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

🟨 The Invisible Edge: Why Automation Can’t Replace You If You Stay Here

🟦 The Focus Hack No One Talks About (Because It’s Emotional)

🟥 How Creators Scale: The Ancient Instinct Behind Product

The other day, I was walking to get dinner while listening to a video which helped clarify an idea I’ve been exploring in past editions: exploration vs execution

Benn Jordan described two kinds of work:

• Abstract labor — the creative work of coming up with the idea for a YouTube video.

• Concrete labor — the practical work of editing the video, which he hired someone else to do.

That distinction—between planning and execution—mirrors how I’ve approached delegation:

Plan the task, define the process, then hand off the doing.

Increasingly, the “someone” I have been delegating to isn’t a person—it’s AI.

AI excels at concrete labor: structured, well-defined tasks.

The better I get at breaking down work into clear steps, the more I find I can offload to AI.

But this raises a bigger question:

If AI handles the world’s concrete work, what does that free humans to do?

For me, it’s made time to focus on abstract work—generating ideas, validating strategies, and setting direction before execution begins.

If taken to its logical end, automating concrete labor (especially the kind often done by employees already operating like machines) could free those same people to focus on more human pursuits: exploring ideas, following passions, and fully engaging their curiosity.

Most people think AI threatens their job. They're wrong.
AI threatens your tasks. Not your role.

Unless you built your career on repetition, templating, and incrementalism — in which case: yes, it's coming for you.

Because in the end, automation won’t replace your job—unless your job is acting like a machine.

—🗃️—

I used to think concentration was about willpower: cutting out distractions, setting timers, forcing myself to focus. Then I read a line in The Inner Game of Tennis that changed this perspective:

“Concentration is the fascination of an object.”
Fascination—not force.

Focus isn’t about effort, it’s about fascination. Not pushing ourselves to pay attention, but becoming genuinely interested in what we’re focusing on. Developing a relationship with it.

Suddenly, I understood why people get lost in writing, coding, painting, or solving problems for hours. They’re not forcing focus—they’re drawn in. They’re not just working—they’re in love with the process.

This aligns with a core idea in bhakti yoga: deep focus comes from love. When attention is rooted in affection, it becomes effortless—even immersive.

A classic Eastern story illustrates this:

A seeker asked a yoga master how to unite with his true self. The master told him to meditate on God. But after two hours, the man confessed he couldn’t stop thinking about his beloved bull.

The master said, “Then meditate on the bull.”

The man returned to meditate. Two days passed. When the master called out, the seeker replied, “I can’t come out—my horns are too wide for the door.”

His focus had become so complete, so infused with love, that the boundary between him and the bull dissolved.

This isn’t just a metaphor—it’s practical:
As The Inner Game a book on improving your tennis game says:
“One of the most practical ways to increase concentration on the ball is to learn to love it.”

So get to know your object of focus. Be curious. Be fascinated. Build a relationship—with a ball, a codebase, a canvas, a paragraph, a problem.

Don’t just block distractions.
Build fascination with your work and focus will follow.

Love might be the most underrated productivity tool we have.

—🗃️—

We often think of productization as a business strategy—a way to turn insight into a repeatable offering, package value, and scale it. But this process isn’t new It’s one of humanity’s oldest instincts.

Long before markets existed, people noticed useful things—where animals migrated, which plants healed, how to make tools stronger. These weren’t secrets to guard. They were shared—told around fires, passed from person to person. The motivation wasn’t profit; it was participation.

Human curiosity drives us to observe, question, and explore. Just as powerful, though, is human generosity—the impulse to teach, to share, to make knowledge transferable. When curiosity and generosity combine, something remarkable happens: we don’t just solve problems—we create the systems that help others solve them too.

This is how civilization is built. One person discovers something and names it. Others adopt and adapt it. Eventually, systems form around it. A pattern emerges: discovery becomes codified, codification becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure becomes culture. That’s how calendars began. How laws formed. How philosophies turned into religions and workshops into cities.

Capitalism didn’t invent this cycle; it just accelerated and commercialized it. Markets bring scale, ownership adds incentive, and platforms provide leverage. But beneath all that lies something deeper: the human drive to turn insight into impact, to make sure what we learn doesn’t die with us.

Every time someone writes a tutorial, builds a tool, or shares a framework, they’re contributing to this ancient pattern. They’re not just scaling value—they’re honoring the lineage of knowledge. They’re saying: “I struggled so you don’t have to.” Productization, in this sense, isn’t just a business move. It’s an act of care.

Seen this way, the modern world isn’t just full of products—it’s full of encoded generosity. A thousand acts of clarity, packaged and passed on. Civilization, after all, is just a well-organized archive of solved problems. 

In a noisy world, we often confuse value with visibility. But real value is what it’s always been: one person’s clarity, made useful to many. Not for likes. Not for leverage. But because that’s what humans do.

We discover.
We share.
We build.

And civilization moves forward.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Leverage lives in where you stand, not how fast you move.

In a world of automation, power shifts when perspective does.

• Think upstream: AI executes. Humans contextualize. Move from doing to directing. Insight is the new productivity.

• Follow fascination: Focus isn’t forced—it’s felt. Trade discipline for alignment. What pulls you sustains you.

• Share to scale: Hoarding ideas isolates. Packaging them builds momentum. Vulnerability moves faster than perfection.

Each shift unlocks a different kind of power:

→ Labor → Leverage
→ Force → Flow
→ Isolation → Infrastructure

Position is power.
The higher your vantage point, the more clearly you see what matters—and what’s next.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 Until next week

-GH