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💡 The Big Idea: The Thinking Is the Point

Last week, I came across an interesting article by Brennan Kenneth Brown, which asked a very direct question:

His answer was no. He couldn’t find a study, a body of work, or much of anything beyond people on forums reporting that they feel less anxious.

What he did find was a thriving market for courses and books teaching the methods.

He makes a pretty compelling case that the industry is the output. He even links to an Andy Matuschak note titled “People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use,” where Matuschak puts himself on that list.

As someone who has a website titled Practical PKM, he’s talking about me too. I sell a pre-built Obsidian vault. You’re literally reading my newsletter about PKM right now.

And honestly, he’s got a point. There are a lot of people who will teach prescribed systems for PKM, so it's easy to get lost in the technical details and miss the forest for the trees. He even calls out Tiago Forte directly, citing 20,000 course students and 100,000 books sold, and — he argues — not much of a body of work built with the method itself.

Then the Obsidian CEO showed up in the comments, and things got interesting.

The Luhmann Problem

The strongest part of his argument isn’t about Forte or courses at all. It’s about Niklas Luhmann, the German sociologist who PKM fans tend to idolize.

People like to point to Luhmann as a prolific creator whose system helped him publish 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles. But as Bob Doto rightly points out in A System for Writing, people praise his output, not necessarily the quality of his work.

His system was a box of index cards he kept in a slipbox he called a Zettelkasten. But Bielefeld University has been digitizing that box since 2015, and the sociologist running the project says Luhmann liked to cultivate the myth that the box — not him — produced the books.

Anyone hoping to replicate that output by getting access to the cards is going to be disappointed.

Which raises an uncomfortable question someone posted in a Zettelkasten forum: the cards are public now. So where are the dozens of new books?

Steph Ango Thinks That’s the Wrong Question (And I Agree)

Steph Ango, Obsidian’s CEO, replied in the comments of Brennan's article by reframing the whole thing. Asking what note-taking apps have accomplished, he said, is like asking what spreadsheets have accomplished: it's just a tool, and a tool doesn’t accomplish anything on its own.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. And he argues that the practice of note-taking is insanely valuable:

He even uses Henry Ford’s jot books as an example for arguing that the real value lies in the thinking they represent, not what’s on the pages. Another example is Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, which have also been digitized.

The point is the method doesn’t matter. The thinking does.

And note-taking is an essential part of doing your best thinking.

How Thoughts Disentangle Themselves

There’s an old line I love: thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips.

I would add to that, “and also clicky keyboards.”

So many times, when I don’t quite know what to make of something, I’ve opened a blank Obsidian note and just started typing. The act of moving the cursor across the page is the very thing that helps me figure out what I really think.

That’s the part Brennan’s scoreboard can’t see. Before you write something down, you don’t actually know what you think about it — you have a feeling, a half-formed reaction, a sense that something matters without knowing why. The idea only becomes a thought when it has to survive being put into words.

This is why “I’ll remember it” is a lie. You won’t remember it, because there was never an it to remember. There was a vague shape, and the shape quickly evaporates.

So when Ango says writing is a way of thinking, he’s not being poetic. The notes aren’t a record of thinking that already happened somewhere else. The notes are where the thinking actually happens.

Which means the value shows up immediately, at the moment of writing — not later, when you go looking for the note.

The Score Takes Care of Itself

When Bill Walsh took over the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, they had just gone 2-14, making them the worst team in the NFL. When he was hired, he didn't set a goal for a certain number of wins. He wrote a Standard of Performance: a list of behaviors everyone in the organization had to meet regardless of the score, covering everything from how players ran their routes to how the receptionists answered the phone.

Two years later, they won the Super Bowl.

What does this have to do with PKM? Everything.

I believe Brennan is measuring the wrong score. Books published, papers written, meaningful contributions to human understanding.

I didn’t get into PKM because I wanted to pump out a bunch of content around PKM. I fell in love with Obsidian because it’s a tool for thought that helps me do my best thinking, and that thinking has helped me do my best creative work.

Which is also my answer to that Matuschak note up above. He’s right that many write about note-taking without a serious context of use. But thinking clearly is a context of use. It’s just not one anybody can measure from the outside.

And it’s why Luhmann’s cards sat there. The box was never the engine. Luhmann had forty years of sociology he was trying to work out, and the cards existed to serve that particular purpose. Hand those same cards to someone with no question of their own, and you'll get a very well-organized pile of paper, but that's it.

​The 4 Disciplines of Execution explains the differences between these lag and lead measures. A lag measure is the result you want, but by the time you can see it, it's too late to actually do anything about it. A lead measure is the thing you can do consistently to produce the lag measure. It's less satisfying to look at, but it's easier to influence.

Brennan went looking for PKM’s lag measure and couldn’t find one. Fair enough. But nobody has ever hit a lag measure by staring at it.

You don't wake up and decide to write an important book. You decide how and what you’ll read this morning. You decide whether the idea that struck you in the shower gets written down or evaporates. You decide whether you revisit your notes or let them rot.

That is the PKM standard. And it’s the only part of this you actually control.

The Bottom Line: I (Mostly) Agree With Brennan

After his article went up, Brennan got a long, careful rebuttal from another blogger. And instead of digging in, he actually updated the piece, conceding several of his initial points — including that he’d overreached on what Obsidian itself claims, and that his own framing questions had drifted partway through the article.

Then he narrowed his target. He wasn’t going after the tools, or the communities, or people who’d found something that fits how they think. He was going after the branded subculture: the course-selling, the Luhmann myth-building, and the pressure a beginner feels to pick the One True System before they’ve ever written a word.

His advice to that beginner? Skip the course. Start creating. Figure out the organizing part later, if at all.

Amen, brother.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for years, and I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with anything more. I even wrote a whole article on the history of desire paths about resisting the packaged frameworks and letting your system develop as you use it.

So in the end, we were never really arguing. He picked the wrong yardstick, but he pointed at the right problem, and it's one people should pay attention to: people lifting up the system instead of the thinking it enables.

Because the thinking is the whole point. That is the standard. Not the framework you use. Not how your folders are organized. Not how many books or papers you write. The only thing that matters is whether you’re doing the thinking and whether you’re making the thing.

— Mike