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

🟨 The Strange Way Problems Quietly Redraw Your Identity

🟦 The Purpose Ladder: Why Skipping Rungs Can Shatter Your Progress

🟥 The Real Definition of Luck (And How to Manufacture More of It)

Right now, I’m somewhere between New York and DC, wedged into a window seat, typing this newsletter while the hum of the engines turns the cabin into a quiet little bubble. Over the past year, these flights have become one of my favorite places to write.

Writing Verstreuen every week is a problem I’ve deliberately invited into my life. And make no mistake - it is a problem. Every Monday, no matter how the week’s gone, I’m faced with the same question: What’s worth writing about this time?

But here’s the twist - this “problem” has quietly become part of who I am.

If you’d asked me a year ago to write ninety-three unique, somewhat intellectually engaging articles, I’d have told you to get lost. And yet, here we are. The ongoing challenge of producing three pieces a week has stretched my sense of what I’m capable of. It’s the problem that’s made me a writer - something I never would’ve claimed before.

That’s the thing about problems: they don’t just block us - they outline us. They trace the current perimeter of our identity.

And here’s the fun part: if you want to redraw that map, you have to work at the edge - solving the problems that live right at the boundary of who you think you are.

For me, that means expanding the scope of what I write. Maybe a book someday. But that’s a problem for another day.

📎 Takeaway: The only way to expand your identity is to solve the problems that define its edges.

—🗃️—

In Purpose and Profit, Dan Koe outlines four macro levels we move through:

1. Survival – Doing what it takes to make it through the day.

2. Status – Getting recognition for your skill and results.

3. Creativity – Transcending recognition to pursue mastery and exploration.

4. Contribution – Sharing your learnings to advance the craft itself.

It’s tempting to think of these as tools in a Swiss Army knife - swappable, situational - but in reality they’re more like rungs on a ladder. Skipping a rung usually means your foundation will crack later.

I’ve fallen into that trap myself - trying to “make a difference” before I’d truly stabilized my footing in Survival or moved past the gravitational pull of Status. It’s like consulting at its worst: skipping the years of deep skill-building and leaping straight into “creative” problem-solving. The result? Outputs that look impressive but lack the weight and rigor that only come from time spent in the trenches.

The Contribution stage is a PhD-level achievement. It’s where your work not only perpetuates existing knowledge but evolves it - pushing the frontier forward. But without mastery beneath it, that contribution is shaky at best, harmful at worst.

Lately, I’ve had to be honest with myself about where I’m standing on the ladder in my current projects. Am I actually in a position to create or contribute? Or am I still, in truth, surviving and building status?

Because the real power of this framework isn’t in racing to the top - it’s in knowing which rung you’re on, and committing fully to the work that rung demands.

📎 Reflection question: Which rung are you on right now - and are you being honest about it?

—🗃️—

We call it “luck” when something good happens without us fully understanding why. But luck is often just a lack of visibility into the system that produced the outcome. The more you can see the mechanics - relationships, timing, positioning - the more “lucky” you start to look.

I used to think of certain opportunities in my life as chance encounters. But when I look back, there’s always a chain of cause-and-effect: a conversation I had, a book I read, a project I shipped, a connection I made. Nothing existed in isolation - it was all part of a system I just couldn’t see yet.

This newsletter is the same way. Writing ninety-three ideas and exploring topics that interest me wasn’t an accident - it was the result of a system. My Zettelkasten has evolved into WorkFrame - my process for turning books into brilliant ideas. It’s not about hoping inspiration strikes; it’s about engineering an environment where it has no choice but to show up.

📎 Reflection question: If you wanted this outcome to happen again, what system would you need to understand?

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Problems mark the edge of who you are. Purpose tells you which direction to grow. And luck? That’s just the system you haven’t drawn out yet.

This week, try this three-part exercise:

1. Find your edge. Identify one problem that’s pressing right up against your limits.

2. Place yourself. Be honest about where you are on the four-level purpose ladder.

3. Trace your luck. Pick one “lucky” break and map it backwards until you can see the system that made it possible and how you could leverage it.

Edges, ladders, and maps - together they turn vague ambition into deliberate growth.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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