📕 LivingOS Issue #114 - Roaming with Notion
Plus, a love letter to my golden Alishan oolong tea.
Hey friends, this week has been hard…
It pains me to read the news, so I turned to my healing practice—running, breathing, meditating, writing, and making tea. (You can read my latest letter to Alishan Oolong Tea here.)
Today I want to share some raw thoughts with you.
I have been experimenting with a new knowledge system.
I built my company and community on Notion. I am plagued by the sunk cost and cautioned against the shiny object syndrome, so I didn’t bother to try something new seriously. Perhaps that’s why I have delayed my appreciation for Roam for a whole year.
How silly am I to worry that Roam will replace Notion entirely?
While Roam has some rough edges, I came to love the app in three main ways:
My notes can speak to each other: You can explicitly “link” ideas or implicitly browse through “unlinked” references to see your knowledge talking to each other. Instead of siloed in distinct Notion Pages, I can now effortlessly create and connect the dots for my life!
My thoughts are more structured: While this may seem to contradict Roam’s decentralized nature, I find the “bullets” to be a forcing function for me to synthesize my thoughts. Instead of the freewriting nature of Notion, I can now invoke a unique bullet whenever I need it. How convenient!
My creations are equal and serendipitous: Unlike Notion, there is little structure in Roam. I thought I’d be frustrated about the chaos in Roam. Still, it ends up resurfacing some valuable thoughts that I’ve long forgotten (just like Readwise) and other unconscious patterns in my morning journal and dream diary.
Roam has since become my top-funnel notepad (where I capture new signs in life). Notion, on the other hand, became my precious library where processed thoughts reside. In short, I think in Roam and create in Notion.
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, put it well:
“Imagine a future where instead of lending someone a book, you lend them your bookmarks. Where your notes, annotations, and references are synchronized across platforms and applications. Where your bookmarks belong to you, and a record of every book you read is saved and stored securely, no matter how or where you read it.”
That is the LivingOS Fellowship Library.
The best part of the new system…
While my knowledge systems have enabled me to write three hundred essays and a book in one year, the best part is not the system but the community.
Every day I receive letters on how my work has given people clarity and confidence to take on new work and life challenges. These transformation stories fuel me to create and coach so many amazing people in life.
I can’t wait to see the fantastic chemistry unfolds in the next cohort.
Live. Fire. Go.
PS - Eva made an incredible book cover that amazed so many people and got a design gig!
Apply for the LivingOS Fellowship April Cohort • Read The Power of Curiosity