Your "second brain" is just another subscription making someone else rich while your actual thoughts rot in digital purgatory.

Notion, Roam, RemNote—they're all lying to you. Promise infinite organisation, deliver infinite distraction. You're not building a knowledge empire; you're building someone else's monthly recurring revenue.

Time to get your brain back.

Obsidian - The note-taking app that works offline and doesn't hold your thoughts hostage. Free, no cloud dependency, your files stay yours. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

Zettelkasten Method Explained - How one German bloke became stupidly productive with index cards. Before the internet ruined everything.

Building a Second Brain (The Original) - Tiago Forte's book that spawned a thousand productivity courses. Worth reading before dismissing the whole movement as Silicon Valley snake oil.

Local-First Software - Why your data belongs on your machine, not floating around someone else's servers. Technical but worth the brain cells.

The Collector's Fallacy - Saving information isn't learning. Highlighting isn't thinking. This'll sting if you've got 47 browser tabs open right now.

The Obsidian Solo Setup (15 minutes, zero subscriptions)

Stop overthinking it. Here's the bare minimum to get your thoughts out of the cloud:

That's the foundation. Once you're not completely useless with the basics, these plugins actually earn their keep:

Essential Add-ons (if you must):

The Graph View (Built-in and Actually Useful):

Here's where Obsidian gets interesting. Every time you link notes together with [[double brackets]], it builds a visual network of your thoughts. The Graph View shows this as connected dots—each note is a dot, each link is a line.

The Double Bracket Magic:

Type [[Client Meeting]] and Obsidian creates a link. If that note doesn't exist yet, it'll create it the moment you click. No "create new document" faff, no saving files with specific names. Just think it, bracket it, click it.

You can link anything to anything:

Suddenly your scattered thoughts become a web of connected ideas. Write about a problem in your daily notes, link it to the project where it matters. Mention a client in three different contexts, see all connections instantly.

The killer feature? Backlinks. Every note shows you everywhere else it's mentioned. Click on [[Client Meeting]] and see every project, strategy, and random thought that references it. Your notes start talking to each other.

It's like having breadcrumbs through your own brain, except the breadcrumbs multiply and create new paths.

Sounds wanky, but it's genuinely useful. You'll spot patterns you missed: that client problem connects to three different projects, or your "random idea" from March is actually the missing piece for your current work.

It's like seeing your brain from the outside. Some connections make perfect sense, others make you question your sanity. Both are valuable.

The best part? When Obsidian goes bust or pivots to NFTs, your notes are still readable in any text editor. Try that with Notion.

I spent three years bouncing between note-taking apps like a digital nomad with commitment issues.

Evernote felt like filing papers in a nuclear bunker. Notion was beautiful and completely unusable after 100 notes. Roam Research promised to make me think like a genius but mostly made me think about monthly subscription fees.

The breaking point came when Roam had a server outage during a client deadline. My "second brain" was temporarily lobotomised, and I sat there refreshing the page like an idiot instead of working.

That's when I realised the trap: I'd outsourced my thinking to companies whose business model depended on my dependency.

Obsidian isn't perfect—it's got its own rabbit holes and plugin addiction potential. But my notes live on my hard drive. When I'm offline in the middle of nowhere, my thoughts are still accessible. When the internet dies, my second brain doesn't flatline.

The cloud isn't backup storage for your mind. It's someone else's computer holding your ideas hostage for $10 a month.

Coming soon: the Lone Wolf Unleashed podcast.

That's it. No sales pitch, no "revolutionary framework," no email course promising to change your life in 7 days.

Just me talking about the stuff that actually helps solo operators switch off sooner and live larger. No interviews, no guests, no "what's your morning routine" nonsense.

It’s coming to your favourite podcast app (the trailer may already be there!).

Real tactics for working less without going broke. Because apparently everyone else is too busy building courses about productivity to actually be productive.

Or just reply to this email. I read every one, even the ones telling me I'm wrong about everything.

Switch Off Sooner. Live Larger.

Lone Wolf Unleashed Because working every hour isn't a badge of honour, it's a design flaw.

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