I've developed a way of finding new value out of my Obsidian PKM system notes.

Here's how it works.

Stargazing

Stargazing is the process of opening Obsidian graph view, filtering it, & searching for distant connections.

When doing this, you look for ideas that have no connection, but you challenge yourself to find one. You'll find there's always some way to connect the dots because humans are excellent pattern recognizers.

One Way to Do It

Stargazing takes a lot of mental energy. But, using Obsidian makes it much easier. It's like building with LEGOs.

I did a stargaze. Stargazing is a form of idea-level emergence.

Emergence is what happens when we connect two ideas to create a new idea. We must ask ourselves, "Where is the connection here? Is there a new idea here?"

Below, I created a new node (the blue one) out of the two orange idea nodes. By combining these two ideas, I drilled down into the possibilities between them. This created a new idea: "use the priming effect to prevent saboteurs".

If you do this enough, you can keep drilling deeper and deeper until you find questions that stump you.

Those questions are the ones worth answering.