A manual for life in Obsidian
Over the past few weeks I’ve set up a special folder in Obsidian called Metaskill.
It’s not work notes. It’s not a daily journal. It’s a collection of life skills: how to learn, how to talk with people, how to rest, all the way to how to think.
The goal is simple: to have my own “manual for life” that I can open anytime.
Why I started
It started from a small frustration.
I’d often read a good book, watch a good video, get a good insight, and then forget it. Or only remember it vaguely. When I actually needed it, I couldn’t recall it.
It felt like my brain was leaking. I kept learning, but nothing stuck.
Then I had a thought: what if I wrote down each of those life skills, one by one, like recipes in a cookbook?
Each skill is one page. Pages link to each other when the topics are related. Over time it forms a kind of map: a picture of which skills I already have, which ones I’m learning, and which are still blank.
It’s not for showing off. It’s for me, so I don’t keep starting from zero.
How it works
I split it into 7 folders that follow my everyday activities:
- Talking and communication
- Doing and execution
- Learning
- Daily life (sleep, food, exercise)
- Review and reflection
- Ways of thinking
- Work
Each folder holds concrete skills. For example, “Learning” has how to remember things so they stick and how to read so you actually understand. “Daily life” has how to sleep properly and how to eat simple but healthy food.
This is where Claude and Codex come in to help.
I don’t write everything from scratch. First I talk with Claude about one skill: what my experience with it is, what I already know, what I’m still confused about. It helps me tidy that up into a note that’s easy to read.
I use Codex when I’ve run out of Claude tokens, and for tidying up file names and finding pages that are actually connected but that I hadn’t noticed yet.
What it’s taught me
What I didn’t expect: once I had a decent number of notes, the map started to “talk” on its own.
I can see which parts are full (it turns out I take lots of notes on how to learn and how to think) and which parts are still empty (it turns out I rarely write about communication and daily life).
It became a mirror. The parts of my life I haven’t been paying attention to show up clearly, without any long reflection.
At first, though, I got it wrong. I thought it had to be complete before it was useful. So I got stuck on the first skill for days, trying to make it perfect.
It’s actually the other way around. You have to start messy: one skill, two paragraphs, rough connections. Then when you add a second and third skill, the connections show up on their own.
Building a “manual for life” happens bit by bit, not all at once.
The one thing that’s stuck with me most from this process: we’re not actually short on life skills. What we’re usually missing is a place to store them, connect them and reread them when we need them.
Our brain isn’t a storage space. It’s a place for thinking. Our job is to build the storage outside our brain.
I’m still far from done. But I can already feel the difference.
If you want a picture of what tinkering with this looks like, @faizintifada has made a detailed video version of it. They happened to use it to write a script for a Cursor event. Watch the video on YouTube (in Indonesian).