The player could not load. Watch it on YouTube instead.
Obsidian for beginners, taught as a course rather than a demo
Obsidian for Beginners: Start HERE — How to Use the Obsidian App for Notes
About this video
Lesson one of a six-part beginner course, and almost all of it is about links. Setup gets sixty seconds at 0:14; a worked example of one note linking to another takes five minutes from 2:06; linked mentions and graph view arrive at 7:25. The argument for why any of that matters is saved for 10:02, near the end.
This is the first of six lessons, and the description says so plainly: watch the six, then go and play in your own notes. That framing explains the shape of the video. Nothing here is exhaustive, because nothing here is meant to be the last word — it is the first pass over an idea the rest of the course builds on.
The idea is linking. Setup is dispatched in a minute at 0:14, which is a confident editorial choice: the app installs like any other app, and the part that needs teaching is what happens when one note points at another. From 2:06 there is a five-minute worked example of exactly that, and it is the longest single section in the video. If you only watch one stretch, watch that one.
Linked mentions and graph view at 7:25 are presented as the payoff of the linking, not as features to configure. The distinction matters. Graph view in particular is easy to treat as decoration — a constellation that looks impressive and tells you nothing — and the video’s framing pushes against that by introducing it after the reader has made the connections it draws.
The final three minutes step back. “The value of your notes over time” at 9:12 and the argument at 10:02 are the part that outlives this particular app, and it is worth noting where they sit: after the practice, not before it. Recorded in September 2020, it is old enough that the menus shown are not the menus you will see, and new enough that the reasoning has not dated at all.
What it covers
- Installation and settings are compressed into about a minute at 0:14 — the course is not going to walk you through the interface.
- The five minutes from 2:06 are a single worked example: one note, linked to another, and what changes once it is.
- Graph view appears at 7:25 alongside linked mentions, and is treated as a way to find connections you already made rather than to admire them.
- The justification for the whole method is at 10:02, after the reader has already done the thing — a sequencing most tutorials invert.
Chapters
Chapter times are the creator's own list, published in the video description.
