am not recommending you let AI build your second brain for you.

If Claude writes all your permanent notes, your Galaxy is Claude’s thinking, not yours. If Claude writes all your content, your audience follows a language model, not you.

Use AI as a partner that elevates your thinking. Let it surface relevant information, suggest connections you had not found, and structure concepts before you create. But you are the one who synthesizes, decides, and creates.

That distinction is everything. Your second brain should compound your intelligence. Not replace it.

Conclusion

You now have everything you need.

Two tools: Obsidian and Claude Code. One free vault template with the full IPARAG structure and a pre-configured CLAUDE.md. A setup that takes under 15 minutes and produces an AI second brain that knows who you are from the first session.

Go to Noah’s Ark Bank, download the vault template, and follow the three steps above. It is entirely free.

→ Noah’s Ark Bank

By joining Noah’s Ark Bank you will also be subscribed to my daily emails. I write every day about building a second brain and turning it into a profitable and purposeful business. You can unsubscribe any time, but if you want to be part of this community of sovereign creators, I would love to have you inside.

If you want to go further with advanced features — MCP integrations, custom skills, sub-agents, and full workflow automation — watch the deep dive video here: I Connected Claude Code to Obsidian

And if this article gave you value: like, subscribe, and drop a question in the comments. I answer every single one.

Welcome back to Noah’s Ark.

See you soon.

Two weeks ago, I connected Claude Code to my Obsidian vault. And since then, I’ve been having insomnia.

Not bad insomnia. The good kind. The kind that comes when your mind is so stimulated by what you’re building that it refuses to stop working, even at 2am. Every night I lie in bed thinking about new possibilities, new workflows, new ways to use this system. I’ve never experienced that from a tool before.

So in this article, I’m going to show you exactly what I built and why it’s the most powerful AI setup I’ve ever used as a creator.

But before we get to the solution, I need to explain the problem. Because most people who use AI every day are running into it — and they don’t even know it.

So grab a coffee, take your time, and let’s dive in.

Prefer to watch? If you want to see the full setup in action, with live demos of every workflow described in this article, the video covers everything:

The AI Problem No One Talks About

Every time you open Claude or ChatGPT, you start from zero.

You explain who you are. You describe what you’re working on. You give context about your audience, your tone, your goals. You get a decent answer. You close the tab. And the next time you open it, you do exactly the same thing all over again.

The AI does not know you. And because of that, the output is always generic.

Most people blame the prompt. But the prompt is not the problem. Context is everything when it comes to getting good AI output. Generic context produces generic results. You can spend weeks obsessing over your prompts and still get mediocre answers if the AI has no idea who you are, what you’re building, and what you’ve already created.

The Built-in Memory Solution Is Broken

Claude and ChatGPT both have built-in memory features. They were supposed to solve this. They don’t.

The problem is structural: those systems save arbitrary snippets automatically, without your control or editorial judgment. There’s no hierarchy. No organization. No way to know what the AI is or isn’t remembering. It mixes your projects, remembers the wrong details, and creates noise. At its worst, you get AI that inserts references from your 2am journaling session into your next business proposal. It’s not a system. It’s an approximation of a system.

The Real Solution: Put the AI Inside Your Second Brain

Instead of going to the AI, you put the AI inside your system.

When Claude Code opens inside your Obsidian vault, it reads your notes, your projects, your context, your writing rules. It knows who you are from the first prompt in every session. You don’t re-explain anything. And it gets smarter every time you use it.

That’s the fundamental shift.

My Setup: Two Tools, One System

The setup I’m using combines two tools: Obsidian and Claude Code.

Obsidian is where my second brain lives. Claude Code is the AI agent that lives inside it. Together, they create an intelligent second brain that reads, writes, and acts on my behalf.

Why Obsidian

Obsidian is free and requires no subscription. Your files live on your computer as a local folder of plain markdown files. You own your data and nobody else does.

The markdown format is universal: any app can read it, and AI reads it natively. Unlike Notion, Evernote, or OneNote, there is no proprietary format. You’re not locked into anything. Even if Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, your files would still be there, readable by any text editor on earth.

What makes Obsidian particularly powerful for this setup is the direct file access. Notion stores your data in a format that isn’t cleanly accessible to external AI. With Obsidian, Claude reads your files directly, with no API calls and no workarounds. You and the AI work in the same folder simultaneously, in different interfaces, with the same context.

Why Claude Code Specifically

Claude Code is a genuine agent. It doesn’t just answer questions. It reads, writes, and modifies files, executes terminal commands, and can even launch sub-agents to parallelize work across your vault.

Two things make it exceptional for this use case. First, it reads a CLAUDE.md file and a memory.md file at every startup, automatically, before anything else. Second, it has full access to your file system in whichever folder you open it in, with persistent context across every conversation.

It’s also extendable via MCP (Model Context Protocol) to connect to external tools, which I’ll explain later.

The Terminal: Not What You Think

To use Claude Code, you need to open it in your terminal. And I know what you’re thinking. You saw “terminal” and almost closed this article. Stay with me.

The terminal is not as scary as it looks. It’s just an interface that lets you run commands and navigate your computer with text instead of clicks. Every click you make on your screen is a command the terminal could run. Claude Code can do all of that, plus everything you can’t reach by clicking.

The visual interfaces (Claude.ai, apps, wrappers) are limited by design. They don’t give Claude full access to your file system. The terminal removes that limitation. And that’s where the real power lives.

The Only Three Commands You Need

You don’t need to become a developer to use the terminal. You need exactly three commands:

pwd tells you which folder you’re currently in. Run it and you’ll see your current location in the file system.

ls lists all files and subfolders in the current directory. If you opened the Finder and looked at the same folder, you’d see exactly the same thing.

cd "[folder-name]" navigates into a folder. And cd .. takes you back one level up.

That’s it. Three commands. Everything else, Claude handles.

How to Launch Claude Code in Your Vault

There are two ways to do it.

The first: open your terminal, use cd to navigate until you’re inside your Obsidian vault folder, then type claude. That’s all it takes.

The second, and easier one: find your vault folder in Finder, right-click on it, go to Services, and select “New Terminal at Folder.” Your terminal opens directly inside the vault. Type claude and you’re in.

From that moment, Claude is inside your system. It reads your context immediately. It knows your folder architecture, your projects, your writing rules. It knows more about your setup in the first prompt than most collaborators would after a week of onboarding.

CLAUDE.md and Memory: The Context That Grows

What transforms Claude Code from a useful tool into a genuine second brain is the context system. Specifically, two files: CLAUDE.md and memory.md.

Your context lives in your files, not in AI memory. That’s the key insight. With Claude Code, your context is readable, editable, and fully structured markdown that you control. Everything Claude knows about you is stored in files you can open, read, and modify at any time.

CLAUDE.md: The Brain of the Brain

Claude reads CLAUDE.md at every session startup, automatically, before anything else. This file is where you store everything Claude needs to know: who you are, your current projects, your folder architecture, your writing rules, your preferences, your guidelines.

Claude can update this file as you work together. If it does something you don’t like, you tell it: “Update your CLAUDE.md so you don’t make that mistake again.” After five sessions, Claude knows your projects, your voice, your standards, and your preferences better than most human collaborators would.

You can even do what I call meta-optimization: ask Claude how it would restructure the CLAUDE.md file to be even more efficient, then let it update the file itself. You can also ask it what information it still needs to do its best work, and have it run through a series of questions to fill in the gaps. The context compounds the more you invest in it.

You can place CLAUDE.md files at multiple levels of your vault. I have one at the root that covers my entire system architecture, and individual CLAUDE.md files inside specific folders I use frequently. When Claude navigates into those folders, it reads the local context file automatically.

memory.md: The Session Log

The memory.md file is where Claude records key decisions, patterns, and actions after each session. It gives Claude continuity across conversations and allows it to pick up exactly where you left off.

If you have to stop in the middle of a project, you tell Claude to save everything it needs for next time into its memory. The next time you open Claude and pick up that project, it remembers your progress, your decisions, and what you were building toward.

Ask Claude to update memory.md at the end of each session. Over time you’ll have a detailed log of everything you’ve built together, every rule you’ve established, every decision you’ve made.

The Compounding Effect

Here’s what this means in practice.

Use Claude Code once and it knows your folder structure. Use it five times and it knows your projects, your current focus, and your voice. Use it twenty times and it becomes your personalized operating system. It knows more about your knowledge base than you consciously remember at any given moment.

The more you use your second brain, the smarter your AI becomes. Automatically. That’s the power of this entire setup.

Real Use Cases: What I Actually Do With This

I’ve been running this setup for two weeks. In those two weeks, it has fundamentally changed the way I work. Here are the use cases that matter most.

Knowledge Management

My Zettelkasten system has around 491 permanent notes. Claude navigates all of them.

The tasks it handles for knowledge management would have taken me hours before. It can update tags across hundreds of files after a taxonomy change, completing in minutes what used to take an entire afternoon. It finds notes that should be linked to each other but aren’t. It creates new permanent notes from literature notes: reading my highlights, synthesizing the core concept, formatting the note correctly, and linking it to existing connected notes. And it surfaces thematic connections across years of notes instantly, finding clusters of ideas I had forgotten I’d written about.

To give you a concrete example: I can open Claude Code and type “find me five permanent notes in my Galaxy about the subconscious mind.” Claude searches my file system, reads the relevant files, and returns five permanent notes with sources and summaries in seconds — entirely through a natural language request. (If you want to see this live, watch the video above.)

Content Creation with Full Vault Context

Before Claude writes anything, it launches sub-agents that scan my vault. It finds related Galaxy notes, past newsletters on the topic, previous content pieces, and existing outlines. The result is that content gets built on everything I’ve ever thought and written, not from a blank page.

The outline for this article was built using exactly this workflow.

Here’s a concrete example of what this looks like: I asked Claude to find five permanent notes about the subconscious mind, then immediately asked it to write a newsletter using those notes, following my writing style, with a classic AIDA structure. Two minutes later, Claude had produced a complete draft: proper metadata, title, subject line suggestions, preview text, key takeaways, and the full email, all formatted exactly as I format my newsletters. The prompt I wrote was barely two sentences. (If you want to see this running live from start to finish, watch the video above.)

That’s the leverage of having an AI that has already read everything in your knowledge base before you even ask it to create something.

Skills: Workflows as Slash Commands

This is where the system becomes exponentially powerful.

Every workflow you build with Claude Code can become a repeatable command. Here’s how it works: you run a workflow with Claude, then at the end of the session you ask it to write an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the process. You save that SOP as a skill file. From that point on, you type /skill-name in the chat and the entire process runs automatically.

Every workflow becomes a permanent, callable command. The system grows in capability the more you use it.

To see how fast this works: after completing the newsletter-from-Galaxy workflow, I asked Claude to turn it into an SOP and create a skill file. Two minutes later, Claude had written a complete agent definition (identity, context, eight steps, checkpoints, good and bad output examples), created the skill file, and linked everything together. A workflow that required manual effort every time became a single command. (Watch the video above to see this built in real time.)

I do this at the end of every productive session. We work through a problem together, I’m happy with the output, and I ask Claude to create a new SOP and skill based on what we just did. Over time, my skill library grows into a personal automation system built entirely around how I actually work.

MCP: Connecting Claude to External Tools

Claude Code doesn’t have to stay limited to your local vault. With MCP (Model Context Protocol), you can connect it to external tools and services.

MCP is a standard that lets Claude Code communicate with external apps and APIs in real time. Without it, Claude only sees your local vault. With it, Claude can read from and act on your other tools as part of the same workflow.

Things3: Live Task Management

I’ve connected Claude to Things3, my task management app. Claude has live access to all my tasks, projects, and areas.

The practical application is simple: I can ask “what are my priorities for today?” and Claude reads Things3 directly to give me a real, personalized answer based on what’s actually scheduled, without leaving the terminal.

Tana: Capture and Voice Notes

I use Tana as my capture system. It has great mobile widgets for instant capture via text or voice note, with auto-transcription. I assign tags to sort different types of content automatically: YouTube ideas, newsletter topics, tweet concepts.

Claude has access to my entire Tana capture system via MCP.

The most powerful thing I’ve built on top of this is a skill called /voicenotetoletter. When I invoke it, Claude fetches the latest voice note from my newsletter supertag in Tana, translates it near-literally from French, formats it as a complete newsletter, saves it to the correct folder in my vault, and generates a description, curiosity-based bullet points, and five subject line suggestions. An entire content pipeline runs in one command.

That’s the power of MCP: your vault, your tasks, your capture system, and your content pipeline all become one integrated system operated from a single interface.

The Cost: Why This Is the Best Value Setup Available

The entire setup costs €20 per month. That’s it.

Obsidian is free. Claude Pro is approximately €20/month. The MCP servers I use for Things3 and Tana are free and self-hosted on my computer.

To understand why this is exceptional value, you need to understand how most AI productivity tools work. They charge you a subscription fee and then bill API usage on top. They make margin on the API tokens you consume. Per-token billing costs significantly more per session than a flat subscription. With Claude Pro, you get substantially more usage for €20 than you’d get paying equivalent API costs through another app.

The Notion comparison is worth spelling out clearly. A lot of people built their second brain in Notion, and for years I did too. The problem with Notion is that you spend more time maintaining the system (databases, views, templates, relations) than actually using it. And when you want to connect AI, you run into the proprietary format problem: Notion’s data isn’t cleanly accessible to external AI, and you end up locked into Notion’s own AI offering, which comes with a margin.

With Obsidian: plain text files. Claude maintains your context automatically. You don’t configure anything. You just work.

The Honest Assessment: Pros and Cons

I want to be straight about what this setup is and what it demands from you.

What It Does Well

The context is persistent, readable, and grows automatically with every session. It works with your existing Obsidian vault immediately, the day you install Claude Code. It’s extendable via MCP, custom skills, sub-agents, and web browsing. It’s the cheapest high-power AI setup available. And every piece of context the AI has about you is stored in plain markdown files you can read, edit, and fully control at any time.

If at any point Claude’s understanding of you feels off, you open the CLAUDE.md file, fix it, and that’s the end of it. Full control, all in plain text.

What It Demands

Terminal comfort is not optional. The visual Claude.ai interface is weaker because it doesn’t give Claude full system access. That’s a structural limitation, not a bug. The power lives in the terminal, and if you want the power, you have to go there.

That said, it’s genuinely not as difficult as it looks. Invest a few hours getting comfortable with pwd, ls, and cd. Practice opening folders in the terminal. Within a week, it won’t feel foreign anymore. The discomfort is short. The capability is permanent.

The initial setup takes time as well: writing a solid CLAUDE.md, organizing your files into your vault, running the first calibration sessions to get Claude properly aligned with your system. But here’s the workaround: you can literally dump all your files into an inbox folder and ask Claude to organize them for you according to your system. You can even point it to my YouTube videos and ask it to build the folder structure according to my methodology. Because Claude can write files and create folders, it can build the system for itself.

Finally, the setup is less effective if your primary knowledge base lives in a proprietary format like Notion or Evernote. You need local markdown files for the full experience. That said, via MCP, Claude can access content stored in other tools and import it into your vault if needed. There are always workarounds.

What About Eden?

A lot of people who follow my content originally found me through my Kortex and Eden content. So I want to be direct about where Eden fits.

I use Obsidian with Claude Code because it’s the most powerful setup I know for this kind of work. All the reasons in this article support that choice. But that doesn’t mean Eden is wrong for you.

Eden is a solid alternative if you’re not comfortable with the terminal and have no interest in becoming comfortable with it. If you want a visual, all-in-one interface where everything lives in the same place. If you’re fine with your data on the cloud. If you want features Obsidian doesn’t offer natively: YouTube video transcription directly into your vault, built-in cloud storage, or native collaboration features.

Everything I’ve described in this article applies to Eden as well. The IPARAG folder structure, the context system, the agentic workflows: all of it translates directly. Eden’s agents give you the same capabilities in a more visual environment. And because both tools use native Markdown, if you build your system in Eden and decide later you want to move to Obsidian, the migration is clean and lossless. The option is always open.

One thing to know about Eden’s credits: Eden runs on the API, meaning your usage is billed per token rather than covered by a flat subscription. For light to moderate use, credits will last and you’ll be fine. For heavy power use (modifying hundreds of files at once, running long agentic sessions multiple times a day), credits may burn faster than Claude Code on Claude Pro, which can get expensive quickly.

Test it against your actual usage pattern before committing to a plan.

For those of you who migrated from Kortex to Eden and have no desire to switch systems again: don’t. Apply what I’ve shown you in this article directly inside Eden. It works. The system is the system, regardless of the tool. That’s the most important thing to take away from this section.

Conclusion: How to Start Today

You now understand the most powerful AI setup I’ve found for creators.

The foundation is simple: context beats prompts. Always. When your AI knows your folder structure, your projects, your voice, your writing rules, and your entire knowledge base, the quality of its output changes completely. The setup compounds: every session makes Claude more useful, more personalized, and more aligned with how you think and work.

Here’s how to implement this starting today:

1. Install Obsidian (free). If you already have a vault, open it.

2. Install Claude Code. Open your terminal and run npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code. It will prompt you to link your Anthropic account. That’s all the setup it needs.

3. Navigate to your Obsidian vault in the terminal. The easiest way: right-click your vault folder in Finder, go to Services, and select “New Terminal at Folder.”

4. Type claude to launch Claude Code inside your vault.

5. Ask Claude: “Read my vault structure and write a CLAUDE.md file for me.” From that first session, your AI has context. You’re in.

If you want to skip the setup and start with a system already built, I’ve created a complete LIFE OS vault template (free): the full IPARAG folder structure, a CLAUDE.md template, note templates, skill examples, and everything you need ready to import into Obsidian. You’ll find the link in the description at Noah’s Ark Bank, my free collection of templates, prompts, and SOPs for building your AI second brain.

» Click here to download the entire LIFE OS Vault Template to build your AI Second Brain now for free

If this changed how you think about AI: share the article. And if you haven’t watched the video yet, it covers the live demos of every workflow described here:

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Drop your biggest question in the comments. I read and answer every single one.

Welcome back to Noah’s Ark. See you soon.

Most people read books, take notes, watch videos, save articles — and then forget everything.

A week later, you couldn’t explain what you learned if your life depended on it. The notes exist somewhere, buried in an app you haven’t opened in three months. The highlights are there. The ideas are there. But you never use them.

Here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud: the problem isn’t that you don’t consume enough. The problem is that you consume too much, without a system to turn information into knowledge — and knowledge into output.

That’s the trap most creators and knowledge workers are stuck in. You accumulate. You highlight. You save. But nothing compounds. Nothing gets made. Every time you sit down to write a newsletter or record a video, you start from scratch, from a blank page, as if all those hours of learning never happened.

A second brain solves all of this.

A second brain is an external system — a set of apps, folders, and workflows — that captures what you learn, organizes it, connects it, and makes it available when you need it. It doesn’t replace your brain. It amplifies it. Your brain is for having ideas. Your second brain is for storing and connecting them.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the complete system I’ve built over four years and now use daily to learn faster, create content consistently, and never start from a blank page again. We’ll cover three systems: Content Acquisition, Note-Taking via the Zettelkasten method, and Content Creation. I’ll compare the two apps I recommend for implementing this in 2026. And at the end, I’ll tell you how to access all my templates, SOPs, and even a custom AI to help you implement everything for free.

Grab a coffee, take your time, and let’s build this together.

Watch the video version here:

Part 1: The Foundation — IPARAG, Your Folder Architecture

Before building any system, you need structure. Without it, your second brain becomes a digital junk drawer — a mess of files that grows every week but delivers nothing.

Most people organize their notes by topic. They create folders called “Ideas,” “Self-Development,” or “Business” and dump everything inside. A year later, the folder has 300 files and they have no idea what’s in it. That’s the wrong approach.

The right starting point is a single question: what are you going to do with this information?

That question is the foundation of IPARAG — the six-layer system I use to organize everything I capture by purpose, not topic.

Inbox — The Capture Point

Everything lands here first. Voice memos, clipped articles, random thoughts, downloads from a coaching call. You don’t sort, you don’t organize. You just dump. The inbox is a temporary holding zone, not a storage system. The rule is simple: process it to zero regularly — daily if you can, weekly if you must.

One note for the AI era: you can now have agents clean your inbox automatically and route files to the right place. I don’t have this fully set up yet, but it’s coming.

Projects — Time-Bound Outcomes

Projects are things with a clear finish line. “Launch the new course,” “Renovate the kitchen,” “Complete the certification.” If it has a deadline or a completion criterion, it goes here. I subdivide this folder into active projects and “someday maybe” projects — things I want to do eventually but am not working on right now.

Areas — Ongoing Responsibilities

Areas are the domains of your life you maintain and improve over time — health, finances, relationships, business. There’s no end date. You’re just keeping standards up. Every document and file related to a specific area lives under that area’s folder.

Resources — Reference Material for Later

Guides, templates, saved articles, course materials, AI prompts. Stuff you might need someday. It’s not active, but it’s worth keeping. The key distinction between Resources and Areas: resources don’t require regular maintenance.

Archives — Completed or Inactive Items

Finished projects, old content, historical records. The archive exists so your active folders stay clean and uncluttered. Once a month or once a quarter, you sweep through your system and ask: does this need to be here? If not, it goes to the archive. You still have a reference, but it’s not creating noise.

Galaxy — Your Knowledge Layer

This is the special one. The Galaxy is where your Zettelkasten lives — all your permanent notes, in a completely flat file structure, with no hierarchy. No subfolders, no topic categories. Everything at the same level, connected through tags and wikilinks.

This is your mind, externalized. The most valuable part of your entire second brain. And I’ll explain why the flat structure matters in a moment.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down: Why This Matters

Most people organize top-down: they create the folder structure first, before they have any content. The result is a rigid system that doesn’t match how knowledge actually grows.

IPARAG is a hybrid. The top-level folders (Inbox, Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) are top-down — they give you structure for action. But the Galaxy is bottom-up: you capture ideas, create notes, and then connections and clusters emerge organically through tags and wikilinks.

This combination gives you the clarity of top-down structure and the serendipity of bottom-up knowledge. If all your notes are in silos by topic, they’re isolated and can’t connect. If they all live flat in one space, unexpected links form — and that’s where the real value comes from.

Part 2: System 1 — Content Acquisition (Consume Less, Better)

The problem with modern information consumption isn’t quantity. It’s quality and intentionality. We optimize for speed and volume — scroll faster, consume more, save everything. But saving isn’t learning. Highlighting isn’t thinking. And if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing.

The goal of the Content Acquisition system is to consume less, but better — and extract maximum signal from every source you touch.

The Content Hierarchy

Not all sources are equal.

Books have the highest signal-to-noise ratio. They’re dense, edited, and represent long-form thinking. A great book is ten years of someone’s experience compressed into six hours.

There’s a principle called Lindy’s Law: the longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to survive. A book published in 1980 that’s still relevant has been stress-tested by time. The principles that held for a hundred years will likely hold for the next hundred. Prefer timeless over trending.

Articles and newsletters are curated, focused, and up-to-date. Great if you follow the right people.

YouTube and podcasts have lower information density, but they’re powerful for learning nuance, storytelling, and hearing from people who’ve lived the ideas you’re studying.

Tweets and social posts are the lowest signal. Useful for quick inspiration, but I wouldn’t make them a primary learning source. Most of it is noise.

The Tool Stack

Here’s the pipeline I use. Everything flows into one place.

Reader by Readwise is my reading and clipping hub. You save articles and newsletters, read them inside the app, and highlight the sections that matter. Everything syncs automatically to Readwise.

Snipd handles podcasts. While you’re walking or commuting, you can tap a button and clip the last sixty seconds of what was just said. The clip auto-transcribes and exports to Readwise. This has completely changed how I retain ideas from podcasts.

Kindle is where I read books. All highlights sync to Readwise automatically. I’ve been using my Kindle for two years and it’s one of the best investments I’ve made.

Readwise is the central sync layer. Everything flows here — books, articles, podcasts, web clips — and Readwise automatically exports your highlights to your note-taking app. One app. One pipeline. Zero manual effort.

Tana is my quick-capture layer on mobile. I have Tana widgets on my home screen for instant voice or text capture. Every idea that comes while I’m walking, in the shower, or reading — I open Tana, write it down, add a tag, and it’s retrievable in seconds. I’ll talk more about how I use it for content ideas later.

The Daily Habits

Consume after creation, not before. Your morning is your peak cognitive window. If you start by reading newsletters and listening to podcasts, you’re spending your best energy on other people’s ideas. I dedicate my mornings to output — writing, building, creating — and consume in the afternoon and evening. Reading in the morning is fine (it’s still a low-dopamine activity that stimulates without hijacking your focus). But newsletters, podcasts, and social media stay off until I’ve created.

Consume with a question in mind. Active reading beats passive reading every time. Before opening a book chapter, ask yourself: “What’s the main idea here? Does this apply to what I’m currently working on?” It sounds simple, but it changes everything about how you read.

Highlight less. This is the habit I have to keep reminding myself of. The real highlight is the one that surprises you, challenges a belief, or confirms something you already feel is important. When you highlight everything, you’re avoiding the cognitive effort of deciding what truly matters — and you end up with so many highlights that processing them becomes impossible. Be selective. The constraint forces clarity.

Part 3: System 2 — Zettelkasten Note-Taking (Turn Highlights into Knowledge)

Most note-taking systems are graveyards. You save notes, you never revisit them, they accumulate untouched. I was guilty of this for years. I had hundreds of notes I never looked at again.

The problem isn’t the app. It’s the method. Notes are only valuable if they’re connected, synthesized, and retrievable. That’s exactly what the Zettelkasten method is designed to do.

The Three Types of Notes

Fleeting notes are raw captures — highlights from your reading, voice memo transcripts, rough ideas. They’re ephemeral. They exist only to feed literature notes. Don’t try to organize them. Just capture.

Literature notes are one note per source. After you finish a book, an article, or a podcast, you write a single note that summarizes the source in your own words. What was the main argument? What did you learn? What do you disagree with? You add your own commentary, questions, and reactions. This is where you do the work of actually engaging with the material — not just collecting it.

The key phrase is “in your own words.” Copying and pasting quotes isn’t a literature note. Restating the idea in a way that reflects your understanding is.

Permanent notes are the core of the entire system. From your literature note, you extract the single most important ideas and write each one as a standalone note — one concept per note. Once it’s written and linked to other notes in your system, it lives there forever, compounding in value over time.

The Principle of Atomicity

One note equals one concept. This is the most important rule.

A note called “Productivity” is not atomic. It’s a topic. A note called “Why willpower is finite and should be conserved” is atomic. It’s an idea. The difference matters because atomic notes are easy to connect, reuse, and evolve independently. You can link them, surface them, and build on them. A giant topic note just sits there.

If you write a note and realize it covers two ideas, split it into two notes and connect them. The act of splitting and linking is where knowledge gets built.

Connecting Notes — How Knowledge Compounds

The value of your second brain is not in individual notes. It’s in the connections between them. A note that links to five others is worth ten times more than an isolated note.

When I write a new permanent note, I ask myself a set of trigger questions: How does this idea relate to what I already know? Does this challenge or confirm an existing idea in my system? What’s a practical application? What would happen if you reversed the premise?

These questions force me to find existing notes to link to. And over time, those connections form clusters. Clusters become Maps of Content.

Maps of Content (MOCs) are the navigation layer. When you have seven or more notes on a related topic, you create a MOC — a curated index that links to all those notes and shows how they relate to each other. It doesn’t summarize the notes. It maps the territory.

If you open my Galaxy in graph view right now, you’d see the MOCs as the large hubs — Productivity, Memory Retention, Mental Models, Cognitive Bias, Relationships — and hundreds of permanent notes orbiting around them, all connected. That’s what four years of consistent note-taking looks like. It’s one of my most valuable assets.

Part 4: System 3 — Creating Content from Your Notes

Here’s the reframe that changed everything for me: your second brain is not a personal library. It’s a content factory.

Every permanent note you write is a potential piece of content. An insight becomes a tweet. A cluster of notes becomes a newsletter section. A MOC becomes the outline for a YouTube video. The goal is to never start from a blank page — because your ideas are already captured, already processed. Your job is to format and polish them for your audience.

Capturing Content Ideas with Tana

My content pipeline starts in Tana. Every time an idea comes to me — in the shower, on a walk, while reading — I open Tana on my phone and capture it with a tag that corresponds to the content type: tweet, newsletter, YouTube video, story idea, testimonial. I have widgets on my home screen so the capture takes less than ten seconds.

Ideas live in Tana. Content is produced in my second brain, in Obsidian or Eden. Tana is just the entry point — the frictionless capture layer.

The Manual Creation Path

Pick an idea from Tana. Choose a template — short post, newsletter, YouTube script, long-form article. Brain dump everything you already know about the topic, pulling from your Galaxy notes and literature notes. Then fill the template structure: hook, problem, solution, story, CTA. Write the final draft.

This process is so much faster than starting from nothing because the research and synthesis are already done. You’ve already processed the ideas into your own words through your literature and permanent notes. The writing is just assembly at that point.

The AI-Assisted Creation Path

This is my favorite workflow for complex pieces. I record a voice note — usually 3 to 10 minutes — where I explain the idea out loud, as if I’m talking to a smart friend over coffee. No structure, no filter, just thinking out loud. Then I feed the transcript to AI with a prompt: “Structure this as a newsletter” or “Turn this into a YouTube outline.” I also provide writing samples so the AI matches my voice and tone.

AI handles the structure. I handle the soul. Then I edit the output, add specific stories and examples, inject my personality and perspective. The AI gives you the skeleton. You add the flesh.

The next step — which I’m actively using in my own setup — is AI agents that crawl your entire Galaxy, draft outlines automatically, and surface connections between notes you didn’t know existed. This is where AI inside a second brain becomes genuinely powerful. I use Claude Code integrated with Obsidian, and it has access to my entire knowledge base. Having an AI that knows everything you’ve ever learned is a different category of leverage.

The Full Loop

Read a book → highlight the key ideas → write a literature note → extract permanent notes into your Galaxy → that note becomes a tweet → the thread becomes a newsletter → the newsletter becomes a YouTube video.

One idea. Four pieces of content. One system. Infinite leverage.

Part 5: Obsidian vs. Eden — Choosing Your App

Both apps I recommend use Markdown — plain text files, readable by any app, portable, future-proof, and AI-friendly. This is non-negotiable. If your notes are stored in a proprietary format (looking at you, Evernote, Notion), and you want to switch apps in two years, you’re stuck. With Markdown, your notes don’t care which app you open them in. You’re always in control.

Obsidian

Free and open source. Your files live on your computer. No subscription, no cloud lock-in, full ownership. You have a massive ecosystem of community plugins — graph view, daily notes, flashcards, AI integrations, task management. You can build almost any workflow imaginable.

The tradeoff: Obsidian requires more technical setup. You’ll configure plugins, manage file paths, and if you want AI agents working inside your system, you’ll need to get comfortable with the terminal and basic tooling. It’s built for power users who want full control.

Best for: developers, power users, and anyone comfortable with technical tools who wants to own every detail of their system.

Eden (formerly Kortex)

Eden is an all-in-one workspace — files, AI, and agents in a single interface, no configuration required. AI models are natively integrated: you can chat with your notes, ask questions, and generate content directly. You can add a YouTube video by URL and Eden auto-transcribes it and makes it searchable inside your workspace. AI agents can organize your notes, create file structures, and surface connections automatically.

The UI is clean and approachable. Onboarding is easier. You don’t need to touch an API key or a terminal.

The tradeoff: it’s still in beta and evolving quickly. Features change, and bugs appear. But it’s the right tool for creators who want the power of AI inside their second brain without the technical overhead.

Best for: creators who want simplicity and native AI features and want to focus on the craft, not the configuration.

My Personal Setup

I currently use Obsidian with Claude Code, because I’m comfortable with the technical side and I want full control over my system. But for most creators — especially if you’re just getting started — I’d recommend Eden. The good news is that because both use Markdown, you can start in one and switch to the other at any time without losing a single note.

Conclusion: The System That Changes Everything

You now have the complete second brain system I’ve been building and refining for four years.

Three systems: Content Acquisition → Zettelkasten Note-Taking → Content Creation. One pipeline that captures everything you learn and turns it into output automatically.

A folder architecture — IPARAG — that keeps everything organized without effort, so you can always find what you need.

A clear choice between the two best apps: Obsidian for power users, Eden for simplicity.

And a new relationship with your knowledge. Nothing gets wasted. Every book, every podcast, every idea compounds. Your second brain becomes smarter with every note you add. And the more connected your notes become, the more it starts generating content ideas and connections you never consciously made.

I know this might feel like a lot. Four years of building gets compressed into one article, and it can feel overwhelming. But start small. Set up IPARAG. Pick one app. Start your first literature note this week. The rest will follow naturally.

All of the templates I use — the literature note template, the permanent note template, the content creation templates, the full IPARAG folder structure pre-built for Obsidian and Eden — are inside Noah’s Ark Bank, my free resource hub. You also have access to a custom AI trained on all the SOPs and templates that can answer any question about implementing the system, step by step.

Click here to access it for free:

https://noahsark.podia.com/noah-s-ark-bank

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And welcome back to Noah’s Ark.

Noah

When you really think about it, procrastination is paradoxical.

Why don’t we just do the things we actually want to do?

Obviously there are many reasons for that. But when you step back and really think about it, it makes no sense. If you want to do something, you should just do it. If you know something is good for you and important for you, you should just do it right now.

But yet that’s not what happens. Because there are actually major forces going on, both external and internal, that influence you and lead you to procrastinate.

That’s why in this article we’re going to analyze procrastination through Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants framework in order to look at the problem from multiple perspectives. Because most content on this topic only addresses one of those perspectives, and that’s why it’s incomplete. That’s why, despite having watched 60,000 productivity videos on how to beat procrastination, you still haven’t beaten it.

The goal of this article is to give you the keys to understanding procrastination so that you can stop being a victim of it. These keys will allow you, whenever you procrastinate, to analyze the situation in a way that helps you bounce back and actually stop procrastinating. You’ll learn more about yourself and transform every experience of procrastination into an opportunity for learning and growth, which will allow you to constantly progress toward embodying your Higher Self.

So grab a coffee, take your time, and let’s dive in.

If you want to watch the video version of this article, click here:

2) The Framework: Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants

Ken Wilber’s model says that any human phenomenon can be understood through four lenses.

1. Upper Left: Interior-Individual (Subjective / Spiritual). What you feel, think, believe. Your inner world. In the case of procrastination, it’s everything that relates to your values, your vision, your alignment with the task you’re procrastinating on, and all the internal conflicts going on.

2. Upper Right: Exterior-Individual (Objective / Physical). What’s observable and measurable in an individual. Your brain chemistry, your dopamine levels, your habits, and your concrete systems.

3. Lower Left: Interior-Collective (Cultural / Intersubjective). The shared beliefs, narratives, and cultural norms you swim in every day without realizing it. Hustle culture, comparison, perfectionism, the “passion-preneur” myth that we’re going to debunk later.

4. Lower Right: Exterior-Collective (Systemic / Interobjective). The infrastructure, platforms, systems, and structures that surround you digitally and physically. Social media algorithms frying your brain, the attention economy built around making you addicted to content, and your entire digital environment.

Procrastination is never just one problem. It’s always a combination of all four quadrants. If you only fix one, the other three will pull you right back in. They’re all interconnected, so when you work on one quadrant it influences the others. But that’s why in this article we’re going to analyze procrastination and find solutions across all four quadrants, so you can actually beat it forever.

3) Upper Left: Procrastination as a Spiritual Problem

The Alignment Test: Do You Actually Want to Do This?

When you are genuinely aligned with an action, when it comes from a deep, authentic desire, you don’t need to force yourself. It flows. It’s natural. It’s almost effortless.

Think about it: when was the last time you procrastinated on something you were truly excited about? Probably never. You just did it.

So if you’re procrastinating, one of two things is happening.

Scenario A: You don’t actually want to do it.

You’ve convinced yourself you “should” do it. Maybe some guru on YouTube told you to start a podcast, or a mentor said you need to do cold outreach, or a book told you to wake up at 4 AM every day. But deep down, it’s not your desire. It’s an external authority you’ve internalized as your own goal.

In this case, procrastination is actually a healthy signal. Your brain is telling you this isn’t your path. The move here is to question the legitimacy of the action. Where does this obligation come from? Is it aligned with your vision, your values, and what you really want out of life? Or are you chasing someone else’s dream?

Scenario B: You genuinely want to do it, but you can’t seem to start.

You know you want to create content, you know you want to build your business, but something invisible is blocking you. This signals an internal conflict. A part of you wants to move forward, but another part is resisting. It can be fear of judgment, impostor syndrome, fear of failure, or even fear of success.

The move here is to identify the conflict. A very practical exercise: ask yourself “what are all the benefits for me NOT doing this task?” Maybe you’ll realize that not creating content allows you to spend more time with your kids, which reflects that you value family deeply right now and don’t want to sacrifice those moments. In that case, maybe you need to create content at another time, or find a way to honor both values without sacrificing either. Asking this question will help you find better alignment with the task.

Higher Self vs. Lower Self

Napoleon Hill, in Outwitting the Devil, describes two forces inside every person.

1. The Higher Self is the version of you connected to your vision, that acts with intention, that moves toward your goals with clarity and purpose. This is the voice that knows exactly what you need to do. The part of you who is unafraid, resolute, and decisive.

2. The Lower Self is the part that seeks comfort, avoids pain, and is driven by fear and ego. This is the voice that says “do it tomorrow,” “just one more video,” “you deserve a break.” You tell yourself you’ll scroll for 15 minutes and it ends up being two hours. The Lower Self seeks instant gratification and leads you to the habit of drifting. Drifting means you’re not aligned, not decisive, and not intentional.

Procrastination is what happens when your Lower Self wins the daily battle against your Higher Self. Which self rules depends on the dominant nature of your thoughts. Positive thoughts and emotions give control to your Higher Self. Negative thoughts and fear give control to your Lower Self.

The question becomes: which voice are you feeding?

If you’re feeding your Lower Self with negative thoughts and fear, it will give control to your ego, which will seek instant gratification and pull you into every bad habit you want to avoid. But if you’re cultivating gratefulness, joy, harmony, and peace with specific daily practices, you will embody your Higher Self in your daily life.

The Hawkins Scale: Your Frequency Determines Your Capacity for Action

David Hawkins mapped human consciousness on a scale from 0 to 1,000. What I love about this map is the simple idea that the lower your emotions, the lower your frequency, and the more incapable of action you become:

Below 200 are the contracted states: shame (20), guilt (30), apathy (50), fear (100), anger (150). These are low-energy states where action feels impossible.

200 is Courage, the tipping point. This is where action becomes possible because you start believing you can change things.

Above 200 are the expansive states: willingness (310), acceptance (350), reason (400), love (500), joy (540), peace (600). The higher you go, the more natural and effortless action becomes.

When you’re operating below 200, you literally don’t have the energetic capacity to take action. Procrastination isn’t a choice at that point. It’s a consequence of your vibrational state.

When we analyze procrastination through this lens, the question shifts from “how do I force myself to work?” to “how do I raise my frequency so that action becomes natural?”

Upper Right: Procrastination as a Physical Problem

The Psychological Triggers That Make Tasks “Procrastinable”

Research in psychology identifies several characteristics that trigger procrastination:

• If a task is boring and doesn’t stimulate your brain enough, you’re going to procrastinate.

• If it’s frustrating because you don’t know where to start or feel stuck, you’re going to procrastinate.

• If it’s too difficult and the cognitive load is too high, same thing.

• If it’s ambiguous and you don’t know exactly what to do, unstructured because there’s no clear process to follow, or has no immediate reward because the payoff is too far in the future, you’re going to procrastinate.

• And if it lacks personal meaning and you don’t see why you should do it based on your values and worldview, of course you’re going to procrastinate. That last one connects right back to the Upper Left quadrant.

Each of these triggers has a concrete solution. But first, there’s a bigger problem hiding underneath.

The Dopamine Problem: Your Motivation Engine Is Fried

You already know about this because every creator on earth has talked about it. But dopamine is the molecule of anticipation and motivation. It gives you the drive to move toward an action.

If you overstimulate your dopamine system with artificial spikes (social media, video games, porn, infinite scrolling, notifications), your brain recalibrates its baseline. Normal activities like working, creating, reading, thinking, walking no longer produce enough dopamine to motivate you. The result is that you’re physically incapable of taking action. Your brain is running a motivation deficit for the things that actually matter.

And here’s what’s interesting: most of the time, you indulge in instant gratification and cheap dopamine when you lack alignment with your Higher Self. So we come back to the Upper Left quadrant. That’s why I believe procrastination is ultimately, mostly, a spiritual problem. But all of these are interconnected.

If you’re not feeling connected to your purpose, your why, and you don’t have a clear vision of your goals, then of course you’re going to indulge in cheap stimulation. And it’s incredibly easy to do so with all the technology we have nowadays. So you fry your dopamine, and it becomes even harder to take action toward your goals.

The Mental Bandwidth Problem

If your mind is cluttered with notifications, unread messages, open browser tabs, and mental loops about social media, there’s no bandwidth left for creation. Taking action requires focus. Focus requires space. If your brain is running at 80% capacity before you even start working, you only have 20% left for the work that matters.

This is actually a psychological principle called the Zeigarnik Effect: we remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. All the open loops from your phone (unread messages, notifications, half-started tasks) overload your mental RAM and prevent you from thinking clearly and creating. It’s exactly the same as with a computer. If you open too many tabs and applications, you run out of RAM and everything starts lagging.

That’s why you need systems to manage your tasks, projects, and goals, and free your mental bandwidth.

Lower Left: Procrastination as a Cultural Problem

Toxic Productivity Culture

We live in a world where “grind 24/7” is glorified and hustle porn is everywhere. Paradoxically, this creates more procrastination, not less.

When the standard is “work 16 hours a day like Elon Musk,” anything less feels like failure. So you set impossible standards for yourself, feel overwhelmed by the mountain, and end up doing nothing at all. This leads to negative emotions like shame and guilt, which, as we’ve seen with the Hawkins scale, lower your frequency, make you incapable of action, activate your Lower Self, and push you toward instant gratification that fries your dopamine even further.

Cultural perfectionism is one of the biggest hidden drivers of procrastination. It drives negative emotions, shame, and self-sabotage. And it’s a perfect example of how all four quadrants are interconnected.

The “Passion-preneur” Narrative

There’s this idea that if you follow your passion, you’ll never work a day in your life. This creates a dangerous implicit belief: if it’s hard, it must not be your passion, so you should quit.

The reality is that even the most aligned work has boring, frustrating, and difficult moments. Editing videos can be tedious. Answering emails is boring. Building systems is repetitive. Sometimes you have low months and it’s hard to bear the stress.

But if the cultural narrative tells you that it should feel magical every second, you’ll second-guess what you’re doing and start thinking “maybe this isn’t aligned with me,” when in reality it’s just part of the process.

You procrastinate here not because the work isn’t right for you, but because the culture taught you that aligned work should feel effortless 100% of the time. In a way, that’s true: if you find your life’s work, you won’t “work” in the bad sense. But that doesn’t mean it won’t require effort and energy. When you’re aligned with your Higher Self, it becomes easy to put in the effort necessary toward your life’s mission, because the feeling of joy, alignment, and fulfillment drives you.

But let’s be honest. Being a creator, being an entrepreneur, building your business, all of that is scary. It demands you to take risk. It means you will have moments of low income and financial stress. That’s part of the process and you have to embrace it. That doesn’t mean it’s not what you’re meant to do.

The Comparison Trap

When you see creators posting every day, building audiences effortlessly, and seemingly doing everything without breaking a sweat, it creates a gap between where you are and where you think you should be. That gap generates shame. And shame sits at the very bottom of Hawkins’ scale, around 20. It’s one of the most paralyzing emotions a human can experience.

When you’re constantly seeing testimonials of people going from zero to 10K a month and you’ve been creating for six or twelve months and you’re still at zero, it feels awful and makes you procrastinate. That’s why I’m very big on deleting social media and protecting your peace from all that noise. It will only lower your frequency and make it harder to take the action that will actually generate abundance in your life.

Option Overload and FOMO

The current culture glorifies being multi-passionate and having multiple income streams. It’s even worse with AI nowadays, with this constant AI FOMO.

The result is that you have 15 possible projects in your head, you can’t fully commit to any single one, and you procrastinate because choosing one thing means letting go of everything else. But there is only with focus that you can build something meaningful. The paradox of choice is real: the more options you have, the less likely you are to act on any of them.

You need to take a definite decision and focus on one project. That’s why I work in sprints and create quarterly goals. Define your priority for three months, iterate, then take a step back, reflect, and adjust. But always work on one thing at a time.

Lower Right: Procrastination as a Systemic Problem

The Attention Economy

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter are all engineered to capture your dopamine. Thousands of engineers backed by billions of dollars are optimizing algorithms specifically to keep you scrolling.

You don’t lack willpower. You’re just fighting a war against some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering ever created.

The Absence of External Structure

As a creator or solo entrepreneur, you have no boss, no fixed schedule, and no external deadlines. In a traditional job, the system does the heavy lifting: your boss tells you what to do, meetings structure your day, deadlines create urgency.

When you work for yourself, you have to create all of that from scratch. And most people were never taught how, because we always had schedules and were always told what to do, from school to college to having a job. So when you become an entrepreneur and can literally do anything with your day, it becomes paralyzing.

The system itself is set up for procrastination. That’s why you need to learn the soft skills to manage your emotional state for peak spiritual and creative performance, and the hard skills to manage your tasks and projects in alignment with your goals.

The Infobesty Trap

We have access to hundreds of methods, frameworks, productivity systems, apps, and “perfect routines.” This creates a loop of meta-procrastination: you end up spending more time optimizing your productivity system than actually producing anything.

You’re watching videos about procrastination instead of working. You’re reading books about habits instead of building them. You’re building another Notion setup with ten databases that won’t produce anything instead of just creating your next piece of content or your next offer.

The information ecosystem feeds the very problem it claims to solve.

A Digital Environment Designed Against You

If you don’t control your digital environment, it will constantly sabotage you. Notifications on, inbox open, Slack pinging all day, phone face up on your desk. Every buzz, every badge, every red dot is an invitation to break your focus. And the system never stops sending them.

Cut all your notifications and design a digital environment that serves you instead of enslaving you.

The Solution: My Systems to Beat Procrastination Across All Four Quadrants

These solutions follow a pyramid structure, from the most spiritual and important at the top, down to the most tactical and practical at the bottom. This way you can solve procrastination on all fronts.

1. Generating Clarity, Self-Knowledge, and Higher Self Connection

Step 1: Generate clarity on who you are.

“Know thyself and you will know the universe and the gods.” Self-knowledge is step number one. You cannot stop procrastinating if you don’t know who you are and where you want to go.

A powerful way to do this is through personality tests. You can use multiple frameworks: MBTI, Enneagram, Schwartz Values Test, Love Languages, The Five Wounds. If you’re into the spiritual side, you can also look at your Vedic and Western astrological charts.

The goal, just like with the four quadrants, is to use multiple perspectives to understand who you are. Cross-reference the data from all these tests to find the essence of who you are and compare it with your own life experience to see what rings true. Another great method is asking friends and family who know you well to describe who you are when you’re your best self.

If you don’t know where to start, just start with the MBTI and the Enneagram. Give the results to AI, ask it questions, make connections, and try to understand yourself better. AI is very powerful as a self-analysis tool. But be careful not to fall into confirmation bias or the Barnum effect. Take everything with a grain of salt and use it as a way to find insight by yourself.

Step 2: Define your goals across four major life areas.

If you don’t know who you are, you won’t be able to define where you want to go. That’s why generating clarity was the first step. Now define the goals you want to achieve across: Wealth (financial goals, career, what your work looks like), Health (fitness, energy, vitality, sleep), Relationships (friends, family, romantic), and Spiritual (fulfillment, alignment, daily energy, spiritual or religious practices).

Having a clear vision of who you want to be and what you want to achieve over the next five years across these four areas gives you optimal clarity. If five years feels too long, just do one year. You’ll develop a longer-term vision as you start working on it.

Step 3: Create a personal manifesto.

Transform that work into a personal manifesto. I have an entire manifesto that summarizes my life principles, my values, the character traits of my Higher Self, and the person I’m trying to embody every day across all areas: relationships, family, business, everything. It goes into deep detail. The more detailed it is, the more visual and emotional it feels when you read it, the more powerful it is.

Read it every day, ideally twice a day: when you wake up and before you go to sleep. It will connect you to your Higher Self. And constantly update it so it feels personal and resonates deeply.

Step 4: Daily practices to connect with your Higher Self.

First, daily visualization or self-hypnosis. Block 5 to 10 minutes every day to visualize your Higher Self. Feel what he does, how he acts. Visualize past events and how your Higher Self would have acted compared to you, and build the confidence that next time you will act that way. There are thousands of studies showing how creative visualization creates new brain connections. Read Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz if you want to go deeper on this.

Second, daily gratitude. Every morning and every evening, write five things you’re grateful for and take the time to really feel it. Practicing gratitude is the simplest way to raise your frequency on the Hawkins scale. It literally takes less than five minutes a day. Do it for 30 days and your overall gratefulness, joy, and happiness will be 10 times higher.

2. Protecting Your Dopamine and Motivation System

This is all about the via negativa: removing everything that pulls you down. Here’s what I do.

I have zero social media on my phone. Until noon, all apps like email, WhatsApp, and Discord are blocked using the Foqus app (free and open source, highly recommend it). On my computer, I use the Chrome extension NewsFeed Eradicator, which blocks my feed on YouTube, Substack, and all social media. I don’t go on any of them before I’ve finished my workday. This way, even if you have an autopilot habit of opening Instagram while waiting for ChatGPT to answer (don’t lie to me, I know it happens), instead of your feed popping up, you’ll see a quote reminding you it’s not the time to scroll.

With all these systems in place, nothing fries my dopamine before I’ve accomplished my creation tasks for the day. Your morning must be sacred. Dedicate it only to creation, not consumption. The only thing I consume in the morning is reading: 15 to 20 minutes with my first coffee, which I take an hour and a half after waking up so my body can naturally generate cortisol first.

I also have Focus mode on my iPhone blocking notifications almost all day. Zero notifications for all my apps except Reminders and my habit tracking app. Notifications are an insult to your brain. Block all of them.

A good audit test for your dopamine system: when you’re in the shower, what do you think about? If it’s nonsense or video game news, your dopamine is hijacked. The number one thing on your mind when you’re doing nothing should be your projects, your goals, the person you want to become, and the actions you want to take.

3. Deprogramming Toxic Cultural Narratives

I don’t use rigid time-blocking every day because it’s unrealistic. Every day has variability. Some days you start earlier, some days later, some days you’re more intense than others. And that’s okay.

When I first started in entrepreneurship, I felt like every day I had to follow my routine to a T and plan my day by the minute. If I didn’t, I felt awful, and it actually created shame and self-sabotage. Don’t fall into over-optimization and hustle porn. Don’t compare yourself to others. Focus on yourself and on gradual improvement.

If today your goal is just to do one hour of deep work, that’s already exceptional. If you can’t even do one hour, just do 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter. Don’t compare yourself to people who have been doing this for years. I’ve been in online entrepreneurship for eight years, investing in courses, coaches, biohacking, and productivity to master all of this. And despite all that, there are still moments where I procrastinate, moments when I’m less effective, and moments when I fall back into instant gratification.

Forgive yourself for not knowing better until you do better. Creating more guilt, more self-doubt, more shame will actually make things worse. That’s so key.

The ultimate mental model is to see those moments as signals that there’s a misalignment with your vision or your values. Step back, redefine your vision, what you want, your values, how your life can better fulfill what’s important to you across all areas of life, not just work. Use your demons to your advantage. That’s how you stay in a state of joy, lightness, alignment, and even obsession for your goals. Because when you have ultimate alignment, taking massive action becomes easy.

4. Tactical Systems, Structure, and Daily Rituals

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

This is the method I use to manage my goals. You have an objective, which is an inspiring sentence summarizing the goal you want to achieve, and key results, which are KPIs you analyze and update every week to determine your progress. I have OKRs at five years, one year, and quarterly. This creates alignment from macro to micro, so every daily action is connected to where you want to be in five years.

If you want to set up your OKRs, find some articles about the method online, give it to AI or ask Perplexity to create a summary, then use ChatGPT or Claude to guide you through setting your own goals.

GTD (Getting Things Done).

This is my task and project management system. The core elements:

• Inbox. A place where you capture everything that comes to mind: every content idea, task, project, even random thoughts. I use the Things app on Mac and iPhone, and Tana to capture content ideas with tags. Every time I have an idea or task, I note it in my inbox. At the end of the day, I empty my inbox and either transform it into a project (if it’s a list of tasks) or assign it as a task to an area or existing project.

• Projects are lists of tasks organized into areas that correspond to different areas of my life: content creation, lead generation, product creation, but also personal areas like relationships, health, and learning. Anything that doesn’t need to be done now goes into Someday Maybe.

• Weekly review. Every week I look at all my projects, all my tasks, select the priorities for the week, and review the Someday Maybe list to reassign priorities.

• Daily planning. Every evening I define my tasks for the next day. This way I always have absolute clarity, micro and macro, on what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and how it moves me toward my goals.

Start simple. The two most important things from GTD are the inbox and the weekly review. The rest is optional.

Daily Structure.

My workdays follow broad phases, not rigid time blocks. I do deep work sessions of 50 minutes. Every 50 minutes I get up from my chair to counter sedentarity. I try to walk about 7,000 steps a day, which is scientifically optimal for health. During those walks I generate ideas and get clarity on what I’m creating. Walking is also a great time to create using voice notes. If you haven’t been using transcription apps or talking to ChatGPT and Claude while walking, you can get a lot of work done that way.

Shutdown Ritual.

When I finish my workday (usually around 5 to 6 PM), I go through a checklist. I ask myself “how can I consider this day complete?”, review the tasks I’ve done, plan tomorrow’s tasks, and close the day. This creates a clear separation between work and personal life. Because when you work from home, if your work life eats into your personal life, it removes balance and harmony, which leads to potential burnout. And when you crash and burn out, that’s when you give in to instant gratification, which drops you back into your Lower Self, lowers you on the Hawkins scale, and misaligns you.

The Final Message

Procrastination is always a combination of these four forces acting at the same time. All four are interconnected, so when you work on one, it naturally affects the others. But the more you can work on each of them simultaneously, the better.

Connecting with your Higher Self is the most important one because it naturally improves all the others. Then, protecting your dopamine. Then, reprogramming your beliefs so you have beliefs that serve you and make you powerful and aligned, instead of toxic beliefs that generate comparison, shame, and negative thoughts. And finally, having systems, processes, and workflows that allow you to manage your tasks, your goals, and the way you work so everything is optimized for productivity and creativity.

The problem with most procrastination advice is that it only talks about one quadrant. Tips, tactics, and hacks that don’t solve the root of the problem. Most of the time, you don’t really know who you are, you don’t know where you want to go, and you don’t connect with your Higher Self. You have negative thoughts that lower you on the Hawkins scale and prevent you from taking action because your nervous system is in survival mode. On top of that, instant gratification mechanisms destroy your dopamine and make it even harder to take action, which generates even more shame, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

And on top of all of that, you’re living in a system designed to make you addicted to as many things as possible. Social media, fast food, porn. Everything is working against you. If you don’t have systems to protect yourself, you will inevitably be put into submission by all these forces.

The best way to beat procrastination forever is to attack on all four fronts at the same time. Connect with your Higher Self. Protect your dopamine. Deprogram toxic beliefs. Build systems that work for you and protect you from all the addictions and inputs that the world wants you to be a slave to.

If you want to access the entire mind map summarizing everything covered here, you can find it inside Noah’s Ark Bank. And if you want to learn how to build systems that make procrastination almost impossible, subscribe to my email list and feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Every man is what he is because of the dominating thought which he permits to occupy his mind.” — Napoleon Hill

Introduction: How This Book Pulled Me Out of a Rut

For the last three months, I felt really disconnected from my purpose. My business was growing, but I wasn’t feeling driven or stimulated by it. I was just focusing on business as usual — creating content, launching offers, and that was basically it.

So I went to Bangkok, Thailand for a month to switch environments and get out of that rut. During that trip, I started reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And this book had a profound impact on me and on my drive.

Fast forward to now — we’re in February 2026 — and I’m feeling driven and motivated as fuck. What changed was understanding and applying the principles inside that book. That’s why in this article I’m going to share with you all of the principles and big ideas I learned, directly from my second brain permanent notes.

Don’t be fooled by the title of this book. Behind the self-help cliché are a lot of profound truths and principles for life that can be applied to achieve any goal that’s meaningful to you.

So grab a coffee or some tea, take your time, and let’s dive in.

Watch the video version here:

1) Desire — The Starting Point of All Achievement

The first step to achieving any goal is to have a burning desire to achieve it.

Every person who achieved great things in life started with an idea, a dream, and a purpose which they nourished and entertained until it became a burning desire — their number one obsession. That obsession led them to pursue their goal with all of their might and focus, which allowed them to attract opportunities, people, and ideas that turned this vision into reality.

If you want to become rich, your mind must be burning with an intense desire for riches. You must become money-conscious until the desire for money drives you to create definite plans for acquiring it. Once you have that burning desire, you will become convinced that you will obtain it sooner or later and feel like it’s already accomplished. It’s in that state of mind that you can materialize your goals.

Have No Plan B

By cutting all sources of retreat and having no Plan B when setting a goal, you ensure that you maintain a burning desire to win at all costs, as failure isn’t an option. When you get into that state of mind, nothing stands in your way. You become able to transform any setback into an opportunity to succeed.

The man who goes to war knowing that winning is the only option — and destroys all means of retreat — is the one who wins, even with fewer forces than his opponents.

A disclaimer though: this doesn’t mean you absolutely need to quit your nine-to-five to launch a business. For some people, cutting all sources of retreat will be incredibly motivating. For others, it can be way too stressful. And as we’ll see later, if you’re dominated by stress and fear, you won’t be able to accomplish your goals — so it can become counterproductive.

Take this with a grain of salt. But keep in mind that the more engaged you are, the more sacrifice you make to reach your goal, the brighter the fire inside you will burn, and the more likely you will achieve it.

The Six-Step Process to Transmute Desire Into Success

In the book, Napoleon Hill gives us a six-step method to transform desire into its financial equivalent:

1. Fix in your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It’s not sufficient to say “I want plenty of money.” You must be definite about the amount. For me, that number was 100K by the end of the year.

2. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return. There is no such reality as something for nothing. Determine what you’re going to sacrifice and offer to reach your goal. That doesn’t mean sacrificing everything — I’m a huge proponent of balanced lifestyle and finding harmony — but you always have to invest resources if you want any outcome in life.

3. Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.

4. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once — whether you are ready or not — to put this plan into action.

5. Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire, the time limit for its acquisition, what you intend to give in return, and the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.

6. Read your written statement aloud twice daily — once just before going to bed at night, and once after rising in the morning. As you read, you must see, feel, and believe yourself already in possession of the money.

I started doing this, and it actually helped me reconnect with my goal and my vision every single day. It’s part of what made me more driven and also helped me drop a lot of bad habits I had accumulated during that rut.

The key here is that you must already feel the abundance, already feel grateful for what you’re going to have — but feel it as if you already have it. That’s the state of mind from which you can take the best action during your day and create what you need to create.

2) The Power of Auto-Suggestion

“Man’s thought impulses begin immediately to translate themselves into their physical equivalent, whether the thoughts are voluntary or involuntary.”

This is the most important principle of the book.

Nature has endowed man with absolute control over one thing, and that thing is thought. Every thought you have — whether voluntary or not — starts translating into its physical equivalent. That’s why you should never entertain thoughts of fear, doubt, indecision, and negativity, because they will start manifesting in your life and attract other negative thoughts, creating a negative feedback loop.

Every thought impulse mixed with strong emotions will bypass the conscious mind, enter the subconscious mind, and start manifesting in reality.

The Subconscious Mind: Your Hidden Engine

The subconscious mind is a field of consciousness in which every impulse of thought that reaches it — whether through the five senses or mixed with a powerful emotion — is classified and recorded. Through the principle of auto-suggestion, you can voluntarily plant in your subconscious mind any plan, thought, or purpose which you desire to translate into its physical or monetary equivalent.

The subconscious acts first on the dominating desires that have been mixed with emotional feelings, such as faith. When a thought mixed with strong emotion reaches your subconscious, it starts manifesting it into reality. This is essentially the law of attraction — but what’s important to understand is that it dictates how you think and feel, which determines how you act, and thus the results you get in life.

This is the feedback loop you can influence with auto-suggestion. If you suggest positive things to your mind — positive feelings, the feelings of having already accomplished your goal, feelings of gratefulness — you will be in the best state of mind to create your best work and have the ideas and inspiration needed to reach your goal.

Since reading the book, I’ve implemented several rituals based on this principle. Twice a day, I write five things I’m grateful for — morning and evening. It helps me saturate my mind with gratefulness, and the more you do it, the easier and more natural it becomes. From a state of gratefulness, it’s a great place to create your best work. I’ve also started doing self-hypnosis to connect with my ideal self every day — to feel how my best self would act, visualize it, and then embody it.

What Happens When You Don’t Manage Your Subconscious

The subconscious mind functions automatically whether you influence it or not. If you’re not influencing it positively, it will feed on negative emotions and thoughts of fear and poverty that will keep you enslaved.

Whether you decide to influence it or not, your subconscious is always working — when you’re sleeping, when you’re awake. It’s always working to keep your heart beating, to keep you breathing. So if you’re not consciously feeding it with thoughts of positivity, harmony, and abundance, it will start imprinting the negative thoughts and feelings from your environment.

Because we as humans have an innate negativity bias, it’s actually much easier for negative thoughts to enter our mind if we’re not being conscious about it. That’s why if you’re doomscrolling, reading the news, or consuming negativity, all of that is keeping you enslaved — making you paralyzed, making you procrastinate, making you afraid.

This is exactly what happened to me during my rut. I didn’t have any routines to implant my subconscious mind with positive thought. I stopped doing my gratefulness practice, stopped connecting with the person I wanted to become and the goals I wanted to achieve. So of course I ended up in maintenance mode — not driven, not obsessed with any goal, just doing business as usual.

Faith: The Bridge to Your Subconscious

Only emotionalized thoughts will reach the subconscious mind. If you don’t mix your thoughts with feelings, they won’t pass the barrier separating the conscious from the subconscious. That’s why you must mix your thoughts with feelings like faith, love, and desire.

The more faith you have in your goal materializing, the easier you will influence your subconscious mind and have it create the reality you want. Faith, love, and sex are the most powerful of all the major positive emotions and have the power to color the vibration of thought in a way that it instantly reaches the subconscious. When blending the three, you are able to directly communicate with your subconscious, and it acts as a bridge between your finite conscious intelligence and infinite intelligence.

Visualization is the best way to generate these feelings, especially combined with daily practice. At first, it’s hard to feel anything when thinking about your goals. But the more you practice the art of visualization — or even better, combine it with self-hypnosis to enter an altered state of consciousness — the easier those feelings will flow and reach your subconscious mind.

Your Mind Is a Garden

There’s this analogy that appears in basically every book about the subconscious mind: your mind is like a garden, and you are the gardener. If you’re not tending to your garden every day, weeds start growing everywhere and the garden becomes a mess. That’s why every day you need to plant positive seeds that will grow and make your mind garden a beautiful place — filled only with thoughts of harmony, positivity, and abundance.

Even if you don’t believe in the more spiritual aspects of this — the idea that thoughts in your subconscious manifest reality without you doing anything — at least recognize this: the more joyful and grateful you feel in your daily life, the easier it will be for you to take action, be productive, and make good decisions. That alone should be reason enough to take this seriously.

The Two Types of Self

This concept comes from Outwitting the Devil, also by Napoleon Hill. It wasn’t in Think and Grow Rich, but I thought it was so pertinent to what we’re discussing that I had to include it.

We have two selves inside us:

The Higher Self (Faith-Based Self) — The part of you that is unafraid, resolute, and decisive. The part that has faith in the future and vibrates at a higher frequency. This is the part that allows you to reach your highest potential.

The Lower Self (Fear-Based Self) — Motivated by fear, survival, and ego. Your lower self will always try to take charge at any moment of weakness in your resolve and faith. It seeks instant gratification and leads you to the habit of drifting.

Drifting was exactly what I was experiencing during my rut. I wasn’t obsessed or dedicated to any goal — just in maintenance. Seeking instant gratification, playing too many video games, smoking cigarettes again even though I had stopped for nine months. That’s the lower self in action.

Which self rules depends on the dominant nature of your thoughts. Positive thoughts and emotions give control to your higher self. Negative thoughts and fear give control to your lower self.

As Joseph Murphy writes in The Power of the Subconscious Mind: there is the magnetized man, full of confidence and faith, who knows he is born to win and succeed. Then there is the demagnetized man, full of fears and doubts — when opportunities come, he says “I might fail, I might lose my money, people will laugh at me.”

All of the principles we’ve discussed — faith, auto-suggestion, gratefulness — are rituals that help you embody your higher self every day.

3) How to Access Peak Creativity

The Three Sources of Power

According to Napoleon Hill, we have three ways to gain knowledge and power:

Infinite Intelligence — The source of knowledge contactable through creative imagination. These are the flashes of inspiration and hunches you receive when connected to your higher self. One powerful technique from The Power of the Subconscious Mind is to talk to your subconscious directly before sleep and ask it to work on a problem overnight. More often than not, the answers come.

Accumulated Experience — Books, education, and organized knowledge that allow you to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Experiment and Research — Your daily life experience of trying new things to solve your own problems and gathering new insights.

The 10 Mind Stimuli for Higher Vibration

Napoleon Hill defines a genius as “a man who has discovered how to increase the vibration of thought to the point where he can freely communicate with sources of knowledge not available through the ordinary rate of vibration.”

The creative imagination functions best when the mind is vibrating at an exceedingly high rate due to some form of stimulation. When functioning at this higher rate, the mind becomes able to access higher levels of thought and hunches not normally available.

The stimuli to which the mind responds most freely are:

1. The desire for sex expression

2. Love

3. A burning desire for fame, power, or money

4. Music

5. Friendship

6. A mastermind alliance based on harmony

7. Mutual suffering

8. Auto-suggestion

9. Fear

10. Narcotics and alcohol

Ideally, you want to use the first eight to access higher creativity — not fear, narcotics, or alcohol. While narcotics and alcohol explain why some writers of the past seemed to produce genius work while drunk, it ultimately destroyed them. The healthier stimuli are far more sustainable.

Sexual Transmutation: The Most Powerful Creative Force

Sex desire combined with love is the most powerful of human desires and the best source of creativity. Men driven by this desire who can redirect and transmute it toward a meaningful goal develop keenness of imagination, courage, willpower, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times.

This force can be redirected as a powerful creative force in literature, art, business, and the accumulation of riches. To transmute sexual energy, you need the willpower not to suppress or eliminate the desire, but to give it an outlet through forms of expression that enrich the body, mind, and spirit.

If Napoleon Hill had known about porn websites, he would undoubtedly see them as a way people are being enslaved and disconnected from their most powerful creative source.

There’s a fascinating example in the book about Napoleon Bonaparte, who was winning all of his wars while devoted to his wife Josephine. As soon as he moved away from that relationship and started pursuing multiple women, he began losing.

Mental Telepathy and the Power of Association

Napoleon Hill asserts that no two minds ever come together without creating a third invisible force — a kind of “third mind.” Thoughts pass from one mind to another voluntarily, whether or not either person recognizes it.

This is why you must be very careful about whom you associate with. A person whose mind is filled with fear not only destroys their own chances of intelligent action but also transmits destructive vibrations to everyone they come in contact with.

The most common weakness of all human beings is leaving their minds open to the negative influence of other people. This weakness is especially damaging because most don’t recognize it — and even those who do often neglect to take it seriously.

When other people influence your subconscious mind, it’s called hetero-suggestion (as opposed to auto-suggestion). Some people will try to project negative “spells” onto you — applying identity labels like “you’re not organized” or “you’re not creative.” The good news is that if you don’t accept what they’re saying in your conscious mind, it won’t reach your subconscious. But if you let yourself believe their words, they will negatively influence you.

Protect yourself against this at all costs.

4) Persistence — The Insurance Against Failure

“There is no such thing as failure unless it is accepted as such. Every defeat is temporary unless you give up and allow it to become permanent.”

The Persistence Test

The world tends to never reward people before they pass this test. People who cultivate the habit of persistence seem to possess an insurance against failure. No matter how many times they are defeated, they understand that there is no failure — only temporary defeat.

It’s like there is a hidden guide whose duty is to test you through all sorts of discouraging experiences. Those who pick themselves up after a defeat and keep trying, despite everything, manage to succeed. Those who can’t take it simply don’t make the grade.

If you’re facing adversity right now, know that — as the saying goes — God only gives you battles He knows you can overcome. Trust yourself, embody your higher self, and don’t let fear and negativity turn you into your lower self. See every challenge as a test the universe is giving you to make sure you’re really committed to your goal.

I love the idea that there are no obstacles on the road — the obstacle IS the road. Every challenge isn’t preventing you from achieving your goal; it’s actually the way to achieve it, because overcoming it develops the virtues needed to manifest what you want.

The Eight Principles of Persistence

Persistence is a state of mind and therefore can be cultivated. It’s based upon these definite causes:

1. Definiteness of Purpose. Knowing what you want is the first and most important step. As Nietzsche said, “Any man with a strong why can bear any how.”

2. Desire. It’s easy to maintain persistence when pursuing the object of intense desire.

3. Self-Reliance. Belief in one’s ability to carry out a plan encourages follow-through. Self-reliance can be developed through auto-suggestion — and frankly, auto-suggestion allows you to develop any character trait you want. You can literally become anyone as long as you’re visualizing yourself becoming that person and acting like them more every day. Your personality and character traits are not bound by your past. If you want to go deeper on this, read Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.

4. Definiteness of Plans. Organized plans, even weak or impractical ones, encourage persistence.

5. Accurate Knowledge. Knowing your plans are sound encourages persistence. Guessing instead of knowing destroys it.

6. Cooperation. Sympathy, understanding, and harmonious cooperation from others develop persistence.

7. Willpower. Concentrating your thoughts upon building plans for a definite purpose leads to persistence.

8. Habit. Persistence is the direct result of habit. The mind absorbs and becomes a part of the daily experiences upon which it feeds. Fear — the worst of all enemies — can be effectively cured by forced repetition of acts of courage.

The devil is fear. It’s negative thought. All of it is preventing you from reaching your highest potential. Never let fear and negative thoughts dominate you. Most of the time, we feel fear because we’re projecting ourselves into negative futures, when we could just as easily project ourselves into positive ones.

5) Leadership — Decide Quickly and Firmly

Leaders decide quickly and firmly, and the world rewards them for it. Making decisions promptly and definitely means you know what you want and how to get it. The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going.

A great example is Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, renowned for his rapid decision-making style. He committed $4.4 billion to WeWork after a four-minute meeting with founder Adam Neumann. He invested $20 million in Alibaba after a six-minute meeting following the dot-com crash — what became his greatest investment of all time with an absolutely insane ROI.

The 11 Attributes of Leadership

1. Unwavering courage based on knowledge of self and one’s occupation

2. Self-control — the man who cannot control himself can never control others

3. A keen sense of justice — without fairness, no leader can retain respect

4. Definiteness of decision — wavering shows lack of self-assurance

5. Definiteness of plans — a leader who works by guesswork is comparable to a ship without a rudder

6. Doing more than paid for — willingness to go beyond what’s required

7. A pleasing personality — leadership calls for respect

8. Sympathy and understanding — a leader must understand followers and their problems

9. Mastery of detail — knowing the ins and outs of one’s position

10. Willingness to assume full responsibility — even for the mistakes of followers

11. Cooperation — understanding and applying cooperative effort

On the topic of full responsibility: the belief that everything in your life happens because of you, and that you have full control over your life through your thoughts and faith, is the most liberating realization you can have. It means you’re in power and you can control your situation.

Quick decision-making is a habit you can train in everyday life. For example, I noticed that on weekends, when my girlfriend and I weren’t sure what to do, I used to say “whatever you want.” I realized that if I want to embody leadership, I need to say “we’re going to this coffee shop, and this weekend we’re doing this, this, and this.” She can always adjust the plan, but leading with definiteness is a much better habit than leading with indecision.

The Self-Confidence Formula

Napoleon Hill provides a formula to develop leadership ability — something to read and repeat out loud daily, ideally when waking up or before going to sleep, when you’re naturally in a light state of hypnosis:

First: I know that I have the ability to achieve my definite purpose in life. Therefore, I demand of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment.

Second: I realize the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward physical action. Therefore, I will concentrate my thoughts for 30 minutes daily upon thinking of the person I intend to become, creating a clear mental picture.

Third: I know through the principle of auto-suggestion that any desire I persistently hold will eventually seek expression through practical means. Therefore, I will devote 10 minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of self-confidence.

Fourth: I have clearly written a description of my definite chief aim in life, and I will never stop trying until I have developed sufficient self-confidence for its attainment.

Fifth: I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice. I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will induce others to serve me because of my willingness to serve others. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism by developing love for all humanity — because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself.

Five Ways to Increase Your Magnetism

Your magnetism — your ability to positively influence people — is deeply connected to your energy and sexual transmutation. This energy communicates through:

1. The handshake — the touch of the hand instantly indicates the presence of magnetism or the lack of it

2. The tone of voice — your daily energy and enthusiasm color how musical and charming your voice sounds

3. Posture and carriage of the body — highly energized people move briskly and with grace

4. The vibration of thought — highly energized people can mix strong emotion with their thoughts and influence those around them

5. Body adornment — taking careful attention to personal appearance and selecting clothing suited to your personality

This is why things like porn drain your magnetic energy. It’s also why movements like NoFap gained popularity — people who tried it experienced firsthand how much more magnetic they became. There’s truth behind it.

6) Overcoming the Six Basic Fears

There are six basic fears that every human suffers from at one time or another. These fears hinder your potential and negatively influence your subconscious mind. Overcoming them is crucial to filling your mind with positive thought and letting your subconscious manifest abundance and joy.

1. Fear of Poverty

Symptoms: Indifference, lack of ambition, acceptance of poverty, laziness, indecision, letting others think for you, doubt, making excuses, envy of successful people, worry, fault-finding, overspending, neglecting appearance, procrastination, and expecting poverty instead of demanding riches.

How to overcome it: Recognize that we live in a world of overabundance. Demand riches instead of expecting poverty. Associate with those who demand and receive abundance. Develop definiteness of purpose, self-confidence, initiative, and enthusiasm. Burn all bridges and make riches inevitable instead of planning for failure.

Remember: in life, you don’t have what you want — you have what you tolerate.

2. Fear of Criticism

Symptoms: Self-consciousness, nervousness, timidity, awkward movement, weak personality, inferiority complex, and lack of initiative.

How to overcome it: Understand that criticism plants fear or resentment, never love or affection. Use constructive suggestions instead of criticism with others. Recognize that most people already carry too much criticism from their lives — especially from childhood, when we’re most vulnerable to it. Napoleon Hill even suggested that letting parents criticize their children should be considered a crime.

3. Fear of Ill Health

Symptoms: Looking for disease symptoms, hypochondria, poor exercise habits, and self-coddling.

How to overcome it: Recognize that illness often begins as a negative thought impulse. Approximately 75% of doctor visits are for psychosomatic symptoms. Positive thought is the only cure for illness caused by negative thinking. Stop auto-suggesting illness by obsessing over symptoms.

4. Fear of Loss of Love

Symptoms: Jealousy, fault-finding, gambling, overspending, and insomnia.

How to overcome it: Avoid jealousy and suspicion without reasonable evidence. Don’t try to buy love with money or gifts. Recognize that jealousy is a destructive force, and build absolute faith instead of general suspicion.

5. Fear of Old Age

Symptoms: Developing an inferiority complex around 40, speaking apologetically about age, killing initiative by believing you’re too old.

How to overcome it: Recognize that your most useful years — mentally and spiritually — are between 40 and 60. Express gratitude for reaching the age of wisdom. I’m turning 25 soon, and even I was feeling like I wasn’t at the level of success I expected. The reframe that you become finer and wiser with age is a powerful mental model.

6. Fear of Death

Symptoms: Thinking about dying instead of living, lack of purpose.

How to overcome it: Accept death as a necessity and remove the thought from your mind. Understand that energy and matter cannot be destroyed, only transformed. The greatest remedy is a burning desire for achievement backed by useful service to others. A busy person seldom has time to think about dying.

The Deadly Triangle: Fear, Worry, and Indecision

These six basic fears translate into a state of worry through indecision. Fear, worry, and indecision work together and will paralyze you — removing your confidence, drive, enthusiasm, and joy, disconnecting you from infinite intelligence and your ability to create abundance.

Worry is a form of sustained fear caused by indecision. An unsettled mind is helpless. That’s why you need to take action toward your goal every single day — even if it’s just 30 minutes. A lot of the time, worry and anxiety exist simply because you’re ambitious but not doing anything daily to move forward. Block the time and do the work.

The seven major negative emotions to avoid at all costs: fear, jealousy, hatred, revenge, greed, superstition, and anger. Avoid these feelings because they will reach your subconscious mind and implant the fears that lower your frequency and keep you trapped.

Conclusion: Embody Your Higher Self

I’ve been implementing these practices for the past month, and the results in terms of my energy, joy, creativity, and daily output toward my goals have been transformative. Even the energy with my loved ones — my girlfriend felt the shift, and our relationship is deeper and better now that I’m doing my best every day to embody my higher self.

The whole message is simple: remove fear and embrace your higher self. Fear is the only thing limiting your potential. Remove it from your life and you become unstoppable.

For me, cultivating the power of the subconscious mind is one of the most important messages to give to humanity. And this article is my way of doing exactly that.

If you want to access the entire mind map summarizing everything covered here, you can find it inside Noah’s Ark Bank — my free collection of resources for Noah’s Ark members.

Thanks for reading…

And welcome back to Noah’s Ark.

See you soon.

Noah

You have hundreds of highlights sitting in your Kindle, bookmarked tweets you'll "get back to later," and voice notes scattered across apps.

You keep consuming content, capturing ideas, thinking "this will be useful someday", but when it's time to actually create something, you're staring at a blank page.

Your notes have become a graveyard instead of a garden.

The Zettelkasten method fixes this exact problem, and today I'm showing you how to implement it inside Eden so your notes actually fuel your content instead of just collecting digital dust.

In this new Ark Letter, you’ll learn:

↱ The 5 benefits behind the note-taking method that made one scientist write 60 books from 90,000 notes, and how they’ll transform your content creation speed

↱ The exact 4-step workflow that turns scattered highlights into a self-organizing knowledge system (that actually feeds your content)

↱ How to set up and use the Zettelkasten method inside Eden with the right templates, tags, and workspace structure

So let’s begin!

And if you want to watch the video version, click here:

What is the Zettelkasten Method?

The Zettelkasten method literally means “slipbox” in German.

It’s a knowledge management method popularized by Niklas Luhmann, a German scientist who created more than 90,000 notes, wrote 60 books and 400 academic papers.

One of the major reasons for his productivity was his Zettelkasten system.

The Zettelkasten method allows us to create our own external second brain to better memorize and manage knowledge by compensating for our brain’s innate limitations.

The Five Major Benefits Of The Zettelkasten Method

1. Better usage of your notes

You can more easily retrieve them and be creative with them.

If you’re a content creator, your notes will fuel your content and courses, allowing you to create high quality content at lightning fast speed.

For reference, the entire mind map for this tutorial was written by outlining the overall content and then retrieving my notes from my second brain and assembling them.

The whole process took me exactly 37 minutes.

(I tracked it with Toggl tracker, I swear it’s not a random number out of my hat lol)

2. Better memorization through spaced repetition

Spaced repetition is the optimal way to learn things according to neuroscience.

It consists of short but numerous learning sessions.

Because you’ll be navigating inside your second brain every day to create new notes, content, or retrieve past notes, you’ll be constantly re-exposed to your notes, which will improve your memorization and understanding of each individual concept.

3. Creation of new ideas through Ideas Sex and Serendipity

As Steve Jobs said, “creativity is just connecting things.”

Ideas Sex refers to the process of how two ideas combined create an entirely new one.

Serendipity is the art of making unexpected discoveries by total chance and then exploiting them.

The exploiting part is very important:

A lot of the time we find new connections and make discoveries, but we don’t exploit or leverage them.

In that case, it’s not serendipity.

The benefit of the Zettelkasten method is that you’ll benefit from serendipity because you’ll be able to find these new connections, these new ideas, and leverage them inside your content, courses, or just for your own personal philosophy.

4. Better understanding through the generation effect

The generation effect is the idea that information is better memorized if it’s the fruit of your own mind instead of when it’s just heard, read, or seen.

Rewriting each concept with your own words allows you to make them yours.

That’s also why if you really want to memorize and learn a concept deeply, you shouldn’t use AI to write your notes.

If AI is writing notes for you, then you’re not benefiting from the generation effect.

Of course, if you don’t care about the memory benefits and you just want the speed or easy access to future resources, then you can use AI to create your notes.

But keep this in mind.

5. Easy content creation from your notes

Your notes will compound and then feed your entire content creation process.

Yes, taking notes is a time investment.

Creating your second brain and investing time into understanding how it works takes time and energy.

But you’ll reap the benefits when creating content because you’ll be able to easily create content and courses with high levels of quality and detail by just taking your notes and using them.

You can even feed your notes on a subject to AI and have it organize everything into a course or content for you, allowing you to create high-quality content while staying unique and authentic because it’s from your notes written with your own words and with your own connections and interpretations.

Especially now that we have AI, this allows us to speed up the whole process.

The Three Types of Notes

1. Fleeting notes are basically your highlights, quotes, and tweets. Highlights can be your Kindle highlights, podcast highlights thanks to the app called Snipd, or any quotes or tweets that you capture or bookmark.

2. Literature notes are notes where you synthesize and reformulate fleeting notes from articles, podcasts, courses, and books.

3. Permanent notes are where you extract the core big ideas from your literature note and turn them into a note following the atomicity principle. The atomicity principle states that one note equals one concept.

This is very important when creating permanent notes because that’s how you’ll be able to extract the essence of the content you’re learning from.

Niklas Luhmann used to summarize entire books in one sentence.

The atomicity principle is also what will allow you to promote connections because you’ll be able to turn each concept into singular Lego bricks that you can then assemble as you want.

If your note is not atomic, creating connections will be harder because which idea are you going to connect it to?

You need each note to be one singular idea to have better connections.

The Entire Zettelkasten Workflow Explained

Step 1: Highlight things

Use Reader by Readwise to highlight content from articles, emails, and YouTube videos.

Use Kindle for books, Snipd for podcasts.

Any quotes or tweets that you capture or bookmark can be a highlight.

Step 2: Turn highlights into literature notes

Copy paste all of your highlights into a literature note, then summarize each concept with your own words.

Literature notes are basically the place where you’re working with your highlights and turning them from raw information into your own concepts.

Step 3: Extract atomic concepts into permanent notes

Each individual concept from your literature note becomes one individual permanent note.

Remember the atomicity principle: one note equals one concept.

Step 4: Connect notes together

When you connect each permanent note together, you’ll spark creativity and create these links of interconnected thoughts and ideas.

This promotes creativity, Ideas Sex, and serendipity.

Setting Up Your Eden Workspace

1. Tag Taxonomy Template

The tag taxonomy template is a library of tags to better navigate your workspace.

The more doors you have to open a note, the easier you’ll be able to retrieve it inside your second brain.

Folders are the worst way to navigate in your workspace when you’re working with knowledge and notes.

Instead of searching inside folders, you’ll use tags to find what you need.

You can search for multiple tags to enable deeper filtering.

For example, if you have a newsletter tag and a mindset tag, you can put both tags into the search and it will find all of your newsletters that were about mindset.

Or if you have a permanent notes tag and a biology tag, you’ll find all of your permanent notes about biology.

Your tag taxonomy includes:

↱ Tags by type (map of content, tool, template, framework, tasks)

↱ Note status (enrich, synthesize, connect, complete)

↱ Project status (to do, research, in progress, done)

↱ Content type (short form, long form, personal story, guide)

↱ Note type (fleeting notes, literature notes, permanent notes)

↱ Subject tags (your personal subject bank)

I recommend creating a metadata element on top of each note where you can add the pertinent tags.

2. Templates in Snippets

Add a literature note and permanent note template inside your snippets to easily add them each time you create a new note.

Snippets are a feature inside Eden that allows you to create templates that you can add very quickly into any new note.

To create a new snippet, go to settings, then snippets.

Here you can add your template.

I have my permanent note template with metadata elements, my big idea, and different references I can use to enrich my notes.

I also have the literature note template with metadata elements, highlights section, and summary section.

3. Mind Galaxy Folder

Create your Mind Galaxy folder where you’ll store all of your notes with no hierarchy.

It’s very important that you have no hierarchy because it will promote connections and Ideas Sex.

The problem if you have folders to store your notes is that out of sight is basically out of mind.

Ideas shouldn’t be stored in silos and instead should all be grouped together inside the same folder to promote unexpected connections.

My Entire Zettelkasten Workflow Inside Eden

Let me show you how to apply each step inside Eden.

Step 1: Create a literature note

Go inside the Mind Galaxy folder and create a new note.

Tap snippet and find the literature note template:

It will add the entire template to the note.

Copy paste your highlights (from Kindle, podcasts, etc.) into the note.

Rename the note appropriately.

Fill in the metadata with relevant tags (subject, author, etc.).

Step 2: Open the literature note in two panes

On the left you’ll have your highlights, on the right you’ll have your summary.

You can organize your highlights by chapter or section using toggle elements.

Open the same note in a second pane so you can work on your highlights and create summaries at the same time.

Step 3: Summarize highlights into your own concepts

Work through your highlights and rewrite them into your own atomic concepts in the summary section.

You can go as deep as you want.

Niklas Luhmann was able to summarize entire books in one sentence.

You can create one note that represents the number one big idea of a book, or multiple notes from smaller big ideas inside the book.

Step 4: Create permanent notes in a third pane

Create a new note in the folder and open it in a pane.

Add the permanent note template using snippets.

Copy your summary from the literature note and paste it into the permanent note.

Fill in the metadata (permanent notes tag, enrich tag, etc. If you want to develop it further, subject, author).

The reference section has optional elements you can fill to enrich the note:

You don’t need to fill all of this for every note, but for very specific concepts you really want to go deep into, you can create very complete notes.

Step 5: Make connections using the link feature

Add links in the dedicated section or inside your summary if it flows naturally.

Use the trigger questions to spark new connections.

This will help you find new links to connect your notes.

Final Thoughts

Right now this is the best way to use the Zettelkasten method inside Eden.

The tool is still in beta, and one of the major features that’s missing for it to be fully functional is the ability to see backlinks.

Right now you can create links, but you can’t see what other notes are connected to a specific note.

I’m confident the team will add this because it was a feature in Kortex, so there’s no reason not to have it inside Eden.

Until then, create your links and later you’ll be able to find them in the backlink section when they’ll add the feature.

» Click here if you want to access all of the templates I’ve shown in this tutorial and way more, you can access them inside Noah’s Ark along with all of my AI prompts and SOPs for building your second brain.

You’ll also find the mind map of this tutorial so you can reference the workflow without having to rewatch the video.

I hope this provided you some value and gave you clarity about how to use the Zettelkasten method inside Eden.

As always, thanks for reading…

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah

I shared a lot of tips that I found interesting, and I think many of you will recognize yourselves in this situation.

Brian has been running a newsletter on Substack for almost a year while developing his personal brand.

He doesn’t necessarily want to quit his job for his creator business, but he’d like to generate some extra income with digital products and reach people in his industry with his method.

He works in healthcare and developed a framework to help nurses and doctors ask better questions that allow patients to truly open up and express their problems.

This way, healthcare professionals can help patients experience real transformations instead of the patient just nodding along, saying “yes, yes, I understand,” then going home and continuing to live with the same issues.

I found this really cool because he has his own unique method applied to a specific industry.

His framework is actually an application of the Tactical Empathy concept from Chris Voss applied to healthcare, which is a beautiful example of creativity.

Here’s what was interesting.

Brian was creating content on two platforms: Substack and LinkedIn.

On Substack, he had very little traction.

But on LinkedIn, he had posts that performed extremely well, including one that got over 1,200 likes while he only had 300 connections.

That’s massive. It proves there was real traction happening.

So I asked him: “Are there actually people in your niche, in your audience, who are on Substack?”

Since he’s targeting healthcare professionals, I didn’t think that Substack was really the best platform to reach them.

Today, Substack is dominated by journalism, tech, AI, writing, and business niches.

Not necessarily healthcare or other professional industries, where LinkedIn would be much better suited.

So I told him to focus on LinkedIn.

This is a real thing to understand

Analyze the platforms where you’re posting.

Is your audience actually there?

Some platforms are definitely better than others for reaching certain people.

When you’re in a very professional or niche industry, certain platforms just aren’t adapted for your content.

If you keep grinding on the wrong platform, you can improve your writing all you want.

It won’t change anything.

I invite you to reflect on this today:

if you’re not satisfied with your growth despite consistent content creation, try to analyze objectively.

Is it my content itself, or is it simply that my audience isn’t on this platform?

A good way to figure this out is to look at who else in your industry or niche is creating content on that platform.

If there’s nobody, that’s probably a sign you’re on the wrong platform.

It’s a bit like business ideas.

The business idea that nobody has ever had or executed?

It’s probably because it’s a bad idea.

Same thing with platforms.

If nobody in your industry is creating content there, why keep pushing?

Another piece of advice I gave Brian was to play on his connections.

Today, growing purely organically by publishing content when you’re unknown is extremely difficult.

There’s enormous competition, tons of people posting. So we need shortcuts to unlock the situation.

Look at me.

The reason I went from 0 to 1,500 subscribers and a €3,000/month business with Noah’s Ark in one year is that I created content around Kortex, Dan Koe reshared it, and that sent me a ton of traffic from his audience, which happened to match my ideal audience.

It wasn’t necessarily a move I had planned from the start, but it’s something you can absolutely replicate in your industry.

Identify people in your niche who talk about similar topics.

Connect with them. Engage with their content. DM them. Book a quick call.

Take the time to build real relationships.

Then you can develop partnerships:

Joint newsletters, collaborative posts, shared content.

This lets you tap into their audience and shortcut your growth.

What was interesting about Brian’s situation is that his problem wasn’t consistency.

Thanks to one of my courses, the Daily Email System, he had the ability to easily create emails and posts using the workflow I provide.

The AI-guided questions help him structure his thinking and write posts efficiently.

He had no consistency problems despite having a job plus two kids to manage.

His problem was global strategy:

Positioning, which platform to focus on, and the funnel, meaning how he would actually acquire subscribers to his list.

That’s why the last advice I recommended was to double down on the lead magnet approach with LinkedIn posts where people have to comment to receive something.

He had a post with 44 likes there, following this principle, and it actually generated multiple new subscribers.

So doubling down on it and doing these kinds of posts once or twice a week seems like a smart choice for him.

Beyond creating engagement and making posts more viral, that’s how he’ll capture subscribers to his email list, where he’ll be able to then sell his digital products.

Lead magnets are still one of the best ways to acquire new subscribers.

It worked in 2010 and is still working to this day.

So trust the Lindy Effect and build a valuable lead magnet to promote in your content.

Two-thirds of my email list comes from my lead magnet.

That means there’s a 70% chance you’re reading this email because you joined Noah’s Ark Bank after watching one of my YouTube videos or reading one of my articles.

I have over 1,060 people in Noah’s Ark Bank who joined in one year because I created a lead magnet that’s actually valuable and I promote it in every piece of content.

It gives people a reason to subscribe.

Then once they’re subscribed, they receive my emails.

Whether they unsubscribe or not after that isn’t my concern.

What matters is that more people stay subscribed than leave.

And when I create a new digital product, I can directly promote it to my list and make sales from there.

Free Content -> Lead Magnet -> Newsletters -> Product Launch once a month.

That’s how I built this business.

It’s not easy, but it’s not complex either.

If you recognize yourself in Brian’s situation...

I hope these insights help you reconsider your approach and improve your direction for 2026.

The key takeaways are:

• Make sure you’re creating content on a platform where your audience ACTUALLY is. The best way to figure that out is find competitors in your niche that managed to build a following on the platform. If you’re the only one in your niche creating there, that’s probably a bad sign.

• Double down on the platform where you get most of your results once you find it

• Build a Lead Magnet to grow your list and provide value to your audience, then sell to them directly via email, at least once a month if you want consistent revenue.

If you’d like me to analyze your situation and provide you with tailored advice in a dedicated newsletter...

Just reply to this email with your situation, your n°1 goal, and what’s holding you back from achieving it.

I will read it and provide a detailed answer in a dedicated newsletter.

As always, thanks for reading...

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.

To start the year on the right foot...

I decided to create a new pack for Eden with more than 30 free templates to build your AI second brain.

It contains everything from note-taking to content creation, specific AI prompts, tag management, and more.

Recently Eden has been adding a lot of new features that finally allowed me to update Noah’s Ark Bank, which is my bank of all the templates and resources I create for free for Noah’s Ark.

They finally added the ability to share templates with people.

And they also added a very interesting feature called snippets, which allows you to create templates you can import into notes inside Eden.

So I decided to update all my templates from the previous Kortex versions, adapt them for Eden, put everything into Noah’s Ark Bank, and create this guide to show you how everything works so you can add them to your workspace and start building your own second brain today.

If you want access to all the templates I’m going to show you, it’s completely free, just click here:

Click here to join Noah’s Ark Bank

Now let’s look at all the templates.

Let’s dive in.

Writing Templates

• Long Form Template — A structured framework based on Dan Koe’s method for writing newsletters, articles, and blog posts. Guides you from brain dump to final hook with persuasive talking points baked in.

• Weekly Short Form Template — Batch your entire week of social content in one place. Sections for daily posts across X, LinkedIn, Threads, and Substack, plus a dedicated area for threads.

• YouTube Video Template — Go from idea to script with sections for research, angle discovery, title/thumbnail brainstorming, and full video structure (intro, content, outro).

Note-Taking Templates

• Literature Note Templates (5 versions: Book, Podcast, Course, Article, Video) — Capture highlights from any content type with proper tagging. Each version has pre-configured tags so you can filter notes by source format later.

• Permanent Note Template — Transform your highlights into atomic, interconnected ideas following the Zettelkasten method. Includes trigger questions to help you discover connections between notes.

SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)

• Content Acquisition SOP — A step-by-step workflow for capturing highlights from Kindle, Reader, Snipd, and Readwise, then processing them into your second brain.

• Zettelkasten Method SOP — The complete process for turning raw highlights into literature notes, then into permanent notes, following the proven Zettelkasten system.

• Ultimate Writing Content SOP — A repeatable workflow for producing long-form content using the templates above, from idea to published piece.

Tools

• Tag Taxonomy — A master reference document for all your tags. Pre-filled with categories for note status, project status, content types, platforms, and subjects. The more ways you can retrieve a note, the more powerful your second brain becomes.

• Copywriting Structure Template — A swipe file of proven copywriting frameworks (PAS, What-Why-How, Hook-Points-CTA) that you can save as snippets and insert into any note while writing.

• Three Lever-Moving Tasks Exercise — A productivity framework based on Brian Tracy’s Rule of Three. Identify the three tasks that drive 90% of your results and eliminate decision fatigue every morning.

AI Prompts Bank

• Generate Endless Viral Content Ideas — Three in-depth prompts including the Two-Year-Old Test, 100 Angles Generator, and Idea Generator to never run out of content ideas.

• Content Acceleration System — Prompts for creating viral Twitter content and a five-step newsletter creation workflow.

• Unique Perspectives Generator — Prompts designed to help you develop original angles that differentiate your content.

• AI Learning Workflow — An intuitive system for using AI to accelerate your learning on any topic.

How to Use Snippets in Eden

Quick tip: you can save any template as a snippet for instant access.

Go to Eden settings, find the snippets feature, create a new snippet, paste in your template, and save.

Then whenever you’re writing, just type the snippet name and the entire template appears in your note.

The only thing you need to do is go to the link below, subscribe for free to unlock access, then copy and paste all the templates you find interesting into your Eden workspace.

>> Click here to join Noah’s Ark Bank

Anyway, I hope these templates will help you quickstart your second brain journey inside Eden…

And if you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email or in the comment of the youtube videos.

Thanks for reading,

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.

This is the first newsletter of the year on Noah’s Ark, arriving a bit late because after New Year’s I was pretty sick, then spent a week in dopamine detox to recover from the holidays and get back into the right mindset.

It was also a period of introspection to reflect on what I wanted to create in 2026, where I wanted to take my business, and who I wanted to become...

Which inspired this newsletter:

How do you REALLY outperform 99% of people in 2026?

This topic of “how to outperform 99% of people” is ultra-popular and always gathers a lot of interest on YouTube.

What I find interesting is that most people are drawn to it for ego-driven reasons.

They want to surpass everyone, be the best, have people think they’re beasts.

And I get it.

Those things motivated me too when I was 18-19 and getting into entrepreneurship.

But today I want to talk about how to really outperform 99% of people.

And by really, I mean doing it in a way that’s actually relevant and makes sense for you.

1) The trap of borrowed goals

Most people try to be more productive, accomplish more, create new things, and hit goals, but do it for the wrong reasons.

They do it because they think they should.

Because they saw authorities or people they admire tell them they must work 12 hours a day to succeed.

That they must become a millionaire, or they’re worthless.

Or they must have a perfect physique with 8% body fat, or they’ll never attract anyone.

And most often, these objectives don’t come from a genuine internal desire.

They come from external expectations imposed by society or authority figures.

The problem is that adopting these goals prevents you from creating a life and goals that are truly aligned with your deep values and identity.

It stops you from pursuing your own unique life mission.

And it’s simply not sustainable long-term.

Why?

Because when you adopt someone else’s values and goals and try to live by their framework, you create a misalignment with your own internal framework.

And worse, you start judging negatively the things you actually value, even though those are what you genuinely want and need.

In those “How to get ahead of 99% of people” videos, a common piece of advice is basically:

Do a monk mode, a massive dopamine detox, and cut all distractions.

Stop everything. No video games, no parties, no seeing friends.

Lock yourself in your room, work 12 hours a day for 6 months to a year, and boom...

You’ll emerge transformed and become a multimillionaire with the perfect physique or whatever.

This advice makes sense if your number one value and goal in life is to become a multimillionaire as fast as possible, and you truly prioritize that above everything else in your value system.

It can work for people like that.

But your situation is probably different.

Maybe you value making more money and developing your business.

But is it really your number one value to the point where you’d sacrifice all your other values?

If family is extremely important to you and you start applying this advice, what happens?

Your family value gets completely sacrificed for the money value because someone told you to do it.

You’ll become absolutely miserable.

You’ll work 12 hours a day, stop seeing your family, stop creating bonds, and stop spending time with your kids or parents.

After 3 to 6 months, probably less, you’ll completely break down.

You’ll realize you’ve created a prison you hate.

You wanted to build a business and make money precisely to serve the values you hold dear, to do things you love, and spend time with people you care about.

Instead, you suppressed everything and feel totally miserable.

2) The compulsive behavior trap

Another downside is that this creates compulsive behaviors proportional to your misalignment with your value system.

The more you adopt someone else’s value system, the more misaligned you become with your own.

This gap creates compulsive behaviors like a yoyo effect, leading to self-sabotage, addictions, or compulsions.

Cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, scrolling social media, pornography.

Often, the addiction is linked to the value you’re suppressing.

If you stop seeing all your friends and eliminate social moments from your life to work on your business because a video told you to, you’ll feel incredibly lonely and unfulfilled in your relationships.

What’s likely to happen then?

You’ll become completely addicted to scrolling Instagram, spending enormous amounts of time watching stories and your feed and reels.

It’s the only strategy your brain has available to fill that value.

Even though it’s suboptimal compared to real human connections, it’s the only option you’ve left yourself.

Understanding this is crucial.

So what should you do instead?

First, realize that the advice and routines of people you admire may make sense for them because they’re aligned with their value system.

But you have a different value system, so they might not make sense for you.

Not everyone can have Hormozi’s routine because not everyone has Hormozi’s life history and value system.

That’s completely okay.

Don’t judge yourself or feel guilty because you don’t want to sacrifice your entire life on the altar of work and status.

3) The 6-Step System To Truly Get Ahead Of 99% Of People (By Understanding Yourself)

Step 1: Identify your values

Look at what gives you energy and what drains you.

What subjects naturally awaken interest and curiosity in you?

How do you spend your time and money?

This is an excellent way to understand what you truly value.

Often we say we value certain things but don’t act accordingly.

There’s usually a gap between who we’d like to think we are and who we actually are.

Be realistic. Be okay with yourself. Look at who you really are because that’s where the truth lies.

Reflect on your year. See how you spent your time, what interested you, and understand what that reveals about your values.

You can also take online tests like the Schwartz Values Test or MBTI to help guide you.

Cross-reference the data, and you’ll learn interesting things about yourself

Step 2: Analyze your life areas holistically

Most people sacrifice one area of life for another.

That’s not the philosophy I want to share with Noah’s Ark.

What I invite you to do is create a business aligned with your values that serves your life, not the other way around, and take into account all your life areas holistically.

Beyond business and entrepreneurship, what other values are important to you?

What other life areas must you maintain?

Family, relationships, hobbies, passions, sports?

Look at your life holistically, see how you’ve spent time in each area, analyze them individually when doing your year review, and understand what was good and what you could improve.

Step 3: Plan what you want to achieve

Describe what your life will look like in 12 months.

Really describe it in a way that lets you visualize and feel the vision physiologically.

I like to separate this into different life areas for a global understanding:

• Daily life: What does your typical day look like most of the year?

• Business: What revenues are you generating? How are you developing? What formats are you working with? How do you feel about doing the actions that bring you money?

• Health and fitness: What are you doing? How do you feel when you do it? What’s your routine? If you do calisthenics, have you learned a new move? If you lift weights, have you hit a new personal record? How do you feel in your body? Flexible? Powerful?

• Relationships: Do this for friends, family, and romantic life. What experiences are you living with them? How do you feel about them? Are you traveling together? Trying new activities?

• Lifestyle: How do you feel in your routine? What do you do on weekends? How do you organize vacations or mini-adventures to break routine and thrive?

When describing your life in 12 months, do it from your own value system.

What do you really want?

Don’t base it on what you think you should want according to YouTube authorities like Hormozi.

Base it on what you genuinely want to live, owing nothing to anyone.

Step 4: Define who you need to become

Ask yourself: Who do I need to become to achieve these results?

How will I need to change and evolve?

What skills do I need to learn?

This may includes hard skills like creating courses, developing your email list, marketing, copywriting, etc.

And soft skills like building routines, improving your sleep schedule, or implementing productivity systems.

And finally ask yourself:

How must my habits and routines change to achieve these results?

Step 5: Identify what’s holding you back

Ask: What stands between me and these results?

Most people try to add new actions and habits.

But we underestimate the power of the Via Negativa, addition through subtraction.

Removing what limits you rather than constantly adding new things.

What can you remove from your life that’s limiting you?

Negative habits, toxic relationships, patterns that keep you attached to an old identity you want to transcend.

How can you overcome these obstacles?

Try to change your environment, remove toxic people, and implement strategies to prevent bad habits or addictions.

Step 6: Implement Regular Reviews

When a plane takes off from Paris to Tokyo, it has very precise coordinates and a specific flight path.

But if it deviates by just 1% from its trajectory at takeoff, it will end up thousands of kilometers off course from its intended destination.

This is due to the compounding effects of a directional gap, even a tiny one, between where you are and where you really want to go.

If you’re misaligned from what you truly want at the beginning of the year, by the end, you’ll be exponentially more off course.

To avoid this, establish a regular review ritual.

Weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews to constantly analyze where you are and correct your direction as you progress through the year.

Your real competitive advantage over others is the ability to generate clarity on who you are and what you truly want.

People who neglect this question and prefer to move forward without knowing themselves might try implementing strategies and tactics.

But without the foundational work, they don’t truly progress.

They don’t move in the right direction.

There’s nothing more intelligent and sensible than working to know yourself.

And there’s nothing more frightening than being born, wandering for 80 years on Earth without knowing yourself or where you’re going, and then dying.

The only way to create an exceptional life is to intentionally create it.

Not to live by default.

That’s how you TRULY get ahead 99% of people in 2026.

Most people don’t do this foundational work that helps them understand who they are and what they really want.

But if you don’t do this clarity work, four scenarios will happen:

1. Procrastination. The paradox of choice gives you too many options, so you won’t feel like acting.

2. Abandonment. You’ll give up on demanding tasks because they’re not aligned with what you really want. You did it because you saw a YouTube video and were motivated for two weeks.

3. Inefficiency. You might reach your final destination, but in 30 years instead of 5, completely exhausted and burned out.

4. Disillusionment. You arrive after decades of effort and realize it wasn’t even what you wanted. Now it’s too late because you’ve already spent too much time climbing the wrong mountain.

And that’s the greatest nightmare you can live.

Working for years toward something, reaching the summit, and realizing it wasn’t what you wanted.

And that’s what I absolutely DON’T want you to experience.

If you do this work upfront, trying to understand who you are, what you really want, what your values are, you’ll save years of effort because you’ll be working in the right direction.

It’s far more important to take small actions and work two hours a day in the direction you truly want than to spend eight hours going in the exact opposite direction and realize you’re climbing the wrong mountain.

As Seneca said:

There is no favorable wind for the one who doesn’t know where they’re going.

So that was my message with this newsletter.

I hope it brought you value, and as always...

Thanks for reading,

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.

Eden is not a second brain app, and this is something extremely important to understand.

It also has enormous implications for the systems and content I’ll be creating with Noah’s Ark going forward.

So I felt it was really important to share this with you with full transparency and clarity.

What I mean is that Eden today is not a second brain app, and it’s not meant to be one.

Dan and the team explained this very well in a podcast they did, about an hour long, where they talk about “Kortex: The $3 Million Mistake.”

Great clickbait title.

But what they were saying is that Kortex’s problem was that it was a second brain app for writers, but they didn’t really have a differentiating edge. T

hey didn’t have truly unique, durable value propositions that would allow them to survive long-term.

At the time, they were essentially a mix of Notion and Obsidian.

It was cool for writers, for people in Dan’s community, for people like me who were already familiar with this kind of tool.

What was nice was they included the ability to have all AI models in one place and reference your notes within AI chats.

That was a cool feature, but in reality, it’s not differentiating at all because it’s very easy to implement.

With projects and everything LLMs are developing today, it could be replicated fairly easily.

So beyond the technical mistakes they made, which I won’t go into again since I’ve covered them in previous content, Eden’s vision has completely shifted.

Their objective now is to create what they describe as a search engine for your memories.

The idea is you can save and store everything in Eden, like you would with Google Drive or Dropbox. Photos, videos, texts, notes, but also links to content you find on the internet like articles, YouTube videos, and so on.

Everything stored in one workspace, with the ability to work solo or in teams.

That team aspect is important.

And finally, using all of this to fuel your entire creator business.

It’s no longer just for writers like Kortex was.

It’s also for design teams, video editors, agencies, and more.

This is completely different from Kortex’s original purpose as a writing app, a second brain app, a knowledge management app.

We’re no longer in that territory.

We’re now in what I’d call a content orchestration application.

So what is content orchestration exactly?

It’s the ability to manage multiple types of content with different formats in one place, group them together, and then surface them quickly through Eden’s search features.

And also to use them to feed AI chats, like you can do with the Canvas features or the AI chats that were in Kortex and are now in Eden.

Where Kortex was a mix of Notion and Obsidian, Eden is now a mix of MyMind and Poppy.ai.

If you’re not familiar with these two tools:

MyMind is an application designed to help you capture anything on the web and organize it with automatic AI tags so you can find things easily.

It’s really a place to store and capture content.

Poppy.ai is an application that lets you work on a canvas and connect links you capture, like Instagram reels or YouTube videos, automatically transcribe them, and then link them to AI chats to create content.

Most importantly, it lets you have AI chats fed with context you’ve chosen yourself, because one of the big challenges with LLMs today is controlling the context to get better results.

Eden is clearly a blend of these two applications.

When you look at them separately, you can see Eden is really these two merged together.

There’s nothing wrong with that. The connection makes a lot of sense.

But as I said, this completely changes the dynamic.

Eden is not a second brain app.

It’s not a knowledge management app.

It’s a content orchestration app.

That means it serves different needs, different objectives, and a different vision.

And yes, because Eden has the same features as Kortex, you can still apply the same systems and processes I’ve taught through my courses and YouTube videos to create a second brain in Eden.

That’s totally possible.

But the truth is the application isn’t designed for that.

When I started creating all these systems, I did so because Kortex was just beginning and the vision at the time was to develop this second brain aspect.

In my head, I thought they were going to build a Graph View, develop more and more features that would help us build a second brain, and make systems like Zettelkasten even better.

As we’ve just seen, that’s no longer the case.

It’s changed. It’s no longer the team’s vision.

And that’s totally ok.

But it means that as a systems creator who shares this with my audience, I’m obligated with full transparency to say that today, a major overhaul of my vision and systems is needed.

Even though Eden is great and I’ll continue creating content about it, and it has enormous utility for creators...

For those who are solely interested in knowledge management, learning, and developing a second brain with the Zettelkasten method ?

I can no longer tell you with integrity that Eden is a better application than Obsidian for building your second brain.

Here’s why:

Obsidian is the ultimate second brain application.

It’s free. It’s stored locally.

It uses universal Markdown format that’s easily exportable.

And it’s extremely customizable with plugins.

I’ve started seeing people say they didn’t make the transition to Eden and went back to Obsidian because they didn’t like the new direction.

That’s totally fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Eden has simply evolved into an application that isn’t a second brain app, and therefore second brain systems like Zettelkasten aren’t really suited for Eden anymore in my opinion.

Eden will always lack a Graph View.

I don’t think the team will implement one because it wouldn’t really make sense given their objectives and the type of features they want to develop.

So we’ll probably never have a Graph View in Eden.

As I’ve already explained in my video about the differences, not having a Graph View is a real drawback when developing a Zettelkasten system.

It’s what allows us to develop an ecosystem of interconnected knowledge and encourages us to make links between documents.

Then there’s the fact that Eden’s documents don’t seem to be true Markdown anymore.

From a long-term intellectual sovereignty perspective, if you develop a second brain on Eden with all your notes and one day want to export it or change software, that’s a problem.

With Kortex, it was Markdown, so you could always export your workspace and move it to Obsidian.

With Eden today, I don’t think that’s really the case anymore.

Intellectual sovereignty doesn’t seem to be the team’s vision.

With integrity and transparency:

If you want to create a second brain where you’ll store all your knowledge and notes, where you can apply the Zettelkasten method to develop an intellectual empire and a galaxy of knowledge that belongs to you...

And you do it on software that could disappear in the coming years or change direction?

You risk creating a massive system and investing enormous resources into something that may not be durable long-term.

For that reason, Obsidian remains the best application for intellectual sovereignty.

Now, despite all this, Eden still remains an excellent application for content orchestration.

We’re talking about capturing content you find on the internet, saving it, then reworking and reusing it by feeding it to AI chats and using the Canvas feature.

That’s extremely relevant and practical.

For creators, I think Eden will be extremely useful for building systems that help with content creation.

But if you follow me because you love the idea of creating a Zettelkasten system, I can no longer honestly tell you to do it on Eden instead of Obsidian.

I think Obsidian is better for that today.

That’s why I’m actually going to start creating notes in Obsidian again.

I think I’ll begin producing content on both Eden for content orchestration systems and Obsidian for second brain systems.

This means I’ll need to do a massive update of all the resources I’ve created in my previous courses.

Obviously that’s planned, but I won’t have time to finish everything in December, but throughout 2026 I really want to refresh Noah’s Ark’s entire ecosystem of content and systems to create a coherent learning experience that makes sense, aligns with your objectives and vision, and delivers maximum value.

So here’s the conclusion:

Eden is a content orchestration app, not a second brain anymore.

It does new things. And it does these new things very well.

But for second brain applications, I don’t think it’s really the best app to develop those systems today.

That’s why I recommend you use both tools:

• Obsidian for your Zettelkasten system (if you need one)

• Eden for Content Orchestration.

I invite you to step back and reflect on your objectives with Eden and with the applications you use to organize your knowledge.

If your only goal is to capture whatever you want...

If you don’t care about applying the Zettelkasten method because it’s long and time-consuming...

If all you want is to easily capture notes and internet content to put into AI chats, play around with them, do research and create content...

Then Eden is the best application for you.

No doubt about it.

Much better than Obsidian, which will be more technical and complicated to set up since you have to create your own system because it’s an app where you can do whatever you want.

Eden does what it does very well.

But if you really want that more manual approach to knowledge acquisition with a custom Zettelkasten system ?

If you want to create your own notes, connect them, see the connections between notes to truly deepen your learning, and generate unique perspectives as a creator and individual on topics that interest you?

Then Obsidian remains the best option for developing a custom Zettelkasten and a second brain in that sense.

It’s important for me to tell you this and be authentic and transparent with you.

As I said, this means I’ll need to rework all my resources.

That’s something that will happen and I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

But this is really something I invite you to think about for yourself and for the systems you want to implement in 2026.

I’m currently working on an ultimate guide to generate and create a second brain.

It’s going to be a written guide, a new product format I’m testing.

But this time, I’m going to make it evergreen, meaning I’ll simply share fundamental principles and system steps, and then you’ll have the choice to apply this system on Obsidian or Eden based on your objectives and what’s important to you.

So that’s everything for this email.

It was important for me to make this clarification with you, because I want you to use the tool that makes the most sense depending on your goals...

And because I always want to be transparent and authentic with you guys.

Anyway, thank you for reading...

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.

In today’s email...

I’m going to tell you the story of how I got Dan Koe to share my work, which launched Noah’s Ark and allowed me to grow rapidly...

Turning this business into one generating €3,000-4,000 per month.

If you’re part of Noah’s Ark, there’s a good chance you discovered me this way.

Over time, many people have also found me through Twitter or Substack, but a huge part of my audience comes from the content I started creating around Kortex.

The story of how it all began was pure serendipity.

A year ago, I was freelancing at an agency where I handled all the clients for only €1,500 per month.

I literally had the downsides of being an entrepreneur combined with the downsides of being an employee.

The one advantage was having a stable income source.

At the time, I was lost but knew I wanted to build a new business after shutting down my SMMA agency and all the businesses I had before in the French market.

I was in this phase where I had started creating some new content on Twitter, made a few YouTube videos, and knew I wanted to talk about online business, systems, and building something aligned with my values.

But I was still at the very beginning.

My YouTube videos were getting 20 views. And that’s it.

Then Dan Koe announced Kortex.

As a massive nerd for systems, second brain setups, and interconnected note-taking, when I saw Kortex I thought it was amazing.

A perfect middle ground between Notion and Obsidian.

It allowed you to manage your second brain while also having a great place to store and create content, all in one place.

Obsidian is excellent for creating that network of interconnected notes, but it’s not really the right place to keep your content organized with a productivity and project management aspect.

Kortex allowed you to do both.

You could have top-down organization like the PARA method alongside bottom-up organization like Zettelkasten.

So I started using the software, became a beta tester, and began creating videos and articles in the forum to show people how to use it.

I noticed that most people thought the tool was cool, but didn’t understand how to use it.

This is something I repeat often:

Tools aren’t what’s important.

People are hyper-focused on tools and features when what actually matters is the systems, the frameworks, and especially the philosophy behind them, along with alignment with your own vision.

If people have a cool tool but don’t know how to use it or what kind of systems they can build, they can’t get value from it.

So I started making videos about how I took notes, how to use the Zettelkasten method, how to organize your workspace with tags.

I made simple Loom recordings, and people responded incredibly positively.

So positively that Dan himself said they were great and started sharing one of my Looms on his Instagram story.

I was completely shocked.

A guy with 1.5 million followers just shared my Loom.

Obviously, as an entrepreneur, I thought it was a shame I hadn’t made it as a YouTube video since that would have brought people to my channel.

But I immediately saw the opportunity.

I started talking with Dan privately because the content I was creating and the value I was bringing opened that door.

We ended up setting up a partnership where he shared many of my tutorial videos on his YouTube channel through community posts.

This sent significant traffic my way, which helped my videos gain traction quickly and brought me a lot of subscribers.

And consequently, email subscribers.

I had thought through the system carefully.

I created a lead magnet called Noah’s Ark Bank, where I put my templates, frameworks, and SOPs that people could download for free to apply the systems I presented in my videos.

So I had a funnel:

I’d make a YouTube video, the video promoted Noah’s Ark Bank so people could apply the systems with the templates and SOPs I’d created, and Dan would reshare these videos, sending tons of traffic that ended up on my email list.

That’s how Noah’s Ark took off and grew rapidly.

In May 2025, I created my first course.

It sold very well. I did a €4,000 launch.

Since then, I’ve been launching different programs every month, averaging between €1,500 and €3,000 per month, depending on the month and the product.

All from selling courses, and I’m very happy with that.

What allowed me to reach this stage so quickly was skipping the most difficult and delicate phase for any content creator:

The beginning.

When you start out, you’re truly crossing a desert.

Nobody knows you, nobody listens to you, and nobody has any reason to.

I was able to skip all that painful part thanks to Dan’s shares.

And this strategy I implemented is something you can absolutely do too.

What I find funny is that Dan has an enormous audience.

One million YouTube subscribers, 1.5 million on Instagram.

Among all those people, I’m the only one who managed to create this opportunity with him.

The only one who got in contact, got shared, and built a business from it.

Statistically, it’s surprising that no one else seized the opportunity.

But it required several circumstances coming together:

Having the skills to create the content I was creating, being willing to test a new tool and create content around it, and then actually doing it.

At the start, I hadn’t consciously planned out this whole strategy.

I just naturally began making videos to provide value.

I didn’t expect it to bring such results.

My point with all this is that it gave me an enormous shortcut, and you can apply the same approach.

Finding private communities of creators, ideally free ones, and creating content that brings value to members without direct calls to action is incredibly powerful.

You need to create value, share it, and trust that the value will come back because people will become interested in you.

For example, if you find free Skool communities in your niche, whether that’s productivity, fitness, online business, spirituality, or anything else, you can show up and share free resources you’ve created.

Or answer questions with innovative methods or different perspectives that differentiate you and help you get noticed.

This way, you take up space in the community.

People naturally come to you, ask questions, and become interested.

My very first client at Noah’s Ark was someone who saw my videos and articles in the Kortex Discord.

They messaged me saying they wanted me to coach them.

And that’s how I sold my first coaching package for €500 to help someone build their second brain in Kortex.

This brings us back to a Paul Graham principle.

It’s a startup principle that applies extremely well to online business:

Do things that don’t scale when you’re starting out.

When you’re at level zero as a creator, you need to be willing to do things that aren’t scalable.

Like making videos and content in private communities where you bring value to get known by people who are already in your target audience and are highly qualified.

Then bring them one by one to your email list.

Or it could be taking time to make lots of comments and connections with other creators.

On Substack, you can apply this principle by connecting with creators and setting up partnerships for guest articles and Substack recommendations.

That recommendation system is a very powerful feature that few people exploit.

Even I could be doing more of it to grow faster.

This principle I used to get shared by Dan Koe can be applied with any creator in any niche, as long as you find a community that gathers people in your space.

It’s crucial to do this in a way that’s natural and not needy, without direct calls to action toward your own stuff.

If the community creator feels like you’re just trying to siphon their audience and make money off their back, they won’t appreciate it and you’ll risk getting banned.

That’s why it’s important to do this intelligently.

Really approach it with the mindset of bringing value first before any calls to action.

Be almost afraid to ask.

Say something like “I’ve seen a lot of people asking questions about this, I made a video on it, would it be okay if I share the link?”

Ask the community moderator if you can.

This approach can help you create partnerships, take off, and land your first clients, especially if you’re selling a high-ticket offer or coaching. It can even bring you your first sales calls.

This is extremely underrated, but when you’re a beginner creator, it’s one of the best things you can do.

Most beginner creators try to create content on ultra-competitive platforms, short-form content like Substack notes, Twitter posts, or threads.

(I recently heard that thread visibility has dropped significantly, so even that’s less viable than before.)

They rely on strategies where they just create content and wait to go viral, hoping people will find them.

But at the very beginning, it’s extremely difficult to go viral without initial traction.

Dan Koe gets hundreds, thousands of likes on each of his tweets.

Not because every tweet is necessarily a banger, even though he writes great tweets.

The truth is, he’s now at a stage where he can post anything and get high initial engagement because he’s Dan Koe.

There will always be people engaging with his content.

It’s like Hormozi who can tweet “Drink water” and get thousands of likes.

You can tweet “Drink water” a thousand times and you’ll keep getting zero likes.

This principle is really important when you’re a creator.

Do things that don’t scale.

Focus on bringing value to small niche communities to get known, even if it’s manual, even if it’s a bit redundant, even if it’s laborious.

That’s what will actually make you grow much faster than just posting and hoping to get discovered overnight.

Obviously, it’s possible to create a piece of content that goes viral and get known that way.

But for the majority of beginners, it’s very difficult because it requires knowing the platform codes extremely well.

Entering communities, bringing value, connecting with other creators whether on Substack or other communities, and creating partnerships remains one of the best ways to grow.

If you know creators who like you and are just a bit ahead, maybe with a few hundred subscribers on their list, propose guest articles.

Propose small partnerships.

It’ll bring you new subscribers little by little.

That’s one of the best ways to go from zero to 1,000 people on your email list.

And once you have 1,000 people, that’s already enough to generate consistent revenue.

When I did my best launch, I had only 600 people on my email list.

When you have a product that truly resonates with your audience and makes sense, you can generate enough money to live comfortably every month, even with just a few hundred people.

So that was my advice for today’s newsletter.

I really recommend thinking about this if you’re a creator who wants to develop your business and finish 2026 (even though it hasn’t started yet) with a business that generates recurring monthly income that allows you to quit your job, travel, and be free doing what you love.

Think carefully about what I just shared and how you could apply it yourself.

How could you find strategies to create partnerships with other creators and develop your business this way?

That’s a question worth answering for yourself.

Thanks for reading,

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.

What I did was use a tool called Wispr Flow, which transcribes everything you say with incredible accuracy.

I’d known about it for a while but never actually tested it until recently.

And honestly?

I was blown away by how effective it is and how seamlessly it integrates into your workflow.

Here’s how it works:

You install the app on your Mac and your phone.

All your transcribed voice notes sync across both devices, which is super practical.

On mobile, they have you install a custom Wispr keyboard that lets you record voice messages and transcribe them directly using their AI.

You can send messages straight from your transcribed voice notes.

There are also some really smart features.

For example, you can create a custom dictionary.

Every time you use a word that’s unique to you, you can correct it once in the app and tell Wispr “this word is actually spelled like this.”

From then on, it’ll recognize and spell it correctly without you having to manually fix it every time.

A concrete example:

When I was recording voice notes about Kortex, it would always write it with a C instead of a K.

I’d have to either correct it manually or tell the AI to replace every instance.

Now with the custom dictionary, that’s handled automatically.

Same principle on your Mac.

You can record voice notes with your microphone from any app, everything stays synced, and it makes content creation incredibly easy and fluid.

For creators, this tool is genuinely a cheat code.

Here are three powerful use cases.

Use case 1: create content while walking.

You can write an entire newsletter this way.

Go for a walk, find an inspiring spot, maybe a park, with just a single idea in mind.

Or if you have time, spend an afternoon walking and let your idea emerge naturally.

Then you start talking into Wispr, share everything you have to say about your topic for 5, 10, 15 minutes, and boom.

You have a text ready to hand to AI for refinement.

All you need to do is remove some overly conversational phrases and filler words.

I see it when I talk like this: I use a lot of those little words that don’t work well in writing.

So I ask AI to clean those up, make a few manual corrections, and that’s it.

The huge advantage of creating content this way is that it’s instantly authentic.

I’ve written extensively and built systems to create authentic content with AI.

And honestly, even though I’ve achieved very good results using examples, precise workflows, context, and training AI to learn my style, nothing will ever be more authentic than a transcribed voice note.

Here’s why:

Because even if AI understands your style and tries to replicate it,when we speak naturally, we go on tangents, we head in unexpected directions, we have this slightly disorganized but still coherent flow.

AI will never have that.

AI is always very structured: point 1, point 2, point 3.

It’s organized in a way we are never naturally when speaking or even when developing our thoughts in writing.

That’s exactly what AI can never reproduce about you.

This tendency to go off on tangents is also what makes emails feel organic and authentic.

Voice notes for this purpose are truly exceptional.

Use case 2: give AI better instructions.

Instead of typing out your instructions when using AI for anything, just speak them.

Talk directly.

This is extremely powerful because, as you know, the more precise context you give AI, the better results you’ll get.

If you record a detailed voice note explaining what you want to do, your objectives, what it involves, it will be much faster and much better than typing it all out.

You’ll get significantly improved outputs because you can dump a massive amount of context in one go.

You can even ask AI to ask you questions to get better context from you, then answer all of them.

Use case 3: build a course by coaching an imaginary client.

Transform your AI into your ideal client. `

Ask it to take on that role and, based on a specific goal they want to achieve, have it ask you every possible question.

How would you do this?

How would you overcome different problems, fears, obstacles?

Tell it to be as comprehensive as possible.

Your AI will start asking tons of questions from the perspective of your target client about how to achieve that specific goal.

You answer all these questions via voice notes.

Now you have a bank of responses as if you were coaching an imaginary client who represents your ideal customer.

Then you take all those answers and turn them into a complete course.

You just use AI to refine the structure a bit so everything is organized.

That’s where AI shines:

Structuring and organizing ideas.

Before, you had to do all this by hand if you wanted to create a course.

Now you don’t need to think about it.

Just empty your brain to AI with as many concepts and as much context as possible from your own knowledge.

Ask AI to ask you the right questions to extract those concepts.

Answer without overthinking, pour everything out.

Then hand it to AI and ask it to adapt everything into a course format.

You have your course outline with all the ideas and concepts based on your knowledge, ready to go.

You don’t need to do more than that.

You can start recording modules right away, or turn it into a written practical guide, which is actually a format I’m probably going to test soon.

Little teaser there.

You can be creative and do pretty much whatever you want with this.

For me, this shows how creating content today is no longer difficult.

It’s extremely simple.

Anyone can do it with AI tools and tools like Wispr that let you just talk and have everything transcribed.

What makes the difference now, the fundamental thing that determines success, is how relevant your ideas are, how well you speak to your market, how you position yourself so the market recognizes your value and the value of what you bring.

Then you need the right systems and business model to build that audience, convert them into fans, and convert those fans into clients.

That’s why I create all the systems I share with you, because fundamentally, that’s what brings results.

Content creation itself is no longer the hard part.

One small thing I noticed while recording this:

Wispr has a feature where if the app crashes or something goes wrong, it still saves your recording and you can transcribe it later.

That’s really well done.

When I use ChatGPT to transcribe my messages, there’s a 10-minute limit, which gets annoying because sometimes you get into a flow and start talking about tons of stuff and go past 10 minutes without even realizing.

Plus sometimes it bugs out and crashes, and you lose 10 minutes of recording and have to start over.

Very frustrating.

With Wispr, that’s much less likely because the app is designed to save your recordings properly.

So that’s it for today’s email.

Again, not a single word was written.

Everything was said out loud while walking downstairs in the short court of my condo in Bangkok.

I invite you to test the tool and integrate it into your workflow.

You can download it using this link to get 1 month of the Pro version for free, and if you happen to dictate 2000 words, I get a free month as well.

Win-win right?

It’s genuinely powerful and practical, so it would be a shame to miss out.

See you tomorrow for the next edition of the Ark letters.

And welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.

Today I wanted to share something more personal:

My story as an online entrepreneur before I created Noah’s Ark.

I’ve talked about it a bit in my newsletter, but never in a video before.

And I feel like sharing this might resonate with some souls out there who also want to find their true path and create something that makes them feel alive.

The video is kinda messy, and while editing it, I realized I forgot to mention a lot of details about what happened exactly...

But that makes sense since it could easily turn into a 3-hour-long video if I did that lol.

Anyway, I go over the big turning points in my life and my journey, and what I learned during these times.

You can watch the video here:

You’ll discover:

- How I started entrepreneurship at 17 and what was my first business ever

- My journey from 14k months to going -5k in debts

- How I ended up creating Noah’s Ark after months of feeling lost & depressed

As always, thanks for reading and being part of this journey with me.

This story wouldn’t make sense without you guys reading and supporting me.

Welcome back to the Ark,

Noah.

You’ve created your Eden account...

Moved all of your Kortex files and important documents there...

And started playing with it to try out its possibilities.

But the question you may have now is...

“How do I organize all that in a simple but efficient way?”

And that’s the question we’re going to answer in today’s email.

But before I give you my complete organization system...

We need to understand two very important concepts when it comes to folder management:

Top-down VS Bottom-up organization.

Top-down organization is the classical way of organizing things.

It consists of creating your folders and sub-folders first, and then populating them with documents.

Bottom-up is the exact opposite.

It consists of first creating notes and adding items in your workspace...

Then use tags & links to let the organization emerge naturally from your notes.

Both have their pros & cons and are better suited for different kinds of tasks.

Top-down is better for project management, while Bottom-up is better for knowledge management.

And the great thing about Eden?

It’s that you can actually do both at the same time.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

So let’s begin with my top-down organization system.

Step 1: The PARA Method.

So the first thing you must choose when creating your folder system is a framework.

I personally like to keep things simple, so I use the PARA method, popularised by Tiago Forte.

It’s primarily designed for execution and project management and not for creative idea generation.

(Where going to see later in this newsletter the framework we’re going to use for that)

The PARA method consists of creating 4 folders to manage your entire digital life:

First, we have Projects.

It involves active work that has both a defined outcome and a specific deadline.

Content, products, clients’ work, they’re all projects.

I personally keep all of the I’m working on inside my Project folder, such as newsletters, YouTube videos, courses, etc.

Then we have Areas.

It includes all of your ongoing responsibilities with no end date.

These require maintenance to meet a standard, not the completion of a goal.

That’s where you’ll manage everything related to your health, finances, or relationships.

They’re not a project with an end date; they are areas you’ll maintain for the rest of your life.

The third folder is the Resources folder.

That’s where you’ll store any resources and reference material that’ll help you with your current or future projects, but require no immediate action.

That’s personally where I store all of my AI prompts, reference guides for AI, workflows, templates, SOPs, checklists, and all of that juicy stuff.

And last but not least...

We have the Archive folder.

That’s where you’ll store everything that isn’t related to your current projects anymore.

So any projects you just completed, and resources or areas that are no longer relevant, are going to be stored here.

The goal is to prevent you from cluttering your active folders, where you’ll do most of your work, so you maintain clarity and focus, while at the same time having the ability to retrieve any past projects or resources you may have created in the past.

And finally, something that I just started implementing recently is an “Inbox” folder.

You see, Eden doesn’t have a capture feature like Kortex had.

I know a lot of you loved that feature (me included), but after talking about it with Dan and the team, it makes sense why they removed it.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t create your own capture system inside Eden.

Just create an “Inbox” folder inside your workspace, and every time you want to store an idea, create a quick note for it.

Right now, you’ll still have to move it manually to the inbox folder if you don’t want it to clutter the root folder of your workspace, but I know they’ll be implementing a feature soon where you can select the default folder for new notes.

When this is out, you’ll just have to select the inbox folder, and that’s it, you have your own capture system.

Just use the list view inside your folder, and everything is like it was with Kortex.

So to summarize, here’s how it looks in my Eden workspace:

(I use numbers to easily sort them by alphabetical order, since we can’t manually move them in the sidebar yet)

But as you can see...

There is a fifth folder called “Mind Galaxy” in my workspace.

And it’s the final step for having the perfect hybrid organization system inside Eden, which combines both top-down & bottom-up organization:

Using the Zettelkasten Method.

The Zettelkasten Method is a popular note-taking method popularized by Nikhlas Luhmann, a German scientist, who is famous for using this method to write more than 70 books, 400 academic papers, and more than 90,000 notes.

(Keep in mind that everything was analog at the time, bro was an absolute note madman)

Of course, we’re going to apply his framework to manage our note-taking system, because it’s the best approach for idea-generation and creativity.

I’ll write a deeper piece about how to use and adapt the Zettelkasten Method to Eden, but to summarize, it consists of 4 key steps:

1) Fleeting Notes.

These are quick captures of ideas, thoughts, or highlights.

They serve as the raw material for the system and are designed for speed rather than perfection.

In Eden, your fleeting notes are raw notes you’ve written, highlights you’ve copied and pasted from Readwise, or even an entire YouTube video transcript that you’ve saved inside your workspace.

2) Literature Notes:

These are summaries of content (articles, books, podcasts) rewritten in your own words in a dedicated document.

This step is used to transform information into knowledge, demonstrate understanding, and filter what is worth keeping long-term.

In practice, you’ll create a literature note for each piece of content that you want to master, and start rewriting the concepts and ideas that were important to you inside this note.

3) Permanent Notes:

These are single, atomic ideas extracted from Literature Notes.

They must be standalone concepts that can be understood by themselves and focus on one idea per note.

They will be the main notes that you’ll create to make sure you really understand the concepts in depth, and the raw material you’ll use to feed your AI chats to create content or course material.

4) Connections:

This step involves linking Permanent Notes to create a network of related thoughts.

The goal is to transform isolated facts into a thinking system where new insights emerge from unexpected combinations.

So when you create a new note, you ask yourself how this idea relates to other ideas in your workspace, and create links with these other notes while explaining why you linked them together.

I’ve seen people in the Kortex discord saying that they can’t create connections in Eden, but you absolutely can.

You just need to use “@” instead of “[[]]”

Your note folder will be the main place where you’ll store all of your fleeting, literature, and permanent notes, with NO other folders.

Everything must be at the same level to promote serendipity and unexpected connections.

In practice, it looks like this:

I’ll create a dedicated video showing how to apply the Zettelkasten Method inside Eden, so stay tuned.

(You’ll receive an email about it when it’s out anyway)

This hybrid organization allows you to get the best of both worlds.

The PARA method ensures clarity and speed of execution when working on active projects that need your attention...

While the Zettelkasten Method inside your Note folder is your dedicated creative space where you can play and connect ideas to deepen your thinking and creativity, and benefit from serendipity.

This integration in your workspace also creates a virtuous circle, as you can pull from your knowledge base at any time while working on your projects.

Also, make sure to keep your system minimalist.

One of the main rules in systems thinking is that complex systems that work emerged from simple systems that worked in the first place.

If you try creating something too complex and rigid when you start, you’ll just get overwhelmed, and it’ll prevent you from being more creative and efficient, which is the opposite outcome that we seek.

Start simple, only create stuff that you need to work on right now, and improve your workspace as your needs emerge.

Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions about this.

And remember, I’m going to update Noah’s Ark bank with updated templates, tools, SOPs, and AI prompts for Eden, but I’ll need to wait until they activate the share feature again to share it with you.

If you don’t want to wait, you can just import your Kortex workspace to Eden after adding all the resources of Noah’s Ark bank inside Kortex.

To import your Kortex Workspace, it’s simple:

1. Go to Kortex and find the token at Settings → Account → Kortex Token

2. Copy that token

3. In Eden, go to Settings → Import

4. Paste the Kortex Token

5. Wait for the import to be completed (can take a while if your workspace is big)

Anyway, I hope this guide will bring you some value.

I’ll soon turn it into a YouTube video to make things even clearer for new users.

But as a member of the Ark, you get the juice in early access, aha.

Please, reply to this email with any questions that you may have, as they are gold for my future emails and videos, and to better understand your needs.

Thanks for reading,

And as always...

Welcome back to the Ark.

Noah.