Today’s guest is Nick Milo, a long-time Optimizer OG who’s transitioned from the entertainment industry to the realm of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Nick worked as an assistant editor on popular shows like Better Call Saul, Coyote, and Blindspot. But he’s since left the industry to focus on helping others organize their ideas and knowledge more effectively.
Through his educational site and YouTube channel, Linking Your Thinking, Nick shares the strategies he once used to piece together complex narratives in television. Now, he’s teaching those same techniques to people from all walks of life, helping them boost their creativity and produce more meaningful work.
In our conversation, Nick and I discuss what PKM is and how it can transform the way you approach your work. We explore the challenges of information overload in today’s generation and discuss practical ways to manage it. Nick also sheds light on how his approach to knowledge management stands apart from Tiago Forte’s concept of building a second brain.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and ideas in your life, this episode is for you. Nick’s journey from Hollywood to helping others harness their creativity is also a testament to the power of diversification and the value of transferring skills across industries.
Nick Milo has spent the last 15 years using digital notes to create and grow a fitness boxing into an international company, produce two independent feature films, and become a TV and film editor. Most importantly, as he shares in his website, his use of digital notes helps him calm his thoughts and make better sense of the world.
He has tested and stretched the limits of linked notes in the real world from the fitness industry to the film industry, the football field to civil engineering, strength training to the boxing ring, public speaking to content creation and learned that being effective at managing knowledge is a superpower—and linking your thinking supercharges it.
Today, he teaches through his educational site, Linking Your Thinking, the frameworks to unlock your ability to work with ideas in a way that is fast, flexible, and future-proof.
Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Nick Milo, and Nick got to be honest, a little tough to put together an intro for you, because you're not just one thing. You're kind of a jack of many, many different trades. You've built businesses in the fitness industry, you've worked in the film industry, which is actually how you and I met, and I'm sure we'll get a little bit more into how we were initially connected. You've made the transition from the football field to civil engineering, you've done public speaking, you've done content creation, and probably the reason that we're here the most is to talk more about your ability to help people link their thinking and better understand personal knowledge management. But I really want to better understand your story and how you're really kind of both a jack of all trades and a Master of one. So needless to say, my biggest concern today is, how in the world am I going to do this in only 90 minutes? Because we could talk for hours and hours. But having said that, I want to start by just welcoming you and telling you how excited I am that we can finally get this conversation on the record.
Nick Milo: Zack, I'm so excited to be here as well, and it's wild to know you from the earlier context of TV editing, and now being able to talk with you in this new context, I think that'll just really help us bridge different worlds. And it's kind of, I think, on point with what you're saying about this jack of all trades business that we all need to have a little bit more of.
Zack Arnold: Well, the where I want to start is not so much diving right into the weeds of personal knowledge management. We could talk about obsidian and, you know, creativity and all this other stuff, but where I actually want to start is better understanding your journey and talk a little bit more about where you and I initially connected, because it seems like it was in a completely different universe, and it's almost like I'm talking to your twin brother, right? Because things have changed so much since we first connected, so much so that I knew you as Nick Milo Dragovich, and all of a sudden I'm talking to Nick Milo, personal knowledge management expert. So for the sake of this conversation, I'd love to start by going back to either where you and I first connected, or what led you to the point where you and I first connected? Yeah,
Nick Milo: Absolutely. I guess what led me to the point of connecting with you was extremely strong desire to figure out how to break into editing. So just some quick backstory, 2016 moved to Los Angeles, was able to interview to be a writer's assistant on an NBC show called conviction. I was turned down for that role by the showrunner, but that showrunner gave me, recommended me for the post producer, so I was able to interview and then I was got a role as post production assistant, starting from the bottom up, schlepping soggy cheeseburgers across town. So that was great. And that was, you know, after being in some other professions where I was sort of the person that had all the answers to taking a back seat. It was really quite humbling. But I wanted to break into TV. I just didn't know quite where. Couple of years later, I figured out, as great as it is to be on this producer track, going from like a post production assistant to a coordinator. Coordinator becomes a supervisor. Supervisor would become the post producer or associate producer sometimes, as you know very well, but that role continues to grow. As you also probably know, they're no longer associate producers. They keep on going up the up the ranks because of how post is in is expanding.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, we could, we could do 90 minutes just clarifying all the different titles and post production and what a producer really means we'll say that for another day, but yes, that is one very specific track.
Nick Milo: So I think it was 2018 19, I can't remember quite then, and I felt that the there was two paths, and they were diverging. Either I could continue going up this producer path or looking over at the people that we're helping to, you know, make sure everything was working with the editors, and I was on a particular show on Netflix called chambers, and the My producer there was amazing, so Gina just allowed me to do whatever I wanted to, as long as I was doing my job as a coordinator at that time. So we had a lot of downtime, and I would just sit in with the assistant editors and the editors, and I thought, You know what? I want to go down this track. I think it's a bit more creative. I can really sink my teeth into this. I think it's a better use of what naturally makes me come alive. Great. So I had wonderful exposure. I was getting paid to learn, but I wanted to accelerate, you know, I didn't come out of college into this role. I had already done a bunch of things. I was a bit older I felt for my years in the entertainment industry, and I wanted to accelerate and fast track my progress. So I was like, How can I break in? And that's when I found you. I was like, Okay, how can I best take advantage of my time? Take advantage of these amazing editors and assistant editors I'm working with. I don't want to lose a moment of it. So, yeah, I enrolled in your program and learned as much as possible about how to do all the right things and how to not do all the wrong things, and to fast track that that progress. So it was about a year after that I got my first editing credit, and that was on a show called Coyote, starring Michael chickless, best known from the shield. World. So yeah, that's sort of the editing story.
Zack Arnold: Well, I would say that we could easily spend an hour or more just talking about how in the world did you go from I decided I want to be an assistant editor, and a year later, you're getting your first editing credit on a Michael chiklish show. We could maybe talk about that a little bit more, but I think what we're going to find underneath, as far as all the different specializations that you have, and more your mindset and your approach, something tells me that that pattern is not unique to just I accelerated from assistant editor to editor. That kind of seems like a core foundation of everything you've done, where you said, I want to do this. I'm going to find a way to accelerate the process, and I'm going to find a way to learn faster. And so I want to dig into that. But another thing that I want to point out, that I think is so interesting is that knowing more about your background and knowing what you were looking to do, it's not a coincidence that you happened upon me, because, well, what I always look at is the intersection of different areas. The intersection is where we find our value and our uniqueness. And it wasn't just at the time I was a little bit more focused specifically on I want to help people down the editing path. And now I broadened out considerably, but that was one thing, but in other areas that I'm trying to find a way to optimize or accelerate that process like you were looking for. But I also one of the values that I put out into the world is that you have to do it sustainably by also folk focusing on your health and your mindset. So it doesn't surprise me as somebody that has a very significant athletic background, my guess is, and maybe I'm wrong, but that intersection, whether conscious or subconsciously, was probably another reason you're thinking, Oh, here's somebody that's done it that also values these things that I do.
Nick Milo: 100% I mean, you're immediately speaking my language. I mean, just the books that you would mention, or being able just to talk about habits and these different ways of being productive and and thinking about the industry holistically, and then, yeah, the fitness aspect, you know, Ninja Warrior, I was like, Heck, yeah, he's doing that. That was actually something I always wanted to do my life went into a different direction, where I didn't really pursue it, but that would so just everything about you, I was like, this is the person. This is the person who's thinking in the same multi dimensional way that I naturally think and want to those are the types of people, people that I want to surround myself with.
Zack Arnold: Well,and it's funny, because I can usually tell when I have students in my classes, whether they're in those small groups, sometimes even just those that are kind of in the self guided community that are doing the office hour sessions, but especially my one on one students, I can always tell after a session or two, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I don't know if it's going to be in six months or three years, this person's going to be on the podcast. I knew you were going to be one of those. Students that ended up here, but never in a million years that I think that it was going to be because of all the things that we're going to talk about today. You were so focused and so organized about I need to get into the editor's chair. And if I remember correctly, I think you were in one of my classes right before the pandemic hit. Is that roughly the timeline, that's correct. And then all of a sudden, obviously, everything went all over the place with the pandemic. And first, there was no work, then there was too much work. And now we're back in the place, at least as of the recording of this conversation, where it's like, where are all the jobs, where's the industry? What the hell happened? And you kind of disappeared for a long time. And then, from my perspective, the way that you came back into my life is that I was doing a podcast on a show with one of the top productivity experts, Mike Vardy, and we were talking afterwards. He's like, Oh, by the way, we both know Nick Milo. I'm like, I don't, I don't know who Nick Milo is. Who's Nick Milo? It's like, oh, you know he talks about obsidian and linking your thinking, and he used to work in Hollywood. I'm like, oh, that that's great. But, I mean, I know a nick. I don't know Nick Milo. He's like, Wait, how about Nick Milo Dragovic, Nick, you know Nick? And all of a sudden I got introduced to this completely different career path that you had built for yourself. So there's this big, giant knowledge gap that I have between you were dead sat on, I'm going to be in the editor's chair, and I'm going to be the next great TV editor, and all of a sudden, you're the guy on YouTube that teaches obsidian. Big, giant gap for me there. Talk to me about this career pivot, because so many people listening right now are asking themselves the question, how the hell do I pivot where I am in my career? Because what I'm doing is no longer sustainable.
Nick Milo: Sure, I'll try to maybe give you the onion approach and start with, like, just a really fast surface level, and then we can dig in as needed. But because I've bounced around a bit, and just because of maybe how I'm naturally wired, I've always taken a lot of notes and done a lot with notes, and that's allowed me it's been like a superpower. So when the pandemic hit, there was this really nerdy community with a new application. It was called obsidian, and it allowed me to take notes in a markdown, which is a format that allows you to basically future proof your notes forever so they're not caught in Evernote or Word and you're trapped in somebody else's file format. And I just started nerding out with everybody else talking about these things, and I. Had a few novel, new ideas, and those things sort of resonated. And then they like, tell us more, tell us more. And so the snowflake became the snowball, became the avalanche, and I found that, whoa. Now this thing that's actually been in the background fueling all of my efforts, my career efforts and my pivots, has now actually flipped and become in the foreground, and that's what people want to hear about. I'm uniquely positioned to do it the pandemic. Everyone being, you know, locked in it may where they all wanted to organize their information and figure out this whole, whole dynamic. So it was right place, right time, but it was also, you know, over a decade of experiences leading up to that point, and then I had this really in strange dilemma. I remember I was being offered to edit on Better Call Saul to assistant edit on Better Call Saul. And I actually had to hesitate. I had to hesitate before saying yes. I actually was painstaking over three days where I was like, I've always wanted to be on this show. Why am I hesitating? And it's because this new thing, linking your thinking, was really taking off, and I was helping people get their thoughts in order and actually think better than they ever had before. And it was something that I always loved, except now I was getting paid to do it, and then I had to juxtapose that with editing. And so it was a huge back and forth battle there. So that's sort of the short version of it.
Zack Arnold: I think that without having all the context of obsidian and the linking you're thinking, I think I remember at some point it was one of the last conversations we had when you were still a student, where you might have been deliberating this. I have some memory of you, and I may be talking about how you had this opportunity and we were trying to figure out the cost benefits. Maybe I'm making that up in my head, but that might have been one of the last conversations we had before you disappeared into the ether.
Nick Milo: Yeah, the last conversation I think that we had that I remember it was at an event, and I can't remember what it was, and it was the wrong time to talk to you about that, because we should be socializing, like, I'm really organizing things, and I want to show you, like, kind of how I'm doing things here. But we had to talk to other people. And I was like, ah, wrong time for that, but, but, yeah, the seeds were sort of there. The energy was there, taking a lot of because I knew you would love it because of the frameworks that you go over in your course. And it's like, the spreadsheet, right? How we can, like, find the right people. That was some, some of the stuff that I was doing in obsidian in different ways. I'm like, this is really fascinating stuff, and I want to show you more of that. So yeah, that's that was, I think our last conversation, it was right as I think the paths were started, starting to part.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I would imagine that most people, especially in this current climate, but just in general, if they're in a position where, like their dream project, where, in your case, it was being an assistant editor on Better Call Saul, most people, the vast majority, would say, Are you crazy? Of course, you're going to say yes, but I can relate to that internal voice, kind of, that gut feeling of something about this doesn't feel right. And even though everybody would advise me to say hell yes and not think twice, there's that, that voice that's saying I don't know, there's something about this that doesn't feel like the path that I'm on. Because I went through a very similar journey as well, where, just as my career was really taking off, when I was working on Empire, that's when, all of a sudden, this little hobby of doing this podcast with my hiking group, all of us in the fitness and post community, all of a sudden, that was becoming a thing that was no longer in the background. It was in the forefront. And people were asking for my advice, like, how do I not feel like I get hit by a truck at the end of the day as an editor, how do I try to fit in movement or exercise? What can I be doing for lower back pain, right? It wasn't so much about career development or productivity or creativity back then, but that's where it started, and that's where all of a sudden, it wasn't a matter of, Oh, my God, I have the opportunity to work on another season of the number one show on television. The thought in my head was, yeah, but when am I gonna have time to record my podcasts? Right? And I could tell that that's what I was being pulled towards, right? I had to push myself to be able to take more of the editing work, but I just felt this natural pull. It's like you're being called to do this thing. And it sounds like you were very much feeling that calling as well
Nick Milo: 100% and that's a really nice way to put it. Yeah, this calling, it was like this vocation. Everything that I had worked up towards had uniquely aligned with the macro trends of society. I was like, I had just have to, I have to go in this direction. I mean, I ended up doing Better Call Saul, but it really tore me apart. And I was working really long days. I was only able to do it because of remote work at the time. So I was able to work on one thing, but immediately transition and be confident that I could work on linking your thinking aspects and then immediately transition back as I needed to. So that's something that I don't think I would have been able to accomplish in the office. So, but there was just even even. So it was just too stressful. And there just came that point where I was like, okay, that. A Better call. Saul is going to be it. That's going to be my last show. And how, how can it not like I want, I love, going out with a bang. I was like, that's the best I was able to even have an help edit one of the final scenes in the series finale. So that's great people kind and creative, and that's not a given in this industry. So I'm just so happy to be with that team. And you know, have those memories.
Zack Arnold: It's so funny, because when you say, Yeah, this is going to be my final show, that's the same thing I said about Cobra Kai in 2018
Nick Milo: but you kept going.
Zack Arnold: This is going to be my final show. Little did I know, six years later, I was going to be here, and at least as a recording right now, it's the number one show on Netflix in 83 different countries. Never saw that coming. I'm like, Oh, this looks like a fun little side project. It's this YouTube show about the Karate Kid characters, right? So that was going to be my quote, unquote, last show six years ago, and here I am still working on it. None of which is a complaint, but I can relate to how challenging it is to balance both where you feel like you're just putting in so many hours and you're being called to two things simultaneously, and that can be very, very draining. It's an opportunity that, you know, I'm very, very grateful for, but it does come with its own challenges. One of them being I want to put all my effort in Cobra Kai, and I want to put all my effort into the podcast and into my students and into the coaching program, and there's only so many hours in the day. So like you said, use your analogy. We're going to start to peel the layers of the onion a little bit deeper. So to steal from Elaine Bennis, one of my favorite quotes is, you yada yada. The best part, which is I went from I was nerding out in these forums about personal acknowledgement and obsidian, and now all of a sudden I'm getting paid for it. I'm like, hold on a second. How do you go from just randomly being on forums and nerding out on software to all of a sudden you're getting paid for it enough so that you're thinking, I don't know if I want to take my career opportunity. There's a big, giant gap. Even if it's a day, a week, a month or a year, that's a huge gap. And I think that's where a lot of people are stuck, is number one, figuring out, how could I provide value to others, other than my specialization, but how do I bridge that gap? And you yada yada, the best part, so let's go into that transition from this is just something I do in the background, to now it's generating income.
Nick Milo: Sure I will share what worked for me. I'm sure there are some things that cannot be replicated because of time and place, but there might be some underlying patterns that we can suss out of it. So
Zack Arnold: That's my job. You just tell the story, and I help you identify the patterns.
Nick Milo: All right. Wonderful, yeah. March 2020. We're working on that show coyote and our amazing post producers thinking ahead of the game. Let's get all of our footage so we can edit this remotely before anyone was even thinking that, and before we were locked down. So we had the footage backed up before we even had permission to do so, but that allowed us to continue doing the show. So we bring that back. I'm actually in the same spot that I am right now, and I'm editing here, but we have a lot of time on our hands because of the pandemic and because of all that situation. So I would jump on to okay, just to backtrack a little bit, I was always interested in really small atomic notes. And we are able to take these digital notes and kind of say it's related to this note. And around that time, we could actually link. So there's a connection between two different notes. And if you think about how the brain is wired, it's all these connections and your neurons. But now we could visibly, visibly see that with ideas, whoa. How cool. So a new app came out, a new software application. It's called obsidian. Same time, march 2020 I was quickly on the beta, and they opened up a community forum on the platform, Discord, if anyone knows discord, and so, you know, I think discord, and initially, was more for video game audience. So it's like really fast chat messages, and we're just talking about the application. What if it could do this? What if it could do that, and the developers would immediately provide an update, like, now it does that. Now it does this. Like, whoa. This is cool. And I'm like, this does everything I wanted to, because now I can change file names, and everything will still be linked. It will like, auto, auto update, auto percolate all the links. So this brain isn't just this static thing, but it's automatically updating all my thoughts. Whoa. How cool. So I noticed, because of my background, that if you just have a bunch of links, it's it's like a densely packed forest, and you're walking from one link to the next of these notes, and it's very easy to get lost or overwhelmed. And so, going against the trend of the time, I said what we need is a map, a mapping note that has links to all the notes beneath it that makes sense to us. And I initially did it to organize. I. But what happened was, and this is still 2020, this is like, march into April. I'm like, Whoa, because of the we finally have made no link notes and notes fast enough that it's not just organization anymore. It's ideation. I'm actually thinking better because of how quickly I can play around with this, these texts and ideas in ways I've never been able to digitally before, and that's what I started shouting from the rooftops. I'm like, you can organize notes, and you can use these mapping notes to to actually not just organize but to ideate faster. And what I did was I shared a free kit, a starter kit, of notes showing how you could do this. Okay? Basically a forest of interrelated notes, and people could download that, and that just started conversations. Even more conversations. They liked that. What if it did this? What if it could do that? Explain this better, please. And so now we had the feedback loop. We had a flywheel going. And I was like, Oh, cool. So now I'll respond to what they're saying, and I will make it better. And then there was more interest. Oh, I guess I should start this newsletter thing. And that was around June. But the biggest leap that I did was I reached out to people in that community. I did DMS, direct messages, and I said, I know you just know me as that avatar, Nick Milo, but I'm going to do a private course. It'll be six weeks, one hour each week, and I'd love to just go through some of these principles that I think are really important. Would you be game? I reached out to around 20 people, and around 10 said, Sure. So we ended up doing the first beta cohort of linking your thinking the workshop. And that was great. It went well. That was July or June. It was June 2020, and that was free or paid. That was free. I was asking them for their time and but when you come out of that, I learned so much from them, but I really already had something really great there. So that's when the newsletter started. I was like, Okay, now I have something here. I'm going to expand it. That's when YouTube started, and I just so happened to launch a series of six videos, and we filmed the whole thing. I filmed it with one of my friends from that first cohort. We became friends in that cohort, and Dan, Dan Lardy, and he's like, I think you have something here. I'd like to build it with you. So we did a series of six YouTube videos that was like, how to use obsidian for beginners. Scrapped it and re recorded it, and then that has had over like, 2.5 million views, and continues to be some of the most watched obsidian videos. That was in September. Then I had a few spicy posts on Twitter. Whereas, like progressive summarization, which is by my friend Tiago forte, but at the time I didn't know him, I had a very adversarial post, and I was like, progressive summarization must die. And I was like, We need progressive ideation. And it was like, we need to ideate, not just, you know, summarize other people's ideas. That was the big thing that caught fire as well. I didn't like that tone that that tone wasn't me. So I, you know, I softened it from that point forward. But as far as starting to spark with everyone locked in their homes. We had a lot to talk about. So with all of this conversation happening, in October, I launched the first paid cohort. I was like, let's get 12 people. Let's get 12 people. 12 paying people. Think it was 350 for a six week program, and we ended up getting 55 and yeah. And then that I remember the first, first sale. And then I was like, Okay, maybe we have something here. And then once we had 55 I was like, Okay. I was like, this could be, this could be the start of something special. Then in January of 2021, we had 111 for the next cohort. I was like, Okay, this is, I think this is where I think it is. And so that's the story.
Zack Arnold: Wow. And once again, there's a whole, whole series of layers underneath that. And I agree with you that on the surface would be very difficult to replicate. So if I'm listening right now and I'm thinking, All right, so what I want to do is I need to start by finding a forum for an app, and then when they start developing the app, I need to be on the beta team, and then I need to get in a discord channel, and I need to start DMing people, right? All of that probably you're not going to be easy to replicate. It's not to say that that couldn't be a path to take, but on the surface, probably not that easy to replicate. But there's a framework that I teach specifically in my branding class, but I talk more about just in the general sense of really designing your dream career and being able to pivot where I break it down into four categories. When you identify that somebody has a problem, you have a solution to that problem. The process is conducive to a process that they're interested in going through. But most importantly, they're clear in the. Result that they give you, that's when you find alignment between your products and or services and your audience's needs, right? So I want, I want to use that framework that I teach, and I want to break this down really, really quickly, the first of which is that you identified that people had a problem, which is, there's so much information, and I've got all these notes, and they're in these lockdown systems of Evernote or notion, or Trello or whatever it might be. But on top of all of that, what they're realizing is that information is everywhere. It's non stop. Basically, it's 24 hours a day, a fire hose of brand new content, articles, videos like it just never ends. I used to make a joke, probably about a decade ago, where I said, there's going to be a psychological condition someday known as Netflix Q anxiety, where it's I have so many things in my Netflix queue I'm never going to watch, but now it's Netflix and it's Disney plus, and it's Hulu and it's YouTube watch list, and there's just so many things that we never feel like we're going to catch up, and it literally causes anxiety. So the point is, you identify that there's a community of people that have this problem, right? And you started to say to yourself, I think I might have a solution to this, and that solution is, here's how I organize my notes and how I link my thinking, and here's how I'm kind of using this app and how I'm approaching it. So you were bringing a process, right? You were bridging problem to solution with a process that was conducive to what they were looking for, ultimately. And this is the big transition that I learned about, that's the big realization for a lot of my students, especially for those that are interested in making this pivot beyond I just want another job as a specialist, doing this one thing, and I want to do it again. More diversifying is that people ultimately don't pay you for solutions. They pay you for results. And the result that I believe that you give more than anything else, is not now my notes are organized, and now I find what I need. It's Holy crap. I'm combining ideas that were in disparate places, and those ideas are allowing me to create new ones and be more creative. That's the result that I believe people are paying you for, and that, to me, is very replicable, maybe not your past specifically, but the fact that you found a community, they had a problem, you brought them a solution with a process that was fitting with the way that they were interested in getting to that solution. But really what people decided to pay you for was the results.
Nick Milo: Yeah, I think so, yeah. I think it. I think it follows that framework quite nicely. And I also think there there are two ways to approach this, and we have to stay in tension with both of these ways. One is that top down, like knowing the framework and trying to architect it, and then the other is like the bottom up, but then still being open to randomness and enthusiasm and your own interests, we can't just be completely open to the interest. It's too diffuse, and we'll be scatterbrained, and we won't go anywhere. But if we're but if we're too architecting of it, then that like authenticity that people really, really need these days, from from other people, that vulnerability even will, will evaporate. So it's this balance between knowing that framework and using it because we need to, and then still, though, making sure that you're able to be yourself can be really excited and enthusiastic about that thing. So yeah, I love it. Though. I love problem, solution, process, result. That's good.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And I also love the fact that, like you said, you really have to be authentic, and kind of bringing yourself to it. And don't get me started on authenticity being a trend right now, because, as you may have seen in the world of YouTube or online social media, like authenticity is the latest trend. As soon as authenticity is a trend, it's the opposite of what it's supposed to be. But that's, that's another conversation for another day as well. But what I want to dig into a little bit further is the nuances of how you were able to provide a process that grew your audience. And one of the things that we don't need to go too deep into the weeds, because this is an online marketing podcast, but you had mentioned to me at one point in one of our previous conversations that essentially, you provided, like a free guide, and overnight, you like, had an email list that exploded, which I'm still envious of to this day. I have yet to crack that code, but I know that you basically posted this in the right thing in the right place at the right time, and boom, suddenly you've got a five figure email list.
Nick Milo: Yeah, yeah, it's really surprising. So that was that first starter kit of notes, and it's gone through a lot of different iterations, but it's like, Hey, here's free value and and when I first shared it, it was just on those forums. It wasn't on Discord. It was on discourse, which is a platform that allows a bit more of a long form, sort of posting environment like a normal forum. And I was like, here it is. I wasn't collecting anything, you know, just again, organic, enthusiastic sharing. But then once I start seeing everyone clicking on it, I was like, Okay, now I I need to start collecting this through an email, landing form and all that stuff. So I can't even remember the initial name is something like the ICM kit index categories and maps and that eventually. Came the light kit as an L, y, t, the link in your thinking kit. And today it's now the idea it's now ideaverse, or ideaverse Pro, just to give it some branding. But, um, yeah, every, every day, roughly, well, it's been pretty consistent, with about 40 new email subscribers just to download that thing, or the past four years. And it's, it's really, you know, a lot of those people, well, not a lot of them, but there's a good unsubscribe rate because of the type of community I'm in there. Do it yourself. So they just, they don't want too much help from the outside world, but they're very interested. They want to do it themselves. They download this thing, but then my goal is to build their relationship with them, and then if they want more, they know where to go.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that's such a key part of this, too. And again, I don't want to get into the weeds about, you know, online email funnels versus social media versus paid ads. Like that's not what this conversation is about at all. But I stand by the fact that if you really want to build a relationship with people, and it's not just about conducting a transaction where, if you said, I want to build a business where I'm going to sell this idea versus kit for 999 all you have to do is maximize Facebook ads, and you can probably build a business you're more interested in actually building a relationship with people and helping them along their journey. There's no better platform to do that than email, right? So I've but the my business, as far as, like, the the actual business that generates income, my business is the email list. I build a relationship via the podcast, or I built, I used to build it more via social media. Now I'm allergic to social media, and I don't want anything to do with it, but that's where the relationship is, ultimately built, ultimately built via email. And I still stand by anybody that's listening, that's thinking that I do have some form of value that I can bring in my skills and my experience and my past and my unique perspective. I still say, whatever the business model is, you want to build a relationship with people via email and boom, you were off to the races doing that. It's just the start of it. And like you said, with your kit, it's very transactional nature. And ooh, you help me solve this one problem. I'm going to download it and I'm going to immediately unsubscribe, because nobody's going to help me. I'm going to do it by myself, right? I've certainly got a lot of those too. But you don't need 100% of the people on your email list to decide to pay you money. You need, like, 1% of them to decide that they're going to pay you money. And you can build a life off of that, right? That's, that's how I've done it with this coaching business. So I, having said all that, I want to make a little bit of a transition is still somewhat related. But I want to talk more about what it is that you actually do. Now that we have a sense of how you made this career pivot doing this, I want to talk about what it is you actually do, because one of the things that I absolutely love learning more about is understanding the process of creativity. And I will refer people to a few other related podcasts that we have. You'll see what I'm doing is, I'm I'm linking their listening. I might, might have to trademark that. So I'm linking their listening. And that I have a couple of past podcasts with Scott Young, who I'm assuming you probably at least heard of, is probably in your general ecosphere. We talked about his first book, ultra learning, his second one, how to learn or how to master anything, to learn more about how we can really immerse ourselves, knowing that you can provide the practical tools to learn and gather information quickly. But there's another podcast that I did that I think is more relevant to where I want to go, and that's a podcast with Joey Cohn, who wrote the book The laws of creativity. If you're not familiar with Joey, I think you and Joey would be a really, really good connection to make, and I would facilitate it for you, if you like. He literally, he wrote, it's not a book, it's more of like a Bible. And you can see that I've a lot of time with it. It's literally called the laws of creativity. And in what must be three to 400 pages of just brilliant ideas. The one thing that I took away, more than anything, was understanding the creativity is not creation. It's combination. So the idea is there and that it's all about combining ideas. That's where, for me, the struggle becomes real, because I'm probably going to be the perfect student for you, because I have so many ideas in so many different notes, and then I look at everything I have in like, I don't know what to do with this. I've got a bookmark and Apple notes to this article, and I've got all these coaching sessions that I've got in obsidian, but oh crap, I've got all this stuff that's in Evernote. And when I find that those things are organized and they're linked in just the right way, all of a sudden, it's like the combination of these things, this is what's going to push me to create this new workshop, or write this newsletter, or I didn't even think that I could talk to this podcast guest about this topic, and the intersection of the topic and the guest that brought out a really unique conversation, right? Exactly. So I want to talk more about your approach to what creativity really is, and I want to look at it through three lenses, and you can break down as little or as much as you want of these three lenses, divergence, convergence and emergence.
Nick Milo: Wonderful. Yeah, this is going to be fun talking about all these aspects of creativity. I do know Joey. I haven't talked to him in a while, but, yeah, had him on one of our linking your thinking conferences when, right when his book was
Zack Arnold: Oh great. So then you and I, we clearly know a lot of the same people.
Nick Milo: Yeah and then amazing people. I Okay, so I, like you said earlier, I can't I do help people with organization. That's like, step one. It's like, get your thoughts in order, so that, like, there's a so that once you get your thoughts in order, then you'll want to be expressive. You'll be like, Okay, now, now I'm I can actualize myself in whatever way that is. So organization bleeds into ideation. And that's where, you know, that's my happy place. That's where I think I have the most value to give others. And ideation can't help but express ourselves, lead to joy and lead to deeply meaningful living. So that I think at the heart of what I do now, there's a third part of that, Venn diagram, organization, ideation, I'll say below that is sort of like production. You know, the Getting Things Done aspect, I touch upon that, but not as much as many. In fact, I'm sort of anti productivity that way. I kind of believe that not all those who wander are lost, to quote Tolkien, and so in the wandering, we can create real value if we let ourselves do so. So that ties into divergence. Wandering is all about divergent energy, and let's talk about how that relates to our nodes. We came from a world that told us to use folders. No one was saying use folders. We just had no other choice. I have a file, folders, folders, folders, folders, more folders upon folders. And all this is a siloing and an architecture that is a place where good ideas go to die, essentially because they get suffocated. You have an idea. It's on the tip of your mind, and you have to ask the question, Where should I put this idea? That's the wrong question to be asking. First, get it down, and once you have it down, you can ask all sorts of healthier, more creative questions in a linked note environment, such as, What does this relate to? What does it remind me of? Why is it important as you're typing, you're linking, as you're linking, your thinking, as you're thinking, you're writing, it's this beautiful place to be in. So at any point, I can open a brand new note. It can be a blank page, and I'll just throw stuff in there, raw material, words, ideas. Oftentimes they're just keywords, like, I know this is a cool keyword, like laws of creativity. I don't know how I'm going to use laws of creativity, but just the book, it's like this object, and I know like, I want to kind of orbit some other thoughts around it. Well, I'll just put it into a note, make it a bullet or something, and think about like when you organize your room or the kitchen, like things go in certain sections. Well, in a note, we can actually once we start gathering and collecting whatever the bits of ideas and interests that we have, all we do is we gather them into a single place, and then the magic happens as we start to fluster them. So we could kind of consider this a form of convergence, or clustering different ideas together, and this is where the magic happens. It's really hard to talk about this out loud without the visuals Zack, but it's like when you start to cluster ideas in an environment that is as fluid, almost as water, like this. Is this, you know, this isn't our grandparents, Microsoft Word. This is, or I should say, our previous lives. Microsoft Word
Zack Arnold: You just made me feel really old with that.
Nick Milo: Well I mean, like, I know, I don't, why did I say that? Because we all like you and I, we use Microsoft Word
Zack Arnold: Yeah, no, I totally understand where you're coming from, yeah.
Nick Milo: And now it's all these ideas. It's really hard to say, but we can play around with them visibly, so much faster, almost like shuffling cards on a table on a desk. But as we cluster them together, something magical happens, and that is, we ask even better questions, does this one go above that one? How is this one related to that one? Are they saying the same thing, or is this one already saying too much? And I need to split it into some other points, and so you you can think of it as maybe fast outlining, if you want, but ultimately, it's this ideation chamber, like this high pressure I think of it as like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, colliding, smashing atoms together, but we're doing that with the ideas symbolized by text and a simple note. And as we do that, that's where we get into the emergence. We are generating newness that wasn't there before by combining and recombining and and just having the sparks happen between different ideas. So. So that that is what I try to Yeah, we get the organization done. But what I really want people to do is recognize they have an entirely brand new thinking tool at their fingertips. It's free. It wasn't here before 2020 it's here now, and if you know how to use it, it will supercharge your mind. It will supercharge your creativity. And that's where I want to get more people to feel because once they feel it, not just know, like, oh, this, this wacky guy, Nick Milo, he's talking about, but once you feel it, then people like, whoa. It's an aha moment that they never forget.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I've had that experience more than once, and the the way that I, excuse me, I've I initially found obsidian because of you. And I can't remember if you were the one that recommended it to me directly, because we were talking about this process at the time. It was maybe about a year ago. It was either that or I literally just found you by doing a search for obsidian. You showed up on YouTube because you're literally the obsidian guy. So I don't remember how it was, but I remember thinking initially like, no, no. I feel pretty good about my ecosystem, right? I was using Evernote and I was using Trello, and at least in certain ecosystems, similar to you, at one point, I was the Trello guy, right? You went on LinkedIn learning, and I had all the Trello courses, both for just general training, also for how you specifically do a creative process, like a TV or a documentary workflow. So I was kind of in that world of being. I used that. I used it so fellow post production one. So I remember what it was like being associated with a very specific tool, and that never felt right to me, because I always like to teach the systems and the ideas and be able to apply them to any tool. But I do remember what it was like to be associated with a specific tool, and when I found you as the obsidian guy, I'm watching the videos, I'm like, No, I don't know. I've got my workflow here. But then I started to understand not just, oh, this is good at organizing, or it uses tags versus labels, etc, etc. The aha moment for me was the ideation phase. It wasn't, this is better at organizing than Evernote, it was. It's connecting ideas that I never would have connected otherwise. I would have had to consciously open this node in a window, this node in a window, this node in a window. But then, even with my very rudimentary knowledge, still to this day of how to use obsidian, it's like, oh my god, I never thought to connect this article that I read three years ago about work life balance in Hollywood with this article about X, Y, or Z, or whatever it might have been. And a lot of the the newsletters that I was writing for the the email newsletter, came from that process, and all of a sudden I'm thinking, this is way easier than it used to be, like I could spit out a 1500 word newsletter in an hour or two, whereas before, it was always alright. I'm staring at the blank page, and I got to come up with an idea, and what am I going to write about? And now is you just enter a tag or a keyword, and boom, you can literally have a visual map of these different connections. So yeah, so I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, because this is a very, very weedy and very technical program, but as far as my knowledge of it, I kind of feel like you introduced me to a Ferrari, and right now I'm driving it up and down my driveway. There are so many things that I can do with this vehicle that I haven't learned how to do yet, and I want to, I'm going to dig more into that with you offline, and I definitely want to get into more of your courses, because now is the time for me to figure all this out. Because I'm more interested in doing more in depth, writing, possibly writing a book, but I want to look at it more from without having the visual references. I want to step back and assume that I'm somebody that's in the very early creative phase, whether I'm writing a script, whether I want to make a film, wherever I'm the person that's generating the content that's going to create it, right? So the divergence process for most people at best, is I've got a bunch of tabs open in Google, or I've got a bunch of Evernotes, or I've got a bunch of things that are bookmarked, Apple notes, whatever it might be, right? I want to kind of talk, and again, I don't want to go too deep into the nuances or talking about organizing, because that's not really what this is about. But I at least want to give a picture of how we go from information overload. I have no idea how to manage all this, so there's some semblance of organization. I want to look at the simplest steps that get to the collision of the ideas and oh my god, this is what my film was about, or this is my character's motivation, or this is what I want my YouTube channel's message to be. So let's just start from I am bombarded with way too much crap. I have so many podcasts to listen to. I have 27 tabs open in Google Chrome right now. I've got all these online courses that I paid for. Haven't even logged in. Start me with just super, super bare bones, basics. How do I start to feel 5% less overwhelmed by the amount of information available to me?
Nick Milo: Sure. Number one, it's mindset before anything technical. So it's like, yes, there is the fire hose of information, and that fire hose isn't getting any weaker. So we just have to come to the realization to put the fire hose down and be at peace with that. So oftentimes, when we're doing a. Exercises in in obsidian, or whatever the note app somebody is using. It's like, first thing we're going to do, what's the only rule, no internet like, I know we're on the internet now, but we're not going on search engines, no AI, no Wikipedia, because then we can tap back into that thing that never has any time, which is our own, our own thoughts. So that's number one. It's just mindset, if we do that initially, okay. Now, technically, if there's a lot of overwhelm with tabs, here's a simple exercise that you can try see. I mean, it's so simple, but if you do it, you might enjoy it. Open a new note. Look at those tabs, and just one by one, copy the URL for a tab, put it into the note as a bullet, hit, enter, create a new bullet, and then copy and paste the next URL and each time you close the tab, so instead of all these tabs in your internet browser that are always open to you as a distraction, you now have this note, give it a name, like tabs that I had open, and You now have places where you can access those URLs, and you can be very confident. You can go back to that note anytime to open those tabs again, and you can structure them. You can indent you can say, these are about, you know, this stuff, and this is about that stuff. Great. All right, we're already doing the the sorting, the sense making, the Organize, organizing, but just a simple activity like that will provide immediate relief and maybe nudge you into what's possible with with making notes.
Zack Arnold: So now, because I know that beyond just the lack of organization, I hear this from my students all the time, and even I have some of it, it's a sense of of guilt, right? It's well, I said I was going to read this, and the tab is there. So for me, yes, I'm moving the link somewhere else, but now all of a sudden, I have this one note with 28 different links to articles. Oh, my God, when am I going to find the time to get through all these right? So the what I really want to point out that I think is so important, and I'm glad you said it this way. It always starts with a mindset. All right, so there's a quote that you gave that you just kind of want to use to cap off. I like this. The quote of you need to be willing to put the fire hose down. But I think this is another one in this overload of information age that people need to hear. So I'm quoting you directly. We don't need more knowledge every second. Instead, we need to get better at devout developing the knowledge that we already have. And this is so hard for me personally, and it's so hard for other people, there's always this barrier of, I'm not ready yet. I don't know enough, right? And that's that can sometimes be used as not just a way to procrastinate, but to really stop yourself. Well, I don't know if I could create a YouTube channel about this. Let me gather more information first, or I couldn't start a newsletter talking about work life balance in Hollywood. Who am I to think that I can do that? I need to gather more information first. So how do we give ourselves permission to put the fire hose down? Because even to this day, I still give myself the excuse. Well, I don't know enough to do this yet. It's like, Dude, you got enough information at your fingertips, just freaking do it. So how do you give yourself permission to put the fire hose down?
Nick Milo: Honestly, I learned it as as deeply like we can intellectually. Learn this a million times. Doesn't matter, but the one that really like punctured to my core. I just so happened to go to a New York Broadway play with a friend randomly, and it was a play that had no interest in it's called Pippin. It's not like, the most exciting. No one's like, oh, yeah, let's go see Pippin. But it's about this story of a young guy, and he's trying on a bunch of different career paths, like his dad's the king. So it was like, Hey, let's go. Yeah, let's fight in wars and rape and pillage. He's like, I don't want to rape and pillage, though. So then he's trying out something else. And he's trying out that and and someone at some point, and at this time in my life, I was not good at remembering quotes or information. That's probably why I wanted to take so many notes. But this one thing was said to him, he's like the only thing to be sure of is that there's nothing to be sure of. And I just started repeating that for the rest of the play. That one quote, I went home, and I also was looking at people who were extremely prolific in their life at that same time, Pablo Picasso was on the top of my mind. Picasso is somebody who averaged one painting or drawing or sculpture a day, like one piece of work a day for his life. What like? That's incredible. So I combined that idea of prolificness and the only thing to be sure of is that there's nothing to be sure of. I was like nobody knows diddly, like nobody knows anything. Who are they? They can't judge me. They don't know anything either. So how about I just create as much as I want to create, as fast as I can create, and let history sort it out. Just let the paramedics sort it out, so to speak, like I'm just going to do my thing and and that would that was the time that really punctured me deeply. I was like, No, there's nothing to be sure of. So that means no one can just. Me they can't be sure that my writing or my ideas are poor because they're just going off of whatever they are not sure of. So yeah, everything unlocked at that point. As far as it doesn't mean I don't ever have bouts of imposter syndrome. It also doesn't mean that I don't get caught over consuming, oh my goodness. But at least there are some tools and strategies to to get beyond that, but mindset wise, yeah, that's just one thing to be sure of, is that there's nothing to be sure of. So just go ahead and do your thing.
Zack Arnold: All right. So I love that. Now I want to peel the layer again, because you can take anybody in whatever circumstances in their life, and you can take multiple people, a whole room of people that are watching Pippin with you, my guess is the vast majority of them don't remember that quote, and it didn't resonate with them at all. What was it specifically about what you were struggling with or what was going on in your life that made that one quote echo over and over and over because others wouldn't even remember it was said, and for you, it's been a guiding principle for your entire life and building a business.
Nick Milo: Well, I guess I felt at that time that I wanted to express some ideas. At that time, it was actually more about willpower, and I felt like Johannes Kepler from an old Cosmos episode. Carl Sagan talks about this, this guy who was dead set on believing in Plato's model of the universe, and so he's trying to figure out why Mars doesn't work like the other planets in their rotation. And it turns out that it looked like Mars is orbiting one direction, and then for little part of the year it goes backwards. They call it retrograde, and then it'll start spinning its normal direction again. And long story short, Kepler had to abandon his entire faith to destroy that model and recognize that there was a different model. So he had to get rid of his complete faith in platonic models and replace it with something that was turned out to be true, which is elliptical elliptical orbits of planets and bodies. So he had to completely smash his limiting beliefs. And why that resonated with me so much is because the quote from Pippin is because I was holding on to the limiting beliefs that we all have deep down inside, fear of rejection, imposter syndrome, and the way that it manifested for me was through perfectionism. Oh, it's not ready yet. Oh, I can make this better before I share it. And that's always a losing proposition. But especially, especially in our digital age, you are penalized by not sharing. And everyone who is sharing their crap, their crappy first drafts, they're all being rewarded for it because they they get feedback. And then that starts a beautiful flywheel effect. So it just everything is going against the people who don't share. And if you're someone who, if you're listening to this, we want your voice out there. We want you to be giving whatever your value is. And if you're, if you're not doing it, then we'll have a bunch of other people who maybe shouldn't be who are opening their mouth and saying things that well, are bringing down the level of discourse, and we need to bring it up. So, yeah, all those things, I think, is just, I think that's why it resonates so much to me, because I was dealing with all those inner beliefs that needed to be shattered.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. Well, I'm glad that I asked that, and I you gave me exactly the answer that I was looking for, was that this entire journey goes so much deeper than I found this new program. I'm a beta tester. I'm going to provide some skills right to go from I think I might put together a free guide to I ask people money to be in my cohort to now, this is what I do for a living. You have to confront all of the limiting beliefs about yourself, which, again, is so much more about mindset than it is about the tech or it is about skills or abilities. And this quote resonated with you because you had the mindset the script in your head was, I'm not ready. This needs to be perfect first. And had you decided this, you know that this index of starter files for obsidian isn't good enough yet, you'd probably still be trying to struggle figuring out, well, is there any jobs for me as an assistant editor? Because that's what I do for a living. But you decided this, this, this crosses the threshold of what I would call good enough, right? The challenge here, and I don't want to get too deep into this, because I have many feelings about social media and content creation, because it's changed radically in the last 10 years. But I would argue that one of the problems is there's way too many people that are giving way too much information that's complete and total garbage, and they could use a little bit of a filter where they maybe need to think that maybe they need to maybe not be sure about everything, but be a little bit more sure about what they're doing. So how would you advise, and this is partially intertwined with the organizing information, but also the person that decides they may want to create it. How do you overcome the idea of, well, everybody's talking about this, and there's already too much information, and it's not even whether or not my information is good enough. Am I sure? Am I not sure? It's what's the point? Like, if somebody's listening saying, I thought that I knew a lot about obsidian, I was starting to think of the idea of. Pursuing that as a path, but, well, Nick blew it for me, because Nick is already teaching obsidian. So how would you, how would you confront that kind of a limiting belief, knowing there's so much content and so many people now doing what you're doing?
Nick Milo: Yeah, that that's it's, it always feels like if I just started this five years earlier, I'd be in such a better position, the one that I think resonates most with me and I've been sharing with others, is that we just can't base success off of extrinsic goals that we can't control. We have to first know that no matter what, even if only my mom reads this, I'm still going to be happy with the outcome of creating this piece, this piece of work in whatever form it is. We might be talking like it might be a tweet or whatever you want to call it, a post, an email, a conversation in the office with a colleague about something you're interested in, in whatever form your expression, your your form of communication, whatever form it takes, just have to be intrinsically motivated to do that, and that that expression is the result, and if you're happy with the expression, that's enough. Now we still need to be practical and figure out the world so you can have extrinsic goals, but it's very important that the extrinsic that the tail doesn't start wagging the dog. Because if you're only focused on the external stuff, it's like, I must make sure this gets 10 likes, or I must make sure I get, you know, something from it. That's great. And I have those goals, but if, but if, but if they are not met, then I can still look at, you know, maybe my latest YouTube video and be like, You know what? I'd like that I made, that I can stand by it. I'm proud of it. So that makes me feel good. And so, yeah, I think it really just is about delineating and being clear that there are extrinsic goals and there are intrinsic goals. We need both. And you if you only have the outer ones, that's when you're going to really get in a world of hurt.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. So I agree with all that, and I want to bring it back to this conversation of convert or divergence, convergence and emergence and and it's less about the actual process and more about how it's us being able to do it for ourselves. So if we're talking about divergence, I love where you talked about sometimes the work is done in the wandering, right? When you're wandering, you're not necessarily lost. And if it comes to the creation process, whether it's creating content online, building a business, writing a script, there is this part where you just kind of have to throw shit against the wall. What sticks? What doesn't stick? You got to write the bad words to get to the good words, right? And in a way, you'd kind of giving yourself permission to, well, I'm going to put this stuff out there. I'm still not an expert on obsidian, but I feel like I'm solving this specific problem for people. But one of the things when it starts to come to the convergence, and it's not just the convergence of notes in Evernote or obsidian or anything else, but the convergence of all the things that you were learning about, how you were going to take the way you've diversified yourself and thus learn to specialize it, right? What you one of the things you mentioned earlier was this idea of wanting to authentically do it. And there was this one video where you were rate way too inflammatory, and you decided I want to take that out, right? My guess is that the whatever I haven't seen the video, but whatever the The approach was, or the tone, or the inflammatory nature. I bet you were probably rewarded by the algorithm for that. And if you would let the tail wag the dog, you would have said, This is what I need to do with my YouTube channel. I need to talk about Evernote shit, right? If you had a tab, if you had a thumbnail that said, Evernote is garbage, you probably have your your likes, and you know, all of your subscribers skyrocket, but you decided that from the divergence to the convergence process, that's a value that I don't hold. The value that I hold is authenticity. So you weren't letting the tail wag the dog, and right now, the tail that's wagging everybody is the algorithm, or the algorithms, right? And I've always been such a big proponent of I don't want the algorithm to tell me what I need to make, and I'm not here to please the algorithm. Now, financially, that's probably hurt me significantly, but I can sleep at night, at least mostly I can sleep at night for these reasons. I have my other challenges with sleeping at night, but they have nothing to do with the algorithm or the business, right? Yeah, yeah. So to me, that's part of going from divergence to convergence, and figuring out who we are and how we provide value, right? So that's kind of high up in the clouds. Now I want to take this idea of convergence a little bit down, not too much into the weeds, but maybe just on ground level, where I have my ideas somewhat kind of sort of gathered. I've got a bunch of notes, I've got a bunch of ideas. I've got clippings, whatever it might be, without going into all the tags and tips and tricks and maps and everything else, just kind of give me a general concept or mindset for how do I start to get these ideas together in the same place, to converge so that it then sparks the ideation?
Nick Milo: Yeah, totally. I love this, and I have simple answers A. One. Let's say you have a bunch of notes. Throw all those notes into a single note, like when I say throw all the notes in there. We're throwing links to those other notes. Great. Now we've cut down on the cognitive burden. We can look at all that stuff in a single spot, typically. Then I'll open up a new note. Let's pretend. Let's pretend this is a 750 word article. Okay, now I can open up a new note. Those are all my reference pieces. They're living on their own. They're doing their own thing. But I'm just going to open up this note and start typing it with a single, consistent through line. Because one of the things when you have a bunch of these atomic notes, some of your listeners, but probably not too many, might be familiar with the term zettelkasten, which is German for slip box. And it's a long story short is when you have a bunch of index cards, like 1000s of them, you can't fit much on an index card, and so you can save information, and then later on, write from these index cards and whiffs of a zettelkasten is about the best insult I've ever heard for writing that is like piecemeal from these different index cards. We don't want that, so I'll have all my index cards, my digital ones, over in one single note that I can click on, I can open up, I can look at but then I'm just writing over in this other note. Okay, now the simple stuff, let's imagine I have something the key is to move to the medium. Move to the medium. Okay, I did my work in obsidian. More than likely, that's not where I'm sharing it. So let's remember there's a real step here of moving that content to the medium. Maybe it's as a newsletter. Well, I have to, have to open up, in my case, ConvertKit. I have to go in there. I have to it's just not a copy and paste either, because in that container, in that rectangle of an email post, it looks different than it did in obsidian. There's a dangling line, Oh, I better fix that one. There's this and that and all those things. The form of the medium helps. It shapes the message in minor ways, sometimes, but in other ways, more profound, more profoundly so move to the medium. And if you don't know what your medium is, you always have one at your fingertips that's called Send to self. Open up an email, copy and paste whatever you have in your note app of your choice, and then edit it to your heart's content in the email before sending it to yourself. Anyone can do that anytime, to practice getting over perfectionism and practice just moving through that process of adding ideas, relating ideas, communicating ideas. That's all we're doing here. But people get stuck with the communicating. You can communicate just to yourself. It's a practice. We just have to get comfortable with what it is to actually move to a medium and then express it, communicate it, and we can do that by just sending to self.
Zack Arnold: It's so funny how similar the two of us are, and I didn't even realize it, but I'm exactly the same way where now, largely because of you, I write everything in obsidian, and one of the things I like about it, it's not connected to the internet. I'm stuck in a closed system where my ideas are based on whatever's in these notes, and I'm not even at the point yet where I'm smart enough to, like, have one note with all the notes within it, but I create a I do the the linking between the notes, and I always create, like, a table of contents for stuff. I have some semblance of what I'm working with. But for me, it's the same thing where you can copy, paste it, but then you look at and you're like, Ah, crap. I can't just hit the send button because now this paragraph is slightly different size than it was before, and it doesn't feel like it's skimmable, or this one line isn't formatted correctly. So I've actually found a hack where I literally will make the window size, and in obsidian, you can create multiple windows within Windows, so you can have your notes next to notes, which I love, but I found it's not really a hack. I'm sure that you're way more of a hacker than I am, but I have the window size be exactly the same width, so it has the same number of letters as it does in my email program. So now when I copy paste it, it's not, oh, wait, this is now seven lines instead of four, and I get to feel for but yes, understanding how the other person is going to consume that information is largely important. So you can put yourself in their shoes. But I want to, I want to zoom into a place that's kind of in between those two things, okay? Because I think at least for me, this is largely where the ideation phase happens, or, as you says, The Emergence phase, if we're talking about divergence to convergence, to emergence. At least for me, I find the emergence phase largely happens by accident when I'm trying to converge my ideas. So I want to talk again, not in the weeds of here, all the fancy features of obsidian, but where you could do this with just about any note taking program or even literal index cards all over the floor, right? So if we go back to the divergence, I've got 28 open tabs in Chrome. We've taken those 28 tabs, we've copy pasted the URLs into one note, and whatever that note taking app is, or we have a pile of index cards, but that's not really usable information yet, because it's a bunch of HTTP colon, backslash, backslash, and I have a lot of notes in obsidian that are still just the link to the. With no context whatsoever. So if we want to go from that to being ready for the medium that's going to go out there, what's the simplest way to say, I've got all these URLs, and I is it a matter of I want to put them in different and I know you don't want folders, but different folders, different tags, different categories. If I wanted to spend half an hour and I've got 28 URLs posted a bullet points in a single note. If I want to converge those ideas, at least for me, that process is where the emergence of creativity happens. So what's a simple way to approach I've got a bunch of this information, and it's organized, but organizing, it doesn't help the ideation or the creative process.
Nick Milo: Interesting. Okay, yeah. So, okay, two terms that may or may not. I might not get these accurate, but I'm going to talk about density and pressure. So density is going to have all these index cards or ideas as tightly packed as humanly possible, all the links, whatever that that is, what is at the core of the linking your thinking ideas is just, you got to pack in all these ideas as tightly as possible, and that's where the emergence happens. Because your mind will just be like, well, this is related to that that goes here, this. Now that makes me think this. That's where in my mind, that that's where the emergence, like something from nothing, happens there, and then it, it can kind of converge out into a formalized work, like all that stuff converges into something. So that's kind of just how I would think about it. And so we talked about density. And then the other part is pressure. If you know you have an output in mind, oh, I got my weekly newsletter. I gotta get that out. That's the pressure to know what to conform to. If you don't have the pressure and you have the density, like, Okay, I have all these ideas. They're tightly packed. But why can't I do anything with it? Well, do you know what you are trying to do? Like, do you know what the outcome looks like, kind of so if, but if you have the outcome without the density of ideas, then it's hard to get there too. That's the blank page that you were talking about earlier. So I would just say that's just kind of the theory and all. But now let's go back to the density. We have all these URLs or linked notes and ideas, and they're tightly packed. And then, so your question here was more about how to
Zack Arnold: Essentially, let's, let's continue with this analogy, right? Where we start by, we put the fire hose down, we've decided I can only use the 27 tabs I have opened in Chrome. I'm not allowed to go any further down the rabbit hole, right? I copy paste the URLs into a single node. I've got a bunch of bullet points. And again, this is not about the tech. This is about the metaphor of the creative process, right? So I have all these URLs, and I know that I have to, it doesn't matter if it's I have to write an email newsletter. I need to create a YouTube video. I want to write a short film script, whatever it might be. What I'm trying to figure out is the simplest step in between, where should I take all those and should I categorize them as, this is about nutrition. This is about fitness. Should it be tags that are it's kind of the basic understanding of the convergence of these is what leads to the emergence of I never thought bullet point seven and 14 had anything to do with each other, but holy crap, this is the story of my film, right?
Nick Milo: Yeah, yeah, great. So don't even have to touch folders. Don't even have to touch tags or any of that. All we need is this simple note with these little bullets and stuff, and each bullet is a line. And so what I implore everybody to get really good at is just being able to move lines up and down, because that's how, when you're clustering ideas together that are on a single line, you can cluster related ideas together, and then you can hit a bunch of spaces, and you'll have, like, a group of five bullets here, and then you'll have a group beneath that of like two bullets, and then you have this big, unsorted group of bullets at the very bottom. Great. Now we're organizing, but we're doing it in like this really fluid way. Doesn't require folders or anything. It just requires actual physical space on a screen. It's like we're mapping with text in a vertical plane. And then I probably would add categories, like you said, like as a header. So I'd give a header and say, these ones are about social dynamics, these ones are about productivity, whatever these headers are. And I'm sense making as I'm working, and all the organization is happening in a single note, and then from that iodine and clustering, it's going to most likely spur off and generate new ideas. That's where the creative part, it's just so hard to talk about. But you'll say, Oh, these two ideas together makes my brain come alive and makes me think this, and like, yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing I have to say about all this stuff. And so that's the spark that generates, you know, your your next gush of energy. But it's, that's the that's the hardest part to say, but it happens by the clustering by type. Packing idea related ideas together. And you can do all that just in a very simple note, move bullets around, make spaces between groups of bullets, give each of those clusters a heading. At some part in this process of natural organization, which feels kind of nice, you're probably going to have the ideation just hit you and you're like, Okay, I'm gonna go in this direction. And then then you're off to the races.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I've had that happen many times where it's for me, it's absolute drudgery to have to go through. Here's the notes that I've clipped or organized. Why did I write this thing again? Or why was this highlighted? But you just kind of force yourself through the process, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh my god, this is the thing. Holy crap. And then two hours later, where did these 1500 words come from? Right? So for me, that the just learning how to do this, like I said, I'm driving the Ferrari around my driveway right now, like I've got so many other things that I can learn about this process, but just knowing enough, just barely enough, to create a bullet put them all in a similar place. Link notes, the emergence of so many different ideas have come for me that have led to not just I'm going to push myself to write this, but I feel pulled or called to write about this idea. And the reason that I bring this up is kind of the two areas where I want to leave this conversation, the first of which is, we're talking a lot about the creative process to create external content, but where we started was this idea of recreating ourselves and retelling our stories. And what I talk so much about on the program, especially when it comes to managing career pivots, is that it's not that you're starting over, it's that you need to find the intersection of all of the areas where you already have skills, abilities, knowledge or values you can bring to others. So the example that I always give, just to kind of show that the power of this intersection is that, if you if we're talking about my experience in the world of Hollywood, Film and Television editing, I work at a pretty high level. I mean, I'm working on Cobra Kai, which is, you know, number one show in 83 countries as we talk. But I'm not the best film editor in the world. I haven't won Emmys, I haven't won Oscars, but I'm working at a pretty high level, and I consider myself a professional. At this point, I'm past the point of I can't believe they're paying me to do this. Do they realize I don't know what the hell I'm doing? That was the first 15 years of my career I've settled into. I guess I'm a professional at this point, right? But I'm not the best in the world. Then we take this other area that we talked about, which is me as an American Ninja Warrior compared to other American Ninja Warriors and even novices, I suck. I'm pretty much not good at the sport, and I've learned, after six years that I'm probably not the best fit for it, and I always kind of come into the group, and it's kind of like, I'm Rudy. It's like, good for you. Kid, good job. We're going to get you in for one play. But nobody, nobody's ever going to think, yeah, I'm legitimately going to compete with them, right? But if we're talking about the power of intersections. If you take my level of experience as a film and television editor and my level of experience as an American Ninja Warrior, and all of the skills they're in, how many people do you know, and you know a lot of people like I do that are as good as I am at film editing that are better than me an American Ninja Warrior,
Nick Milo: I know zero.
Zack Arnold: Right? That's the power of intersection, and that's where, if you're using the this process to find the intersections and the overlap, or if we're talking about creativity, the combination of different ideas, that's why I think personal knowledge management is such a vital meta skill that people have to develop. It's not just about I want to be able to write a newsletter easier. I want to create more YouTube content, or I need to write shorts. It's great for all of that. But I think understanding this process is also really good for us better, understanding ourselves and the value that we can provide to the world.
Nick Milo: 100% and I think you've made a really nice connection. I know there are a lot of puns with the linking, your thinking, the connections, but that's a really great one. With your thoughts. There about like, looking at yourself and saying, you know, what are your what's your stack of skills? What are the overlaps that we never give ourselves credit for? You know that we don't think are important? That's this thing. Is, like they sneak up on you because to you, they're of maybe a little normal or maybe just not obvious to yourself, but from someone else. You know, I remember that show I worked on when I started. It was the coyote. So say, is almost second to last show I worked on. I guess there's another pandemic show in there, but, and I was showing, like, in the office, while we're still in the office, the proto version of what now is in obsidian. And everyone's like, well, one, one, assistant editor, you know how they entered out there's like, oh, man, this is amazing. And then that became a conversation. And it just kind of like picked up momentum. So like, see little seeds were being planted without intention. When, when John, that assistant editor, was telling me, like, how much he loved that himself. And I was like, Okay, that's cool. Like, yeah, all right, so, but that only happened just by having the screen open and sharing a little bit. So that's a, that's a that's a thing, and put that into wherever, like, make a note and just like, What are my. Potential skills or that that might be interesting, and be super easy on yourself. And throw in, like, the bad example section. Like, have a section just called bad examples, so you can throw in the stuff. It's like, I guess I can cook eggs, okay, you know, like, just start easy, so you don't have to have such a high bar for yourself. I think if we can do that, be easy on ourselves. We might kind of discover, oh, you know, like that thing that I do, like I do, like wearing barefoot style shoes, that might not lead to anything, but I'll put it on the list for now. Some stuff like that. I really like what you're saying there.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and it's, it may not be the direction that I'm going next, but the what really allowed me to be able to to build the business that I have now was the unique intersections of I have a lot of experience in the film and television industry. I've made significant career pivots where I don't just have one track, where I kind of climb from the bottom wrong of the ladder to the top. I'm in completely different sectors, whether it's in advertising, marketing, trailers, documentaries, featurettes. You know, I've done independent features, I've done TV. I've done multiple genres where you can look at the resume and say, this is all over the place. You make no sense, right? There's actually value in understanding how to help people be able to navigate that. But then somebody that understands time management, productivity, career development. There are a lot of other business coaches out there that coach people on resumes, and I've had countless students that have come to me. It's that I worked with a career coach on my resume. They are clueless about the entertainment industry. They know nothing about how our business works, because they help people get jobs at Microsoft, right? So it's the intersection of my knowledge of the inner workings of entertainment and creativity with the career or the business coaching that's where the value is, right. So that's why, again, this idea of, if perfection is stopping you, and I don't feel like I'm good enough, you might not be good enough in any specific area, but the intersections are really where I believe the value is. And it's the emergence of those connections that I think provide so much value, whether it's content or your story, your products, your services, or otherwise,
Nick Milo: Absolutely, and there's, there's just a mixture with emergence, right? We have to be aware of things, but we also have to throw the stuff against the wall and and that's scary, that's vulnerable. It's not an easy thing to do, but through that balance and tension, we might discover what that next thing is for us, and that's going to be quite exciting.
Zack Arnold: So as is usually the case with me talking to people that are as bright and interesting as you I've covered about 3% of the things that I wanted to cover, and we're almost pretty much to time. I have one last question that probably should have been at the beginning of the conversation, but I saved it until the end, because it could easily become an entire conversation. But we've been talking about this idea of personal knowledge management, and you name dropped a couple of other concepts in a person you name, dropped Tiago Forte and the idea of a second brain. And I know that for you a lot of times, the quintessential question is, well, aren't they the same thing? What's the difference between personal acknowledgement and having a second brain? And the reason I asked it at the end is because we could talk about it for 90 minutes, but I wanted to just introduce the differences between them so I can send people down different rabbit holes rather than thinking they're synonyms.
Nick Milo: Yeah, totally. So Tiago is great. We're good friends now, I would say second brain one. It's his brand, and it's a fantastic term to talk about the sort of note taking and making systems that we have. So I think that that term has really taken off, especially with the two books supporting it that he has personal knowledge management is a broad term. A lot of people that have their note systems, they'll naturally say, my PKM, and when you think about it, what they're saying is, my personal knowledge management. They're talking about their system of notes, and it makes no sense to say my PKM, but that's sort of like this shorthand term. And because we're online, so much people see PKM, they know immediately what we're talking about. My PKM. My PKM does this, but technically it's PKM system. What is personal knowledge management? Great question, but I would just say it's a way to it's gets deep on that one, but it's just a way to keep track of what matters to us. It's what matters to us is likely some form of experience, interests, ideas, memories. How do we keep track of this stuff? Some people are great storytellers. My older brother Steve, remembers everything. Remember when we did this as kids, okay? And Steve's great, and hopefully every family has somebody who naturally remembers these things. I'm not one of those people. I need a little bit of help. I could write it down, and I do write things down, but I do like the digital format, and that allows me to remember the things that matter. I could journal about an experience from 10 years ago, and then link it to a new idea or concept I'm exposed to today. And that's the power that of ideation. But it's also just wonderful. So I could think about Tom Cruise in my notes today, but I can link it to a memory of watching the original mission possible with my dad and my brother Steve at the Cine four in Great Falls monta. Anna, and that just fills me up with so much joy. And it's there. Then I go out of obsidian or my notes, and I can go off and share it with my brother, like, you remember when we did this? How cool is that? And then he can be like, Yeah, and we did this, and it was that, and this happened, and so it's just a beautiful thing. I'm not trying to create an audience there. I'm just trying to live a full life that matters, that has meaning as much as possible. So that's, that's personal knowledge management. You can call it a million you can call your note system a million different things. But yeah, so the overlap between second brain and there are some systems there and those so those systems, para in particular is a folder based system, and I don't that doesn't really work for me. I don't think it's really needed with Link based notes, but you can use that so second brain is a term I'd say. I love the systems don't work as well for me in my way of thinking through linked notes. That's fine. It works a lot. It works really well for people who focus less on ideation but focus more on organization. Works really great for them. There organization with a little bit of like, I want to be getting things done and be more productive. If you want a little bit more wandering energy, if you're a person with a lot of ideas, find an application that allows you to link, link notes and see where that takes you. So again, it's very easy to go off the rails when we're talking
Zack Arnold: That's why I wanted to ask this in the end. So we have the pressure to keep it tight, but just so I better understand it, so everybody else better understands. Tell me if I'm characterizing this wrong, and if I'm totally out base, you can just correct me. But it sounds like personal knowledge management or having a PKM system is kind of the the overall idea of collecting and organizing your thoughts. And second brain is one version or one system for personal knowledge management. So they're not necessarily synonyms. They definitely live in a similar space. But it sounds like second brain is Thiago Forte's very specific PKM system is, am I characterizing that accurately?
Nick Milo: Yeah. Yes and no, that's what gets crazy, because the term is actually can outlive like there is a possibility that second brain as a term can take over PKM as a broad based term. It just depends on how people use the language, and I think Tiago wouldn't mind that from a brand perspective. But yes, there's, there's second brain building a second brain that has particular systems, and actually don't as much like the systems in my link based world. But as far as the concept, yeah, it applies there, but it can also go more broadly and overlap. And people can say, instead of my PKM system, they could say my second brain. I threw in another one, like people can use digital garden. I threw an idea verse, just to kind of but what I promote is you. That's one of the great mysteries that you have to personally solve. What are you going to call your place? What are you going to call your thinking space? And people have called it all sorts of wild things. So I think you did the best, most, truest form of the difference, differences between the two. But I just do want to open up the space to say that term second brain. We don't know where it's going to land and how, how wide in scope it might go.
Zack Arnold: Well, the reason that I bring this up, and I'm certainly putting no pressure on you personally whatsoever, but my goal is to make this a two part podcast, because there are few, if any, people out there that I think are doing online not necessarily influencing but online education, teaching, building a community and really providing value. I think Thiago forte is on a very, very short list of people that are doing it right and doing it well, I've I've followed many, many people, authors, influencers, coaches, educators, over the years, 98% of them are in my I use a Sanebox, so I have aI filter all of my messages. Tiago is one of the few where every newsletter hits my inbox and I read them because I really admire and respect the way that he's doing it, and I think it would be great to dive more into his perspective versus your perspective. So I'm just, I'm putting it out into the universe that I would love, at some point to to be able to provide enough value to him that he would be willing to take the time to be on the podcast to make this a two parter. Because I think the two of you back to back talking about this is a game changer for anybody that wants to have a better system for not just coming up with ideas, but actually having those ideas emerge into something that goes out into the world so.
Nick Milo: Well I have to say that's a wonderful triangulation. Like, if he, if he did have that two parter, then, like between that, that's, it's a very robust and holistic education, because the way his brain and mind works is, is pretty fascinating. It's pretty impressive.
Zack Arnold: Well, if you know anybody that can facilitate that, you can let me know, but no pressure whatsoever. So either way, I realize we've been a little bit over time, I always prefer to do things right before doing them fast. And I really feel like we barely scratched the surface. And I just I oftentimes I'm counting the the minutes, thinking, Alright, we're almost at 90 minutes, and I got to go off and do my other things. I'm like, Man, this is this is all. We've got, I want to keep going. I love this conversation, but at least for now, we're going to cut it off. And I want to say that I very, very much appreciate your time, your insights. I was so glad to have you in my community, and I'm just so proud and excited about how you've taken where you were back then and what you've turned it into now. So really appreciate everything that you've done, everything that you're doing for people, and most importantly, this is the shameless self promotion portion of the program. If you've inspired people to actually figure out how to do this stuff, where do they find you?
Nick Milo: Oh, that's, yeah, that's easy. Just type, linking your thinking, either on YouTube or just in a URL browser, and then you'll find wherever you want to go.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you've got really well produced YouTube content. It's very, very entertaining. Clearly, you have some experience in the video production space, because there are, there are a lot of good teachers out there that wouldn't know their way around editing or content creation to save their lives. And again, the intersection of your background in Hollywood and entertainment, it's very clear, because you've got really good, well produced content out there.
Nick Milo: Well, thanks for that, and it just, it's wonderful to connect with you this way. Zack, really appreciate it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, of course. So on that note, I just wanted to thank you again, and I hope that we can reconnect soon.
Nick Milo: Okay, thank you.
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared by Debby Germino and published by Glen McNiel.
The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).
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In our conversation, we discuss what creativity really is, how it works, and the ways in which anyone can learn these essential concepts and unleash their own creativity (yes, you can LEARN how to be creative).
In our conversation, Gay and I talk about what he calls the Upper Limit Problem – a concept in which we ourselves tend to sabotage our own successes, preventing us from reaching our own full potential.
Nelson shares how you can manage your time and energy that will allow you to grow while running your business.
No doubt that my conversation with Jeff will unravel the strategies you can use to reinvent the way you interact with people, no matter where you are in your career.
Shie shares how his passion and determination have allowed him to grow and thrive as a creative professional.
Mauro and I talk about the important shifts that we need to take which he lays out in his book, THE PERENNIALS: The Megatrends Creating a Post Generational Society.
Whatever industry you're currently in, this conversation will help shed light on your next steps if you feel you're behind and need to catch up with our constantly evolving world.
Dr. Shrime explains the power of solving your why so you can get unstuck and move onto the right path.
Marc breaks down what makes a “high value question” (it’s far more simple than you think). We discuss simple questions you can start with to begin changing your life, as well as how a simple practice of journaling can support this process.
Your smartphone and social media are doing far more damage than you might imagine. Learn how to take back your time, energy, and attention using the philosophy of 'Digital Minimalism.'
If you intend to be successful, your secret weapon is your ability to focus and do 'Deep Work.' Learn how with author Cal Newport
If you have any interest in working "smarter" instead of "harder," you'll need a system to get you there…and that system is GTD.
Learn how to change just three simple daily habits to achieve your goals and win at the Ultimate Game of Life.
Learn from productivity expert Nir Eyal how to better manage your time, your attention, and become 'Indistractable.
