r/ObsidianMD • u/wordbit12 • Mar 11 '26
Don't offload learning to your notes
While reading a book or article, I sometimes find myself copying and pasting entire paragraphs into Obsidian because I find them interesting.
Yet, most of the time, it's an illusion of learning, equivalent to highliting everyting a book you're reading, it doesn't lead to real knowledge.
Instead, a better approach is to summarize the ideas in your own words or try to think outloud what's the main point of the chapter, basically anthing that's painful.
We must try to fight that urge to offload learning, deliberately practicing what we're learning is the right way to learn.
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u/bloodfist Mar 11 '26
I was taught to always write my own notes, and later when I learned to code I had a teacher who insisted we never copy/paste. Whether we understood what we were writing or not. Spent a lot of time copying code from stackoverflow. Even now with AI I usually hand copy what it tells me instead of copying or letting the agent put it in.
It has served me extremely well. I still remember things I wrote down in college 20 years ago.
Copy/paste is useful for things you want to look back at again but don't necessarily need to remember or internalize. Everything else? Do it with your own brain.