Verstreuen [ver-ˈstrɔɪ̯-ən]

verb (German)

1. to scatter; to spread widely.

2. (versehentlich) to spill, often by accident.

Verstreuen is my weekly ritual of revisiting notes to find the ideas worth carrying into the next week.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 7 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 The most dangerous kind of waste is work that looks successful

🟦 What looks like wasted time might secretly be your edge

🟥 Why stability can become a trap if it costs you your freedom

Over the past year, I've been moving from individual contributor to manager. The hardest shift hasn't been delegating tasks. It's realizing that my ideas now have a larger blast radius.

I learned this the hard way after an all-nighter with the team.

We were preparing designs for a client demo - our offshore team in India on one half, the US team on the other, passing work back and forth across time zones. By morning, we had something polished. More importantly, we had something the team was proud of.

Then we presented it.

The client looked at the designs and said: "Hm. Have we thought about other mediums? Can we do this as a radio broadcast?"

The call went silent.

My first reaction was frustration. Not because the client was wrong, but because the question exposed a brutal truth I had not fully reckoned with as a new manager:

The highest-leverage failure isn't bad work. It's good work pointed in the wrong direction.

the client didn’t want a redesigned dashboard they wanted us to explore and re-imagine what was next.

When I was an individual contributor, a bad assumption mostly wasted my own time. As a manager, it burns an entire team’s midnight oil.

I was not just doing the wrong work anymore. I was directing it.

The more people you lead, the more execution you can mobilize. And the more execution you can mobilize, the more expensive a wrong direction gets. We did not just waste a night. We wasted five people’s nights, split across two time zones, on a client who wanted something else entirely.

Leverage does not simply make you more productive. It makes your judgment more consequential.

 📎 Takeaway: Before you ask people to sprint, make sure you are pointing them at the right finish line.

—🗃️—

We usually talk about curiosity like it is a distraction from strategy.
But sometimes curiosity is strategy before you have the language to call it that.

Looking back, YouTube is one of the clearest examples in my own life. I used to watch videos nonstop. Not because I had a plan. Not because it was building toward some obvious career path. Mostly because I liked watching people explain things.

The videos that stuck were not just entertainment. They were people taking something messy - cameras, startups, architecture, geopolitics, software, cities, workflows - and making it understandable.

Someone would break down why a product launch worked. Explain why a building felt wrong. Spend forty minutes walking through a tool, a process, or a decision that most people never stop to notice.

At the time, it looked like consumption.
Years later, I can see that I was practicing something.

A lot of my work now comes down to entering unfamiliar domains, getting oriented quickly, learning as much as possible and turning complexity into something understandable.

YouTube was an early, uncredentialed version of that muscle.

I was learning how people build context. How they frame problems. How they borrow models from one field and apply them somewhere else. How they make the unfamiliar feel obvious.

My work did not turn me into a learner. It gave a name and structure to something I had already been doing for years.

That is the strange thing about curiosity. It often looks wasteful in the moment because the return is not immediate. You don’t know which rabbit hole will matter later. You don’t know which analogy will become useful. You don’t know which stray idea will become the missing piece in a problem you have not encountered yet.

That’s the hidden value of curiosity.
You don’t always know what it’s preparing you for.

📎 Takeaway: The curiosity you practice for free often becomes the skill someone later pays you for.

—🗃️—

The other day we sat down, booked a flight, and added it to Flighty (because a flight isn't real until it's in Flighty) and then it hit us: we were leaving New York, giving up the apartment, and in a very literal sense, about to be homeless for upwards of a year.

For months we'd been calling it a travel year. An adventure. A rare window to live differently - following my wife's PhD research across the world.

I had been flipping through Naval’s book around the same time, and one line kept coming back to me:

Optimize for independence rather than pay.

There is a version of life that looks successful because it is stable, predictable, and easy to explain. And there is another version that creates more space for long-term bets - even if it is harder to summarize.

This year is an experiment in choosing the second one.

Not because pay does not matter. It does. But pay is only useful if it eventually buys back some form of freedom. Time, ownership, attention, mobility, choice.

Otherwise, you can end up succeeding at the wrong game: earning more while having less room to decide what your life is for.

The plan is no longer theoretical. We bought the ticket. We chose independence on purpose.

 📎 Takeaway: Pay is easy to measure. Independence is harder to see - but it determines how much of your life you actually get to choose.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week’s ideas all circle the same truth: direction compounds.

Point a team in the wrong direction, and effort becomes waste.
Point curiosity in enough directions, and it becomes context.
Point your life toward independence, and even uncertainty can start to feel like freedom.

Whether we are leading people, following rabbit holes, or choosing a less conventional path, the real work is learning what deserves our energy before we give it away.

The goal isn’t to do more, earn more, or know more.
It’s to become clearer about what is worth moving toward - and then have the courage to point our lives in that direction.

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Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋