Public speaking a nightmare? Unlock excellence with the awesome Obsidian

Matthew Hardman
5 min readAug 1, 2022

--

Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/photo/diverse-people-listening-to-speaker-in-modern-studio-3856023/

Recently I was invited to give a speech at the 21st of someone I had the pleasure of being somewhat of a pseudo uncle to all her life. Now while I speak publicly quite often, the pressure of delivering a speech that would not only resonate with about 70 twenty year olds, but also leave a lasting impression with the person it was intended for, had me somewhat anxious and worried I might miss something important.

I had started by taking notes on some scraps of paper to gather some ideas, but then of course, my attention came back to capturing those ideas in Obsidian.

My intention was to use Obsidian as my scratch pad to capture the ideas and flow, and then prior to the actual event, I would transcribe them on to some speech cards for the event itself.

As I was traveling for the event, I decided to use Obsidian on my iPad, simply because it was lighter than opening up my Macbook to do the same thing. This is one of the things I love about Obsidian, pretty much from platform to platform the experience is consistent. With that I was pounding out hilarious and equally embarrassing stories and anecdotes, and as I was doing so, a simple forward slash command made me notice a feature I had overlooked, but suddenly realized that I could use for the speech… Slides.

In case you hadn’t realized, Obsidian has an incredible feature that enables you to turn your notes in to slides for presentations on the screen. Turning markdown in to slides is not new, I have seen the same technique in Visual Studio tools as well, but this feature made me realize I could get set for the speech without having to manage a set of flash cards, because instead I would be able to use this on my phone while I talked. It also meant I could make changes as and when required, without having to cross things out, I could just edit the content…

The way to start creating a presentation, is simply adding the “-” character three times on a line in your notes, and then using the “/Slides” command to turn what you are editing in to a presentation.

Creating Slides in Obsidian

It was all going well until it wasn’t…

The gif above showcases how easy this is to do on a laptop, however let me be completely upfront, this was not the case on the iPad.

Everytime as soon as I did a repeated “-” character, it would replace both the single “-” for a larger line. I thought that this might be some sort of feature on Obsidian doing an auto correct, but when I used the “/Slides” command in Obsidian, my entire document was being rendered in to one single slide, and was not respecting the triple “-”, in fact what it was doing was replace the three characters with this “ — -”, as you can see one large line and one small line.

The “/Slides” command did not like this, so I thought that maybe I should try and do six “-” characters, considering that two “-” would turn in to one big line, hence “ — — — “, however once again, the “/Slides” command did not like this either.

I scratched my head for hours, maybe it was the sleepiness on the flight that was impacting my ability to think, but then I suddenly realized that maybe this was a feature of the OS, auto-correcting the text, assuming a doubled “-” actually meant a larger line. Off in to the settings I went, and I found the offending setting. Under General, and then under the Keyboard section, you will find the settings in the image below.

Screenshot of Keyboard Settings

You will notice the one I have turned off, “Smart Punctuation”, this was the setting that would change my double “-” in to a single longer line character. Once I had turned this off, I was able to create the triple “-” to properly segment out my slides in Obsidian.

Flexibility Unleashed

Now that I had solved that problem, I was able to start creating the sections of my speech using the iPad, and review the notes I was using in the the speech. By the time I had landed at my destination, I had a well formed structure that I am sure would crush it.

The final trick was to get the slides on my small iPhone 13 Pro.

Of course this was a no-brainer with Obsidian on my iPhone as well, and my notes synced through iCloud drive. I was able to open the same Obsidian note on my phone, and use the same “/Slides” command, I suddenly had my speech ready to go as flash cards on my phone.

An example of the flash cards on Obsidian on my iPhone

The funny thing is, when I got to actually making the speech, I didn’t need to use the phone. This was a result of trying to get the settings done so many times and testing the view on the iPhone, had me learning all the points verbatim, so by the time of the event I already had it ready to go. However as they say…

“Fail to prepare, then prepare to fail…”

Lucky for me that speech wasn’t the case, and based on the applause… I kinda think I crushed it!

Thanks Obsidian…

--

--

Matthew Hardman
Matthew Hardman

Written by Matthew Hardman

The thoughts of a technical professional who works across APAC, having the opportunity to see and do a wide range of roles from strategy to people leader.

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?