Considerations of Design: How Ehsan Noursalehi uses the LYT frameworks (Obsidian)

Ehsan Noursalehi is building an “open socket micro book” in Obsidian—an interactive, link-driven alternative to a traditional linear book—because his own writing process repeatedly stalls when ideas must follow a strict beginning-to-climax-to-conclusion arc. The core goal is to capture design lessons from past work (including failures) in short, modular notes that can be rearranged, linked, and published without forcing a single narrative spine. That matters because it turns knowledge management into a creative workflow: instead of hoarding sources or tagging everything, he wants a system that helps him “chew on ideas,” get them onto the page, and only later shape them into a public structure.

His starting point is frustration with scattered tools and the long-term mess of digital knowledge. During quarantine, he noticed how quickly notes splinter across services—Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, Pocket, Apple Notes—until the result is thin, hard-to-reuse fragments. Learning Obsidian pushed him toward a different question: how long should knowledge last? He frames the micro book as a way to make ideas durable—something meant to survive beyond short-lived “five-year” cycles—while also acknowledging that writing is emotional and iterative, not a one-shot publication.

The micro book’s design philosophy is “atomic” writing. Each note is meant to be small enough to draft quickly, then linked through a hub/map of content that guides readers without overwhelming them. He describes a workflow where he pins notes for fast navigation, writes in fragments that blend journal reflection, anecdotes, and practical lessons, and gradually links them into a navigable table of contents. Background sections are treated as lighter-weight context, while the most valuable entries are the ones that stand alone: a reader should be able to understand a note in isolation after following the hub.

A major theme is how to talk about failure more responsibly. In Silicon Valley, “fail fast” often becomes permission to be messy rather than a process for learning from mistakes. Noursalehi’s micro book aims to do the opposite: document what went wrong in the “open socket” effort, extract lessons, and preserve the good outcomes too. He also connects the writing system to broader creative principles—everything is a remix, ego should take a back seat, and ideas often come from many prior influences.

The conversation also turns practical. He uses Obsidian Publish with a custom theme to remove visual “noise” like sidebars and headers, aiming for an essay-like reading experience. He credits Obsidian Sync for versioning and backup confidence, which makes it easier to edit freely without fear of losing work. He compares his approach to evergreen-note thinking and to short, readable business writing (including references to Andy Matuschak’s approach and 37signals’ “Rework”), while stressing that his case-study style needs curation and reader guidance rather than a purely exploratory web.

By the end, the project is both a publishing experiment and a personal design tool: a way to build knowledge that can last, while still leaving room for the messy middle. The remaining open question is how to make the system endure—technically (fonts, analytics, publish limitations) and conceptually (how to keep ideas coherent over time).