For the last couple of months, I’ve been very quiet here on Medium. It’s quite a change, seeing as for most of 2023 I was writing almost daily articles, only letting up slightly in 2024.
There’s a lot of work to be getting on with at university, and I’ve been building a new offer that’s even better than the PARAZETTEL for Obsidian vault, which I’ve been offering for the last year and a half.
Today I want to tell you about it and why I believe in this new direction, but first I’m going to talk about a number of limitations of templates and done-for-you approaches to teaching PKM and note-taking…
By nature, templates and similar solutions are one-size-fits-all. There’s no customisation, you just have to make the best of the information and context that you’ve been given.
This is not necessarily a bad thing — you might learn a lot from the insight shared in the template, especially when it’s designed as something more geared towards teaching theory and simplicity, as PARAZETTEL for Obsidian is (rather than confronting you with hundreds of pointless features with little to no explanation of how to use them usefully).
But there are more personal and effective ways to get a PKM education, one of which I’ve been working on developing…
Through selling a done-for-you template I was never able to connect with and help people directly, but that’s been solved by the new offer that I’ve been building for the last couple of months — the PARAZETTEL Community.
For a long time, I’ve thought about how best to turn personalised interaction and connection into a product to help people.
The original idea that appealed to me was a cohort — something that I ideated on my way home from university to my family during Easter last year.
But this idea never turned into reality. I had a stab at selling mentorship last summer too but again, this never became an offer that I could consistently sell.
Assuming this was related to the fact that people didn’t want to part with personal-mentorship-level money without enough trust in me to deliver at such high stakes, I thought about different ways I could provide the same service for a lower and more flexible price.
Thus, a little more than two months ago, I started the free trial for Skool, the platform the PARAZETTEL Community is hosted on, and began to put things together. Since, the community’s become the single central place to get hold of all of my premium work, including the PARAZETTEL for Obsidian vault, all upcoming courses that I’ve got planned, live calls and more.
Done-for-you templates aren’t necessarily bad. They need to be supplemented with the right guidance for the best effect, so in the PARAZETTEL Community I’ve provided both the template and guidance, amongst many other benefits.
Thanks for reading!