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

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 44 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Ambition Isn’t Free (and That’s the Point)

🟦 The Secret to Opportunity: Dig the Well Early

🟥 The 10-Year Question That Drives Your Habits

Most people think stress is bad. But I recently felt the difference between stress from ambition and the absence of stress when ambition fades.

For three months I was grinding through 17+ hour days on a client project. I poured myself into learning, problem-solving, delivering. The stress was real - but so was the growth.

Now, as I exit the project and step back, I feel the sharp contrast. Without ambition, the stress has evaporated. And oddly, I miss it. Because the stress was proof that I was pushing into new territory. Like taxes, you only pay them if you’re earning. And in this case, the “tax” was evidence I was pushing myself.

I’m not rushing back to unsustainable hours - but I am excited to find a challenge that aligns with my goals, where I can again embrace that intensity. Because the right stress is a signal: you’re growing.

📎 Takeaway: Stress isn’t failure. It’s the receipt of ambition.

—🗃️—

Ambition alone can burn you out. What sustains you is the network you’ve built long before you need it.

In my recent project transition, the opportunities that came my way weren’t from cold outreach or hustle - they were from long-tended relationships. The ones I’d nurtured without expectation, simply out of mutual interest.

In fact, my whole career trajectory has been shaped this way. Back in college, I wanted to put my work schedule on my phone. A small hack that turned into an attempt at building an employee scheduling app. The only reason that project materialized was because of old friends with the prerequisite skills to teach me what I didn’t know. One knew how to code, another had always been a builder since elementary school. Those relationships gave me momentum.

It’s not “who you know” in the shallow sense - it’s who you’ve invested in consistently, so when opportunity strikes, you already have the well to draw from.

As part of that belief, I want to share something I’ve been building: Mulch - an app that helps you maintain friendships like a living garden, by watering them regularly. This is an exclusive first look - and since you’re reading this newsletter, you’re among the very first to try it. If you’d like to be part of that early circle, you can sign up at TryMulch.com.

📎 Takeaway: Relationships compound when generosity comes first.

—🗃️—

If ambition is the fire and relationships are the fuel, consistency is the engine that makes progress inevitable.

For me, that’s been reading. During Covid I picked up books again - not just skimming articles or YouTube summaries, but reading cover to cover. At first, I thought it might be trivial, outdated. Instead, I discovered a density of ideas I couldn’t find anywhere else.

That habit of reading and note-taking grew into a whole system, which now powers this very newsletter. And I keep asking: 10 years from now, what will I be grateful to have stuck with? The answer keeps circling back to reading, writing, and compounding small habits that become foundations.

📎 Takeaway: Don’t optimize for today’s urgency. Optimize for skills that compound.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Stress taxes ambition. Relationships sustain it. Habits compound it.

But here’s the deeper thread: none of these things work in isolation. Stress without alignment just burns you out. Relationships without generosity stay shallow. Habits without vision become empty routines.

When you combine them, though, something shifts. Stress becomes meaningful, because you’re pursuing goals that matter. Relationships become powerful, because you’ve invested long before you need them. Habits become transformative, because they compound in service of a 10-year vision.

That’s the playbook I keep coming back to: embrace the stress, build the well, and compound.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH