🔆 I'll help you...learn faster, manage ideas better, & create inspired work more often.
♻️ Worked for: HBO, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, & UCLA.
🤿 Trained employees at: MIT, Team USA, Nike & Harvard.
❓What if you could improve how you did your thinking? What effect would that have on everything else you do?
Share
Walkthrough: Epic Life Audit (with Obsidian template)
Published 12 months ago • 5 min read
Hey friends,
As most of you know, I recently went on a personal retreat. I spent the first two hours reviewing every aspect of my life. This epic life audit made a major impact on me, so much so that I want to equip you with the template to do your own.
Your hidden benefit for doing this exercise isn't your final score, it's the hidden emotions and deeper understandings that bubble up, because they will create clarity in where you are in life right now, and confidence in where you want to go next. Good luck!
Make Writing Easy Using Linked Notes
Hey there. You still writing? Want to make it easier? More joyful? More...reliable?
If so, you may be interested in the self-paced course of "Writing Original Works". It launches next week.
Learn how to turn your linked notes into clear, meaningful writing.
Hone your voice and improve how you write original works you are proud of.
Use linked notes to unstick your writing and keep your creative efforts moving.
Are you curious about how you get there? In the following video, I share how the WOW course gives you a three-phase learning experience to get fast-acting results—while helping you build an powerful approach to writing that is long-lasting.
Waitlisters will get an email at 8am pacific on Thursday, July 25th, good for 16 hours.
Quick Hits
Speaking of writing...Are you a fiction writer struggling to get representation? Join me at Aug 1-4 in Los Angeles at the UCLA Writers Bootcamp!
Learn from critically acclaimed Simon and Schuster author and former literary agent Eve Porinchak how to create a query letter and a one-page synopsis that agents will love. Learn how to enroll here »
Last year, I attended Shawna Kenney's "Writing the Book Proposal", which certainly helped me in writing mine.
This year, I will be presenting about my experience editing in TV in Cynthia Hsiung's sold out course "Showrunners Boot Camp". Come say hi afterwards if you're there.
This is for you if...the internet is proving too strong a distraction in the middle of the day after a big meal. (I'm definitely not speaking from experience!)
Good for...quick and distraction-free access to ambient tunes that aid focus.
The triplet won! The triplet is the safest type of subtitle. You basically have three chances to win over a curious reader; and you only need one to connect. The triplet is best when the title alone is not clear. I don't think a book titled "Linking Your Thinking" is clear enough on its own. Having an unclear subtitle means both title and subtitle are unclear, which is usually not a winning recipe.
Don't worry, we'll have plenty of time to run more book polls in the coming months.
But do you really prefer "digital garden"?
It might look like everyone who voted really likes the term "digital garden", but the vote total dropped in half for this poll, which tells me the question didn't really resonate with you. My interpretation is that "digital garden" might partially describe your PKM system, but that the silent majority of you are not overly impressed.
I LOVED your email responses, which argued for the nuances in your own PKM systems and where you felt "digital garden" as an all-encompassing term fell short.
"A Story, A Story" is a children's book written and illustrated by Gail E. Haley. It was published in 1970 and won the Caldecott Medal in 1971, which is a prestigious award for children's picture books.
For my birthday this year, imagine my surprise when my mom got me this book. I guess when I was little I really liked it, so much so that she checked it out from the library for me many times. I completely forgot all of this of course.
I wonder what I particularly liked so much. Was it the beautiful illustrations, which are woodcuts inspired by African artwork? Was it the cleverness of the Ananse, a spider man who uses his wits to win? Or perhaps it was the way the book repeats repeats words for emphasis, which taps into my own innate desire for repetition?
I don't know, but decades later, I savored rereading it for the first time ;)
Lionel Davoust is a creative, big-hearted friend, who just so happens to be a best-selling, award-winning writer in France, doing fantasy, science-fiction, and thrillers, with a dozen books and over 35 short stories in publication. His work has been hailed as the "French Game of Thrones”.
He's given many treasured talks to the LYT Community on how to write fiction with linked notes (including in Writing Original Works). But did you know, the earliest talk he gave to our community is publicly available? To any aspiring writing, it's a true hidden gem.
The estimated age of the oldest surviving map in the world, the Turin Papyrus Map, drawn around 1150 BCE.
Some of my neglected maps of content (MOCs) feel a bit less dusty after reading this.
1,808
The current number of Obsidian community plugins available as of writing this. I'm continually astounded not just by the sheer number of these community-developed plugins available but the quality of so many of them as well. I'm really looking forward to highlighting more of them in future newsletters. What's one of your favorite plugins?
As always, thanks for the personal emails, they are appreciated and a joy to read.
Stay Connected,
Nick Milo Milodragovich
P.S...This is your last chance to join the private WOW Waitlist and get 50% off the Writing Original Works course during our 18 hour flash sale on Thursday, July 25th.
To respond to this newsletter, just hit reply. I love getting replies, and read all of them, but I have sadly come to the conclusion I can't realistically reply to most. Trust me, I hate this. But, well, Life puts limits on all of us. Thank you for your understanding. (And if you received this email from a friend, and would like to subscribe, please go here.)
🎟️ Want to sponsor a newsletter (45,000+ subs)? Get in touch.
🔆 I'll help you...learn faster, manage ideas better, & create inspired work more often.
♻️ Worked for: HBO, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, & UCLA.
🤿 Trained employees at: MIT, Team USA, Nike & Harvard.
❓What if you could improve how you did your thinking? What effect would that have on everything else you do?
I'm writing this from my new happy place in Montana... Setting up a new space is a lot of stress, but on the other side is a sense of what's possible. I didn't realize just how much the tiny LA box that we've lived in the past five years was making it so hard to spread my wings. But here? Space! And with space, creativity... Timeblocking has helped In a new environment, you have the opportunity to set up new routines. I've taken that to heart by time-blocking everything for the past two...
Well, I'm excited to announce that I signed a MAJOR book deal with Simon & Schuster! The fact that they inked a "major" deal to a first-time author shows that we've been seen. We've been heard. And my new editors at Simon & Schuster have bet money that our message is ready to spread far and wide. This is a big moment for me and for this movement we are leading. Here is the official release on Publisher's Marketplace. It's happening! Our Shared Opportunity with the Book This book will...
I know many of you are here to “organize your ideas and thoughts.” But I believe you're really here for a deeper reason. The LYT Manifesto In our age of information overwhelm, we find ourselves lost in everyone’s thoughts but our own. We are left cognitively reeling, incapable of making sense of all the information that inundates us. The result is a paralyzing apathy, where we are stuck endlessly consuming information—but frozen in finding the inspiration to act. That's why Personal Knowledge...