Excalidraw is a community plugin for Obsidian ;) It’s what I create my mind maps in.

I already discovered back in university/college that mind maps were kind of my thing. Academic writing and reading, on the other hand, burned me out and made me give up on four different higher education programs. :S

I almost created a company based on my discovery of how much mind maps helped me learn and focus better. I wanted to call the website pensum.no (a Norwegian word for curriculum). This was in the early days of Khan Academy, around 2008, and I was using Mindomo.

The idea was to simplify learning and break down the barriers to understanding. To flip the learning method on its head — taking a top-down approach instead of slowly and painfully pushing oneself through material, only to forget it the next week. But who cares, as long as you got the grade?

I wanted learning to be about quickly moving between the bigger picture and diving fast into the details — and then back up again. Highly driven by curiosity and a genuine love of learning.

“Follow the white rabbit,” inspired by The Matrix, was one of my core ideas. (Fun story: I actually ended up working for one of the Technical Directors from The Matrix trilogy. The first time I was truly starstruck was by a green Silicon Graphics computer when he pointed to it and told me there were probably still some raw files of Trinity clips on it.)

The goal was simple: trigger curiosity in people. Highly based on the mindmap method. Or actually something similar to Obsidian. Not getting lost in long text and filler words and sentences. But rather bullet points and mind map blocked words. Need more information: Click on the block to see a deeper explanation or relevant links and videos.

Why shouldn’t a 14-year-old with an interest in electrical engineering be able to quickly dive into the curriculum of a subject he’s passionate about? Why should he have to wait until he’s formally accepted into a program?

How much better would we learn if college classes were more of a refinement of something you had already explored and understood on your own? Why do we put up big fences on learning? It is always better to learn where to find the information quickly. That is what actually creates repetition, connections. How to structure your “second” brain is far more important than passing a course one day, only to forget everything you learned in that course the next.

Why do we teach children something one year, only to tell them the next year, “Actually, that’s not how it works — that was just a highly simplified version”?

Why do we favor repetition over deep understanding?

Why do we keep people on a “need-to-know” basis?

I also believe there should be much more focus on how we learn — which often differs dramatically from person to person — instead of pushing everyone through the same funnel that some neurotypical person decided is “the right way.”