I wanted my knowledge to be an asset that would:
Get traffic (ie, search engines, others sharing it, social media)
Earn passive income by people paying for access
Serve as a resource for me decades into the future

While there are many articles and books on how to take private notes better, I’ve found almost nothing on how to take better public notes.

By sharing our knowledge publicly, we let our knowledge do the work for us like money earns us interest when invested.

Make your notes default-public

As much as investors are wealthy “on paper” because they own stocks, you are wealthy “in brain” because of your skills and knowledge.

Sharing what you learn helps you remember it (more on this later). So, if you don’t share now, you will forget more and more of the critical subtleties that others need to learn from you.

Everyone is a teacher. Knowledge is abundant. The more you give it, the more you have it. When you teach others, you teach a student and create a future teacher. You become a link in the chain of wisdom that gets passed from human to human and generation to generation.

the term, “sell your sawdust” comes from lumber mills. When trimming wood, sawdust is left on the ground. Originally, that sawdust was thrown away. Now there are whole markets for sawdust.

When most people learn, they unknowingly over-focus on Snow Cone Knowledge. Snow Cone Knowledge is valuable if you use it now, but it’s worth nothing if you let too much time pass by because it either gets outdated or becomes irrelevant.

Just In Case Knowledge. This is when you spend time learning something that you may or may not use in the future.

Titanium Knowledge is durable knowledge that is used often and keeps its value over decades

Even if something is 1,000x less valuable on any given day, over your lifetime it might be 10x more valuable. Many top performers across fields innately think in decades while others think in months.

In order to build a note-taking system which is an asset that gives you passive benefits for decades, you need to focus on titanium knowledge.

Over time, I began to realize that no matter what I was studying, I kept on collecting the same types of things over and over

While Roam and Obsidian opened my eyes, I still found them lacking key features I wanted:
I wanted my notes to be public by default
I wanted my notes to look beautiful
I wanted my thousands of pages of notes to be optimized for search engines

Within the context of a site, the more pages you have, the more you need search, navigation, breadcrumbs, links (normal/backlinks), and other devices to help users navigate to what they need.

one of the biggest arguments against public notes is that people don’t want to take more detailed and contextualized notes in order to make them legible and valuable for others. They’d rather focus more on absorbing new information.

when we know that our notes can be viewed publicly, our notes become more in-depth and organized.

Value for future self. Speaking from personal experience, the context is critical for your future self 5–10 years from now who won’t remember any of the current context.

Learn deeper. Knowing that our notes could be viewed by others serves as a forcing function to more deeply process the info you consume, which leads to faster learning. I call this the Explanation Effect.

Knowledge is similar. We’re all sitting on millions of dollars worth of knowledge that we’ve spent decades learning. But, it’s not enough to discover valuable knowledge. You have to package and refine it if you want others to experience its value.

making the transition from private to public notes can be hard. Some common challenges are:
Impostor’s syndrome: “Are my notes good enough to be shared with others?” or “Is what I’m learning valuable to others?”
Tool Lock-In: “I don’t want to learn another tool or approach. I will stick with whatever notetaking system I have.”
Time: “Is it even worth the time to package my notes so others see their value? Or would my time be better spent taking in more information?”