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 10 new additions to the Zettelkasten—here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Why ‘Done’ Beats Brilliant

🟦 Why Quality Escapes Quantification

🟥 How the verbs you choose shape who you become.

I came across a delightfully scrappy list titled “179 Business Ideas for Kiwis Who Want to Win in the Nineties!”—and what stuck wasn’t any of the ideas themselves, but this truth: done is the engine of more.

We obsess over what to start. But what we start matters far less than that we start—and finish. Done creates surface area. Done lets you iterate. Done puts something into the world that can now be reacted to, built on, compounded.

Each shipped thing becomes scaffolding for the next.

Ideas are, generously, worth three cents. They’re everywhere. What matters is motion. Making something, checking it off—not perfectly, but satisfyingly, just enough to get it out into the world. Once it exists, it can grow. Once it’s out, it can evolve.

Done is momentum. Done is leverage. Done is permission to do more.

It’s not just a mantra—it’s physics. You can’t iterate on what doesn’t exist. Each shipped thing—no matter how imperfect—becomes scaffolding for the next. A foothold. A place to stand.

So whatever it is—your blog post, your online shop, your short film, your app MVP—get it done. Get it out. Let it be a little rough. Let it breathe. Because the real game isn’t in what you think up—it’s in what you follow through.

Make something. Ship it. Let “done” be your strategy.

Done is the engine of more.

**🗃️**

This line hijacked my casual reading session and sent me down a GPT-fueled rabbit hole on two topics I hadn’t realized were connected until that moment: quality and vector databases.

It brought me back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—a book that quite literally rides across the country trying to define “quality”. And the answer?

That always felt like a bit of a cop-out. But this quote from Being Logical helped it click. It’s not that quality can’t be described—it’s that the moment we try to trap it in language or measure it with numbers, we start to distort it.

Words can gesture toward quality, but they never quite contain it. And when we try to quantify it? We flatten it. We reduce something rich and dimensional into something legible—but lifeless.

It’s like describing a musician playing in the park.
I can describe how the sound reflected off Bethesda terrace filling the space as people crowded to listen. The beautiful and emotion filled draw of the bow as the musician sustained the final note. I could give you the chord progression, a photo, even a video.

But none of those artifacts actually are the experience.
They’re proxies. Partial, flattened shadows.

They give you something to hold—but not the thing itself.

And that’s what makes vector databases so compelling.

Traditional systems capture just a few dimensions of something—a label, a tag, a score. But vector systems embed things into many dimensions at once.

What we experience as “quality” is never just one trait. It’s layers. Nuance. Context.
The musician wasn’t just playing notes—they were part of the space, the weather, the crowd.

A vector model can’t replicate that. But it can approximate it—not with a single score (which often distorts what it claims to measure), but with many dimensions, each capturing a fragment of the whole.

Those dimensions don’t define the quality.
But they approximate it.

The more I explore vector-based systems, the more I wonder:
What if the path to preserving quality isn’t about rejecting quantification—but expanding it?

Traditional models distort quality by flattening it.
But vector systems offer another path: capturing quality in all its richness by preserving its dimensionality.

And if we can begin to capture quality—not by pinning it down, but by preserving its dimensionality—what does that open up?

It means we can start building systems that don't just categorize or sort, but understand. Systems that can hold nuance. That can reflect context. That can sense the difference between what's merely functional and what's meaningful.

It suggests a future where our tools aren't just efficient—they're sensitive. Not just intelligent, but perceptive. Where AI doesn’t just tell us what something is, but begins to grasp why it matters.

Because capturing quality isn't about engineering perfection. It’s about honoring complexity. It’s about making room for the felt sense of things—for subtlety, surprise, even soul.

And maybe—just maybe—that’s the path not to reducing what makes us human, but to building systems that respect it.

**🗃️**

Language isn’t just descriptive; it’s generative. The verbs we use to talk about the past don’t just explain who we were—they shape who we allow ourselves to become.

At first glance, the difference feels subtle.
But in reality, it’s seismic.

This isn't just grammar. It’s narrative architecture.
“I was bad with money.”
“I used to be bad with money.”
Same history. Completely different futures.

The first locks your identity to a past version of yourself.
The second frames that version as something you’ve outgrown.

We’re always telling stories about ourselves—often without even realizing it. Through offhand comments, casual explanations, or the little lines we repeat when things don’t go as planned.

These aren’t neutral observations.
They’re narrative anchors.
And if we’re not careful, they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

It’s not just about semantics. It’s about self-authorship.

The way we talk about our past becomes the script we hand to our future.

So the verbs matter.
Are you writing your story in stone?
Or are you leaving space for edits?

**🗃️**

Closing Thoughts

Each idea this week begins in the abstract—ideas, quality, identity—and ends in something real.

You start with a rough sketch of a project.
A gut sense of what’s “good.”
A sentence about who you used to be.

But the throughline isn’t about inspiration.
It’s about interpretation.

What gives anything its power is the structure we give it.
Not rigid structure—but shape. Just enough form for the thing to start evolving.

Execution gives ideas a body.
Multidimensionality gives quality a context.
Language gives memory a direction.

And when those things align—when action, awareness, and authorship stack—you get forward motion that doesn’t just move, but compounds.

Because what we finish, what we refine, and what we call ourselves
all becomes the scaffolding for what comes next.

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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