A weekly newsletter where I help people apply values-based productivity principles and systems for personal growth, primarily using Obsidian. Subscribe if you want to make more of your notes and ideas.
💬 Who are you allowing to speak into your life?
One of the reasons I love podcasts is that they’re incredibly personal.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve never met the hosts in real life. When you listen to a podcast, you feel like you have a place at the table with them. The best podcasts feel like you’re in the same place together chatting with a group of friends.
This was especially important for me when I started nerding out about productivity (& eventually Apple tech) online. There really isn’t a community around that kinda stuff where I live in northeast Wisconsin, so I found “my people” online wherever I could.
I started by listening to podcasts like Mac Power Users and Beyond the To-Do List. Every week, I felt like I was having an informal chat with my “Internet heroes” (a term I use to describe the people I look up to online).
Which was great, because there was no one in “real life” who cared about this stuff as much as I did.
Over time, I learned more about the subjects these online communities were talking about, and eventually, I was able to contribute to the conversation. Listening to David Sparks, Shawn Blanc, Erik Fischer, and Mike Vardy (among many others) had increased my knowledge and ability to the point where I was able to start writing and creating online for sites like The Sweet Setup and ScreenCastsOnline.
My point is this: the information you consume determines the quantity (and quality) of the ideas you have, and ultimately even the actions you take as a result.
The 3 Key Questions to Ask When Determining Influence
Since information is the fundamental building block of everything you do, who you allow to speak into your life matters.
If you want to be more productive, start listening to people who are really being productive (doing more of what matters, not just people who seem to get a lot done). If you want to be creative, get around people who are making the kinds of things you want to make and pay attention to how they do it.
Absorb as much of the high-quality stuff as you can, and ignore the rest.
A while back, I started listening to and reading whatever I could get my hands on Jim Rohn. One of the things he talks about that has impacted me the most is his 3 questions for evaluating relationships.
- Who am I allowing to speak into my life?
- What effect is that having on me?
- Is that ok?
The first question is about who you are allowing to influence you. These could be people you associate with every day, but as my story about podcasts has hopefully illustrated, it’s not limited to the people you know in “real life.”
The people you allow to speak into your life could be family, friends, or mentors. But they could also be podcasters, Youtubers, or authors. That’s one of the reasons I love reading non-fiction books so much — we have easy access to some of the best ideas the smartest minds the world has ever seen! Sad that so many people ignore it when public libraries are literally giving it away for FREE.
(Exit soapbox.)
The second question is about what impact the people who are speaking into your life are having. The effect of listening to these voices is something that we can easily ignore (“my family members may discourage me from taking a chance, but they mean well”). But nothing is neutral, and we need to understand what the voices we listen to are doing to us.
The third question is one of self-determination where we decide for ourselves what importance we are going to associate with each voice in our lives. No one gets a platform in our minds unless we give it to them, so we need to take an honest look at whether we want a particular voice to be amplified or not.
The good news is this: we may not get to choose who is in our lives, but we get to choose what kind of platform they have.
The trick is to give the right people the right platform.
Who Are You Allowing to Speak into Your Life?
The truth is, there are lots of well-meaning people that you shouldn’t spend much time listening to.
That doesn’t mean you need to completely cut people out of your life. But not every voice you listen to should have the same impact.
Proximity should not necessarily equal platform.
Author Ed Cole once said that if you allow others to frame your world, they’ll always make it too small. So be selective and choose to listen to voices that are helpful.
(My hope is that this newsletter is one of those helpful voices!)
Something Cool: Beautitab
I came across a cool new beta plugin for Obsidian called Beautitab that adds a scenic browser-style search bar whenever you open a new tab in Obsidian.
I like this plugin a lot! I use a lot of tabs in Obsidian, and this adds some nice scenery and a helpful search interface to each new tab that I open. You can configure the search bar and the magnifying glass in the upper-left to open different types of searches (i.e. Quick Switcher and Omnisearch), and you can choose the type of photos that show up.
Unfortunately, it’s not available in the Community Plugins directory yet. So if you want to use it you’ll need to install the Obsidian BRAT plugin first, then install the beta plugin using the Github link up above.
Book Notes: Designing Your Life
I recently finished reading Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. It’s a book about applying design thinking concepts to build a well-lived, joyful life.
The authors actually teach a class on this at Stanford University, and it’s clear they’ve spent a lot of time thinking this stuff through. They both come from a design background, with Bill Burnett spending 7 years designing award-winning laptops at Apple before starting the Stanford Life Design Lab.
You can download my book notes here.
— Mike
P.S. I now own the domain mikeschmitz.com! 🎉 I'll be working on bringing things over there shortly, so just a heads up that the from address for this email will likely change to mike@mikeschmitz.com in the near future. Stay tuned for more details 😉
Practical PKM
by Mike Schmitz
A weekly newsletter where I help people apply values-based productivity principles and systems for personal growth, primarily using Obsidian. Subscribe if you want to make more of your notes and ideas.
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