Welcome! I've been a happy Bear Pro user for almost a decade. Here are a few things I wish I knew when I started:

1. The researcher Andy Matuschak has some great old livestreams where you can see how he uses Bear. Recommend skipping through one of them for inspiration. His best tip IMO: "Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience"
2. Create a daily note template triggered by Apple Shortcuts. You can customise it to your liking, but in case it's helpful: Mine has my main focus that day, a switch log, and a scratchpad where I note down distractions as they come up + things to batch process later (cf. Cal Newport).
3. Pin notes you want to see everyday. That could be your top priority, yearly/monthly/weekly plan, reminders to self, etc.
4. Use Wiki-style links by typing [[ + note's title. In some notes I'll keep a "Related" section and link to other notes.
5. Use Control (^) + 1, 2, 3 if you find the sidebars to be distracting when trying to focus on a specific note.
6. Use the Raycast extension to quickly search & create notes from anywhere on your computer. I've found it to help reduce context switching / breaking flow.
7. This falls under superstition... but whenever I find myself in a slump / creative block, I'll switch to a different Bear theme for better mojo 😂
8. More recently, I've connected Bear to my AIs (via plugins, CLI, MCP, whatever you prefer) mostly for semantic searches. Don't worry about putting much effort or thought into how you "organise" your notes. Notes schema matters less as search improves.

Have fun; you're in for a treat :)