Welcome to Verstreuen, meaning “to scatter.” Each week I share highlights from my Workframe system, the process I use to turn books and notes into structured insights. Here, scattered ideas find connection and become something worth sharing.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 34 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Why the best things happen when you stop planning.

🟦 How not to find clarity - thinking vs making.

🟥 Your limits are made of paper - just keep walking

My parents visited this weekend! We had an itinerary on paper, but what made the trip were the moments we didn’t plan.

The big todo for Saturday was The Met Cloisters - until we found out the train wasn’t running.
What started as a joke about biking there somehow became real. The four of us grabbed Citi Bikes and took off up the Greenway, past the Little Red Lighthouse and into parts of the city none of us had seen before.

Every turn was unplanned, yet perfectly timed.

Somewhere along that ride, I realized how rarely I allow that kind of looseness in my work. I’m usually so focused on the polished outcome that I forget how much discovery happens when you stop trying to control it - when you just follow your curiosity.

Whether you're writing an article, building a product, or shaping a life, the urge is to plan everything. But you don’t need to see the whole path - just the next step.

Every trip, project, and life unfolds one decision at a time.
It’s not the plan that reveals the path - it’s the steps you take.

📎 Takeaway
You don’t need to know the whole plan
just take the next step, and the path will reveal itself.

—🗃️—

Last week, I met up with a friend for a working session on Mulch - a personal CRM project I’d been mulling over.

No slides.
No agenda.
Just ideas and the space to follow our curiosity.

Somewhere between half-formed metaphors and too much coffee, one question cracked the session open:

“Is a plant made by one person or two?”

That question pulled a thread - and unraveling it revealed something new.
We started sketching. Then modeling.

What began as a loose conversation about scale and flexibility grew into a clearer idea:
A relationship garden, shaped by Dunbar’s number, where people can visualize and care for their connections.

Then came care cards - lightweight guides to help people nurture the relationships that matter most, supported by the context provided through built-in tracking.

None of this was planned.
We simply followed curiosity, one step at a time, writing down and prototyping whatever felt valuable testing the things that worked and the ideas that didn’t.

By the end of the day, the project had formalized itself.
Its mission had taken root:

“Bring people closer together - add mulch to your relationships.”
TryMulch.com ↗

That session reminded me of Adam Savage’s line: there are questions that can only be answered in the concrete.

You can’t think your way to elegance. You have to build your way there.
Prototyping isn’t about getting it right - it’s about feeling your way into what’s true.

Every sketch, every draft, every early version is an act of discovery.
We learn by making - by letting materials push back, by seeing how ideas behave when they converge with reality.

We often chase perfect plans - neat, aligned, fully thought through.
But most meaningful ideas don’t come from complete top down implementation.
They emerge from exploration.

Emergence is what happens when you let curiosity be your guide without expectation - discovering things you could never have planned or predicted.

📎 Takeaway
Don’t wait for the complete idea. Start making.
The answers emerge from doing.

—🗃️—

Most of the limits we bump into - at work or in life - aren’t real barriers.
They’re stories that protect someone’s comfort zone:

• “My boss won’t approve.”

• “The client expects it this way.”

• “The audience wouldn’t get it.”

These aren’t rules. They’re rituals - habits dressed up as requirements.
And the moment you challenge them, most dissolve.

That’s the thing about paper walls:
They only hold up if you stop walking.

When I started hinting that I was stepping away from a project, the “reasons” to keep me suddenly piled up:

• There were “budget issues.”

• Then “snapshot problems.”

• Then “tight timelines” that somehow made my exit inconvenient.

But when I spoke directly to my day manager, he told me flat out:
“We were fine to let you go.”

The roadblocks weren’t logistical. They were social - paper walls.

It happens in creative work too.
The idea that feels too weird, too early, or too risky is often the one with real potential.

What we call constraints - time, permission, precedent - are often just a cover for something more internal: The fear of pushing past what’s familiar.

That consulting project wasn’t really about leaving a client.
It was about stepping away from the illusion of control.

Most limits aren’t limits.
They’re just lines no one’s had the nerve to cross - yet.

📎 Takeaway:
Test limits before you accept them.
Paper walls only hold up if you stop walking.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Every creative life moves through the same arc: motion, emergence, freedom.

First you step - not knowing where it leads.
Then you make - discovering what the work wants to become.
And finally, you realize the walls you thought were constraints were never real; they were waiting for you to test them.

Faith in motion isn’t blind optimism.
It’s the quiet belief that clarity hides inside the act of doing.

Whether you’re building a product, a habit, or a life, the next step is the only one that’s ever real.
You don’t need the full plan - just enough faith to take the next right action.

That’s the heart of Verstreuen: scattered steps becoming something whole.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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