u/raykoninfinity

context: i had a 4,200-note obsidian vault. zettelkasten-ish. been at it for 3 years.

last november i did a thing nassim taleb mentioned somewhere. went through my vault and tried to find anything i actually believed. like a strong opinion, not a quote, not a summary, not a literature note. an actual position i'd defend.

i found 11.

11 in 4,200 notes. three years of "knowledge work" and i had eleven opinions.

so i started a different file. one rule: only sentences that start with "i think" or "i believe" and that i'd be willing to say out loud at dinner. timestamps on everything.

5 months later, 187 entries.

what i learned vs traditional note-taking:

• notes are about other people's ideas. opinions are about you. you can't tell which one builds a self until you stop doing one and start doing the other.
• the "permanent notes" idea is mostly cope. nothing in my zettelkasten was permanent. but my opinions from november that i still hold? those are permanent. the unstable ones got revised, dated, and i can see exactly when.
• 31 of my 187 opinions contradict an earlier opinion. that's gold. literally the only data i've ever collected about my own mind that surprised me.
• search is now useful. i search "ai" and get 14 things i actually think about ai, dated. i used to search "ai" and get 200 highlights from books i barely remember.

i still take notes. but the ratio flipped. used to be 95% notes / 5% opinions. now it's the opposite. notes only when i need to remember a fact. opinions for everything that matters.

the workflow is dumb on purpose:

1. thought shows up
2. write it as a one-sentence opinion
3. timestamp
4. move on
5. once a month, scroll back, mark the contradictions

what i'd change if starting over: would not use obsidian. it's overkill and the friction killed me. would use the dumbest tool that has timestamps and search. that's the whole spec.

curious if anyone here has tried something similar. and if you have a 1000+ note vault, do this exercise, count your actual opinions. the number will scare you.

Last year I realized something uncomfortable: I couldn't remember what I actually believed about most things 2 years ago. Politics, relationships, money, my career , I'd just quietly drifted, and the new "me" had rewritten the old one's memory.

So I started writing down my opinions. Not journaling, opinions. Specific stances, with dates. "I think X about Y because Z." Then I forced myself to revisit them every few weeks and either defend or update them.

Six months in, three things surprised me:

1. Most of my "strong" opinions were borrowed. Once I had to write why I believed something, half evaporated.
2. I changed my mind more than I thought  I but I'd been telling myself I was "consistent." The data said otherwise.
3. I had contradictions I'd never noticed. I believed two opposite things at the same time about how to spend money, and it was making me miserable.

I ended up building a small tool for myself to make this easier (it uses AI to find the contradictions and show me my "cognitive evolution" over time). Happy to share if anyone wants it, but honestly the bigger insight is: start writing your opinions down, with dates, today. You'll learn more about yourself in 90 days than in the last 5 years.

What's an opinion you held strongly 2 years ago that you've quietly abandoned?