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

🟨 Why the random detour might be the whole point

🟦 The “freedom” trap that keeps you from your true potential

🟥 When psychology beats engineering

A lot of progress comes down to knowing which mode you are in: exploration or exploitation.

Exploration is trying new things to discover better options.
Exploitation is optimizing and doubling down on what already works.

Most growth requires both. As with most things in life there is a balancing act, if you only explore you will never get the value from what you have found. However if you only ever exploit and dont continue exploring then you will never grow.

I felt this in a small way while traveling. I usually keep a long list of books I am working through. These are the books in the queue to be read, processed, and eventually added to the Zettelkasten.

My exploit queue, basically.

But on the way back from Miami, walking through the airport, I was in exploration mode. I wandered past a little free library, found a book that piqued my interest, and let it jump the whole queue.

At the time, it felt inefficient. I already had plenty to read. I did not need another input. But that book ended up having a huge impact, shaping how I thought about leadership, decision-making, and my projects.

That is the annoying truth about exploration: it often feels wasteful right up until it becomes obviously valuable.

The random conversation, the strange book, the side project, the half-baked detour - none of it looks productive in the moment. But without those inputs, you end up squeezing more efficiency out of the same narrow map.

 📎 Takeaway: Exploitation helps you move faster on the current path. Exploration helps you discover whether that path is worth being on.

—🗃️—

Around the beginning of February last year, I rolled off a long-term project and suddenly had way too much free time. I was on the bench, waiting for the next thing, and started doing what people do when the calendar gets quiet: questioning everything.

I pulled together the things I had done across work, projects, writing, tools, hobbies, and fed the whole mess into AI.

The feedback was swift and uncomfortable: I was a dabbler.

Someone who loved many things with range that helped build a useful skill stack. But also someone who did not always stay with one thing long enough to see it through.

It stung because it was true. Exploration had served me well. It gave me taste, pattern recognition, range, and a weirdly useful set of overlapping skills. But exploration eventually creates another problem: once you see enough possible paths, you have to choose.

Ray Dalio puts it simply: “You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.”

The mistake is thinking trade-offs are the enemy of freedom.
They are what make freedom usable.

A person who refuses trade-offs stays open to everything in theory and committed to nothing in practice. Every path remains possible, but no path gets enough attention to compound.

That was the uncomfortable part for me. I liked having options because options felt like freedom. But too many options can become a hiding place from the real work.

At some point, exploration has to become commitment. Not forever. Not blindly. But long enough for one direction to unfold and become real.

The faster path usually belongs to the person who decides what they are optimizing for and lets that decision simplify everything else.

 📎 Takeaway: Exploration shows you the paths available. Trade-offs determine which path gets enough of you to compound.

—🗃️—

Business loves engineering solutions because they feel serious. If users are not taking an action, the default response is usually: reduce friction, add automation, build an integration, make the system smarter.

I ran into this recently with my app mulch. People were not adding contacts, even though that action was necessary to unlock the real value. My first instinct was to solve it technically: build complex integrations, infer relationships automatically, create a system smart enough to know who mattered without the user doing anything.

But the more I looked at it, the more I realized the issue was not actually friction. It was motivation. Users did not need the action to be technically easier. They needed it to feel worth doing.

So instead of building the big automated system, I introduced Mulch Coin - a simple reward mechanism that encouraged users to add contacts themselves. Suddenly, users were doing the work I had been planning to automate. The solution was not more engineering. It was better psychology.

That is one of the ideas Rory Sutherland keeps returning to: not every problem is solved by making the machine more efficient. Sometimes the highest-leverage move is not changing the action. It is changing what the action means.

start earning mulch coin and start your relationship garden →

 📎 Takeaway: Many problems that look like engineering problems are actually behavioral problems wearing a technical costume.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week’s ideas all point to the same operating system for better decisions.

First, explore broadly enough to discover paths you would not have found on purpose.
Then choose clearly enough to let one of those paths compound.
And once you have chosen, do not assume the most sophisticated solution is the best one.

The hard part is rarely effort.
It is orientation.

Explore when your map is too small.
Trade off when your options are too many.
Reframe when your solution is too obvious.

Progress compounds when you stop asking, “How do I do more?” and start asking, “What kind of problem am I actually solving?”

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Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋