Your Best Thinking Is Probably Scattered
If you’ve ever delivered a talk, written a client email, or drafted a workbook, your expertise is scattered across dozens of places. It’s in slide decks, half-finished documents, email threads, and course notes. The problem isn’t that you lack valuable thinking—it’s that you can’t see how it all connects.
This article shows you how to gather that scattered knowledge in one place and use AI to spot the patterns. The result is a visual map of your thinking that makes your expertise reusable and reveals connections you hadn’t consciously made.
Using Obsidian and AI, you can break your knowledge into atomic notes, link them automatically, and create a system that mirrors how you think.
What Obsidian Does (And Why It Works With AI)
Obsidian is a free note-taking app that allows you to link notes together. It’s a perfect companion for AI because AI can understand how to link your thinking and display it in a way that suits Obsidian’s structure.
The key feature is the graph view: a visual map showing all your notes linked together. Each node represents a note, and the size of the node corresponds to how well-connected that idea is. You can click into any node to see its connections, quotes, and source materials.
What makes this powerful is that AI can do in minutes what would take you days: reading through your material, breaking it into one-idea notes, and spotting the links between them.
How Atomic Notes Work
An atomic note is a note that contains one idea. AI reads through your source material—talks, emails, workbooks, course notes—and breaks it down into these single-concept notes.
Once the notes are created, AI spots the links between them and adds those links automatically. Instead of manually documenting your notes and finding where they connect, AI reads through the information, works out where it all connects, and puts the links in place.
The transcript example in the video demonstrates this using Daniel Priestley’s source material: YouTube videos, blog posts, articles, and book extracts. AI scraped the internet for this content, broke it into atomic notes, and linked them together. The result is a graph view where larger nodes—like “Personal Brand as Capital”—connect to related ideas like “Oversubscribed” and the “7-11-4 Rule.”
Building Your Own Vault
The process starts with gathering your source material. This could be transcripts from talks you’ve given, emails you’ve sent to clients to explain something, workbooks, or course notes. AI can also scrape content from the internet if relevant.
Once you have your source material, AI breaks it down into atomic notes and links them. You then open that folder as a vault in Obsidian. The graph view becomes a mirror of how you think, showing bridges between ideas that you hadn’t consciously connected.
Download the agent skill we used to capture Daniel Priestley’s Obsidian vault:
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Using Your Vault to Create Content
Once your vault is built, you can query it using AI. In the video example, a Claude Co-work project uses the folder of information as its reference point. You can ask AI to summarize your thinking on a topic, and it pulls from all the source material, linking directly to relevant notes.
Because AI has access to all your thinking in one place, it understands how you talk about things and can generate content grounded in your expertise. You can ask it to write a LinkedIn post, draft an email, or create a summary—all based on your actual work.
The caveat: you still need to review what AI produces to make sure it matches your understanding. AI is a thinking partner, not a replacement for your judgement.
Focus on What You Keep Coming Back To
This approach works best when you focus on the thinking you keep returning to again and again, rather than trying to capture everything. The vault becomes most useful when it reflects your core recurring ideas—the frameworks, explanations, and arguments that define your expertise.
The graph view reveals themes that keep coming up in your thinking and patterns you didn’t plan for. It’s a way of seeing your own expertise from the outside, and it makes that expertise reusable.
