CEO of Obsidian. Design, tools for thought, and digital craft.
When I learned to use a table saw, my teacher impressed upon me that the machine wants to cut fingers. Fear the saw! Powerful tools can do powerful things. If you want to make handmade wooden furniture you must cut wood. Your desire to have limbs and your desi…
A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice. Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals o…
Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise is verifiable and non-reversible. It does not require you to trust anyone. File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files…
Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more process, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly. When a piec…
Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be appreciated.…
The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a few days…
Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors: We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people We follow strict principles that we do not want to compromise Our users are happy to support us, we don’t need VC money…
Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong, they will…
As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things. When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. It’s been sa…
Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket. Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and shelf st…
Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson. Cost per use Considering cost per use helps me make decisions about most non-peris…
I use Obsidian to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site. This is my bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in. It embraces chaos and laziness to create emergent structure. In Obsidian, a “vault” is simply a fol…
Oscar Wilde once said: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your…
If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon. Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and understand.…
There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it. The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard th…
There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive. I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail. I can feel it almost instantly. In any…
How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life? Count your electric toothbrush, air conditioner, blow dryer, refrigerator, washing machine. Count the tiny motors that control the focus and zoom of your phone camera. A modern car has at least t…
There’s a French expression I like: L’appétit vient en mangeant Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow. Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise…
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that al…
For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste. The term spatial computing is emerging to encompass b…
One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup. It used two micro-OLED displays similar to the ones in Apple’s Vision Pro, but with clear, see-through optics reflected into the eye through a kind o…
Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it. I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looki…
Tools convert something you can do into something you want to do. A pencil converts hand movements (what you can do) into markings on paper (what you want to do) with the purpose of conveying an idea. New tools cause revolutions when they make costly things ch…
Specialization is too heavily encouraged as a career path. Becoming a generalist is one alternative, but there is another path less discussed: become a hybrid. The hybrid path means developing expertise in two or more distinct areas. Having several specialitie…
When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools. When I think about editing text, a much narrower…