Why I Built Beyond: Understanding the World and Yourself

I Tried Everything

Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes — I used them all seriously. Obsidian alone I spent three years with: building vaults, designing templates, even creating dedicated quote-and-thought setups so every passage I saved had space for my own response.

And I did write responses. In book margins, in Obsidian templates, in scattered notes. I wasn't just collecting — I was genuinely trying to think alongside what I read.

But something was still off. After three years with Obsidian, I looked back at my vault and saw the pattern: a huge portion of my quotes had no response at all. Just the passage, neatly saved, with an empty thought field. And even the ones where I did write something — a sentence or two — felt like fragments. The thinking never quite came together.

The Trap I Fell Into

This is embarrassing to admit, but I think it's common: I got more excited about tools than about thinking itself.

New app comes out, I try it. Spend a weekend migrating notes. Set up the perfect folder structure. Feel productive. Then a few months later, the same itch — something doesn't feel right — and the cycle repeats.

Looking back, the problem was never the tool. I'd even built the "right" structure — quote on one side, my thoughts on the other. But having the structure didn't mean I used it well. Most of the time I'd save the quote, tell myself I'd come back to write my thoughts later, and never did. The system was there. The habit of genuinely engaging with every quote wasn't.

And honestly? In most cases, the fewer tools the better. I wish someone had told me that earlier.

The Question That Started Everything

I love reading. One day I thought: maybe I'll build a small app to track what I read. Nothing fancy.

But when I sat down to sketch it out, the design questions turned into real questions.

Reading logs aren't the point. Highlight counts aren't the point. So what is the point?

I kept digging. Why do we read? What are we actually after?

Two things, I think. We read to understand the world — other people's words give us lenses we don't have on our own. And we read to understand ourselves — but that second one doesn't happen automatically. It only happens when you stop collecting and start responding.

Understanding the World vs. Understanding Yourself

Most tools serve the first part really well. They help you capture, save, and organize what you read. That's valuable.

But none of them made the second part feel natural. I'd tried — I built quote-and-thought templates, I wrote margin notes, I had the structure. And yet, most of my quotes still sat there with no response. The ones that did have responses were often just a quick sentence I'd written to fill the space, not genuine thinking.

That gap bothered me. I had thousands of quotes from years of reading, and a fraction of them had any real thought attached. The system for responding existed. The practice of deep, honest responding didn't.

So I Built Beyond

The core idea is simple: other people's words help you understand the world, but only your own words help you understand yourself.

That's it. That's the whole philosophy. Everything else follows from there.

I wanted something I could pull out of my pocket on the subway, or open before bed — moments when a thought is fresh and you have two minutes to respond to it. Not to organize it. To respond to it.

The Name

"Beyond" is about what happens after the highlight. After the bookmark. After the save.

Reading is how you understand the world. What comes beyond reading — your own response, your own thinking — is how you understand yourself.

If You've Been There

If you've bounced between tools and always felt like something was off — I've been there too. The answer, at least for me, wasn't a better tool. It was a different question: not "where should I store this," but "what do I think about this?"

That's the question Beyond starts with.