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

🟨 Generalists vs. Specialists: balancing exploration and execution

🟦 Falling Gracefully from Clarity into Chaos

🟥 Saying Yes, And No: A Strategy for Growth

As a species we are neither the strongest nor the fastest, but we are the most structured and importantly—one of the most curious.

We ask questions no other creature bothers with:
→ What’s under that rock?
→ What’s on the dark side of the moon?
→ What is the meaning of life?

But we don’t stop at questions.
We build scaffolding, systems and tools around our curiosity that help us go further.
This balance between curiosity and building is our engine of growth.

In organizational theory James G. March calls this dichotomy between curiosity and building exploration vs. execution:

• Exploration is search, discovery, experimentation.

• Execution is refinement, efficiency, structure.

One creates possibility. The other makes it real.
One pushes the frontier. The other builds the road behind.
Progress comes from the handoff between the two—structure that sustains exploration.

This is how development happens—not as a straight line, but a relay:
First, the scout. Then, the structure.

In every age:

• Some go ahead to ask “What else is possible?”

• Others stay back to answer “How do we make this real?”

Curiosity without infrastructure burns out.
Structure without vision stagnates.
But together—they compound.

• Generalists are the scouts.
  They roam ahead, charting possibilities.
  Connecting dots across terrain, time, and tools.

• Specialists are the stewards.
  They make it durable. Scalable. Repeatable.
  They anchor the new frontier with craft and depth.

“Generalists explore the edge.
Specialists make it habitable.”

Neither mode is better. Both are essential.

This dance—between exploration and execution—is what turns scattered insight into actual development. Extending the frontier—then building a foundation others can stand on once the right path is chosen.

—🗃️—

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to work on less prescriptive projects—where the job isn’t just execution, but direction-setting. In these moments, we’re not the one receiving the strategy but the one setting it.

This kind of work is very different.

Traditional execution work where a plan is given has fallback routes. If something fails, you adapt. Try again. Pivot. But in strategy work, when things break, the consequences ripple. You’re not just shifting your own path—you’re shifting the foundation that others are building on.

You’re in motion. Making progress. The problem feels scoped. The vision is clear. But then—one unexpected piece of information arrives. A new variable. A surprising result. A contradiction.

And suddenly, the clarity fractures. The scaffolding collapses.

This isn’t failure. It’s something more disorienting:

It’s a fall.

I’ve felt this multiple times.

The clearest example was during my capstone project in college. We were building a virtual reality study—testing how different interface changes affected behavior. things were humming along nicely, then the data came in…

Nothing linked. No patterns. The results didn’t support our model. Every assumption dissolved.

That fall—from structure into ambiguity—wasn’t just disorienting. It felt existential. We tried several solutions to try to fix it quickly. Patch the model. Tweak the inputs. Return to clarity.

But the Cynefin framework suggests how this is rarely possible and offers a solution through falling with intention.

When you fall off the cliff from Simple (known, familiar) into Chaos (unknowable), the first step isn’t to climb. It’s to constrain.

You have to go further into the unknown but this time with bounds on what your unknowns might be.

From there, you can begin to coalesce your knowledge retracing what you know and researching what you don’t to formulate an understanding that moves you into the Complicated zone.

Only then, through standardization of your understanding can you return to a Simple classification of the problem at hand.

After the capstone collapse, we slowed down. We constrained the variables to focus on one effect. Reframed the hypothesis. Rebuilt our test design around what we knew.

That small move—rescoping the chaotic unknown into a manageable domain—was the key to rebuilding a meaningful path forward.

So when the next fall into chaos happens—and it will—here’s the move:

1. Constrain: Narrow the question. Shrink the unknown. Define the new boundary.

2. Retrace: Let go of what you thought you knew. Build from what’s still true.

Move from chaos → complex → complicated. Only then can you standardize again.
This isn’t backtracking.
It’s rebooting with integrity.

Because in uncertain work, the goal isn’t to avoid collapse.
It’s to find your way through it seeking the truth for a more firm foundation to build on.

—🗃️—

In the beginning, growth looks like every opportunity.

You should say yes to everything:
Projects, Conversations, Events. This stage is about expansion. You gather inputs, try things on, feel out the edges of your own capacity. You can’t yet afford precision, because you don’t know what matters most. So you say yes. Because yes builds range, surface area.

But at some point, growth changes shape.

More inputs stop helping. Your calendar overflows. Your attention fragments. And then a deeper challenge appears: not just how to grow, but who you want to grow into.

Because real growth—the kind that compounds—isn’t just about exposure.
It’s about focus, doubling down on areas of unfair advantage and leverage.

The strategy flips:

At first, you grow by saying yes to everything.
But to keep growing, you have to start saying no.

You say no:
→ To projects that aren’t aligned.
→ To clients that don’t energize you.
→ To opportunities that distract more than they develop.

Saying no doesn’t mean you’ve stopped exploring or even that you’ve stopped being a generalist.
It means you’ve started integrating, you’ve begun to choose a path, this is the execution part of your personal development.

You’ve built enough clarity to know what moves the needle.
You’ve developed enough signal to recognize what’s noise.
And you’ve earned the right to develop with intention.

Because long-term progress isn’t just about opening doors.
It’s about knowing which ones you’re no longer meant to walk through.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

True progress isn’t a straight climb. It’s a cycle—of divergence and convergence, of scattering to discover and narrowing to integrate.

Every meaningful pursuit moves through this rhythm:

• You explore by saying yes—scouting the edge, testing ideas, mapping possibilities.

• You build by saying no—choosing focus, refining direction, and anchoring what matters.

• You collapse when the model breaks—but you find your way back through constraint and are able to rebuild often better than before.

• And through it all, you compound—not by doing more, but by repeating the cycle with intention.

This is the path:
Generalists say yes to map the edge. Specialists say no to build the path.

Neither is better. Both are essential.
What matters is the handoff between them—the moment you stop scattering and start constructing.

So whether you’re exploring, refining, or rebuilding, you’re still in the loop.
The real move isn’t to avoid collapse or cling to one mode forever.

It’s to move intentionally through the cycle of exploration and execution to find new paths and build support to evolve for whatever exploration comes next.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 Until next week -GH