Welcome to Verstreuen—meaning “to scatter”—where I unpack the ideas I’ve collected this week in my 🗃️ Zettelkasten, “note box,” personal knowledge management system. Here, I’ll share the highlights, insights, and stories I find interesting—and think you will too!

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 14 new additions to the Zettelkasten—here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Why strong opinions aren’t close-minded—they’re essential.

🟦 The surprising freedom that comes from setting limits.

🟥 What a Build-a-Bear can teach us about who we really are.

On the surface, tolerance is noble. Open-minded. Virtuous. But zoom in and you’ll notice: unlimited tolerance is indistinguishable from indifference.

In a past edition of Verstreuen I explored the idea of value through the lens of philosopher Robert S. Hartman, who said, "Something is good when it fulfills the ideal criteria of its category."

If you never define what’s good, what your ideal is, you won’t recognize it when it appears.

Strong preferences aren’t a sign of close-mindedness—they’re a sign of clarity.
Taste is the ability to recognize what resonates—and just as importantly, what doesn’t.
In a world where anyone can generate anything with a prompt, the real edge isn’t creation.
It’s discernment—the skill to curate, edit, and choose with intention.

Jobs didn’t build Apple by being tolerant of every design. He built it by curating obsessively.
Taste was the strategy. Judgment was the edge.
In an era of infinite content, maybe it still is.

**🗃️**

I’ve been between projects at work, which means I’ve had way too much free time to obsess over the smallest things—like updating my resume.

What started as a quick refresh quickly turned into a full-blown personal brand audit. I kept adding new accomplishments, linking to old projects, revising summaries, and cleaning up the content behind every link—then the content behind those links. Before long, my one-page resume had metastasized into a maze of supporting docs, blog posts, prototypes, and long-forgotten slides.

Each bullet point was an invitation to say more.
Each link became a rabbit hole.
Each sentence begged to be rewritten.

At one point, I even built a design timeline—just to make sense of everything I’d created.

Eventually, I had to stop. I scrapped the whole thing and started from scratch with one rule: One page. No more, no less.

And that’s when something clicked. The moment I imposed a constraint, the quality improved. By limiting the number of details, I could afford to perfect them.

While flipping through 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, I stumbled on a framework that perfectly captured the experience:

At first, I thought this resume update would be easy—plug in a few wins, hit export.
Simplicity.

Then I remembered all the things I’d done—and how none of them fit neatly into bullet points. Everything was connected. Everything needed context.
Complexity.

It was only when I embraced limits that I found real clarity.
Informed Simplicity.

What remained wasn’t everything—it was the essence of my work distilled, the truly valuable work that I was proud to share.

Though this framework comes from architecture, it applies just as well to storytelling, product design, and self-presentation—especially now, when portfolios are infinite and content is endless. In a world overloaded with information, clarity isn’t just helpful—it’s a competitive advantage.

Constraints reveal what actually matters. They help us focus, sharpen, and elevate. The fewer the details, the more room each one has to shine.

Perfection is possible—if you’re bold enough to choose what not to include.

**🗃️**

Facts are easy to verify. They show up on spreadsheets. They have timestamps, stats, and sources.

But values?
They live in tone. In emphasis. In what gets left in—and what gets left out.

I’ve been thinking about this while trying to write and reflect more.

Not in a résumé way, but in a deeper sense: what actually matters about me?
What would still be true if you stripped away the titles, the platforms, the labels?

There are plenty of facts I could list.
But which ones reveal something essential?

One answer comes from an unlikely place: Build-a-Bear.

The bear itself is a commodity—stuffed, stitched, and standardized.
But what gives it meaning is how we dress it. The hoodie that looks like ours. The sneakers. The voice box with an inside joke only we would understand.

We project identity onto it.
The same way we do with everything—including ourselves.

Our identity is built through attention, shaped by what we choose to emphasize.
Not every trait matters equally. Some are surface-level.
But others—the salient ones—reveal something about our core.

You know them when you see them:

• A friend’s deep love for a rapper named after a porpoise

• An eye for saturated color and a life lived vividly

• An almost concerning obsession with Marie Antoinette

These aren’t trivia. They’re clues. Threads.
And when woven together, they point to something bigger:

Who you’ve been—and who you’re becoming.

Zoom in, and you see your lived identity: the result of past choices, habits, patterns.
Zoom out, and you see the trajectory: what’s stayed constant, and the future you keep circling back to—whether or not you’ve stepped into it yet.

This back-and-forth—between perception and perspective—is the real work of becoming.

Even neuroscience backs it up:

• Looking down activates systems for clarity, coordination, and getting things done.

• Looking up engages dopamine, vision, imagination. It points to what’s next.

The same is true emotionally:

• Looking down grounds you in who you are.

• Looking up shows you who you might become.

So how do we decide which details matter?

We don’t ask, “Is this true?”
We ask, “Does this reveal something essential?”

Because a characteristic is only significant if it says something about the nature of the thing. The rest is just decoration.

And identity, like the bear, is shaped not by what we start with—but by what we choose to carry forward.

**🗃️**

Closing Thoughts

This week’s ideas all circle back to a quiet truth: what we choose shapes what we become.

Taste is a form of intention—an act of saying, this, not that.
Constraints aren’t barriers—they’re tools, forcing us to reveal what truly matters.
And identity? It isn’t something we find. It’s something we craft—through attention, repetition, and care.

In a world of infinite noise, clarity is a form of self-respect.

To choose is to commit.
To refine is to honor essence.
The most meaningful work isn’t in what we add—it’s in what we choose to leave behind.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen

Thanks for taking the time to explore and reflect on my notes with me. If any ideas particularly resonated or challenged you, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

👋 Until next week.

-GH

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