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

🟨 The Self-Growth Lie That’s Secretly Slowing You Down

🟦 Why You Should Love Your Competitor

🟥 The Counterintuitive Truth About Breaking Bad Habits

We’re taught to treat our lives like buildings.
Blueprints, milestones, year-by-year plans.
Success comes from effort, precision, and adding more.

But you are not a building.
You are a seed.

And everything you need is already inside you.
Your job is not to build yourself—it’s to become yourself.
Growth doesn’t come by force, but by noticing what’s working—and blooming where you’re planted.

The sun doesn’t always shine—
and still, the tree thrives.

Rain doesn’t always fall—
But when it does, the roots are full.

Control isn’t growth—it’s a coat of paint over the real work of accepting the journey.

Letting go is not giving up.
It’s cooperating with your own nature.

Greatness doesn’t come from demanding what it should be.
It comes from trusting what’s already inside—
and giving it enough light, patience, and stillness to bloom.

—🗃️—

For months, I’ve been dreading the seemingly endless barrage of challenges in a project I’m working on.

Each week brings a challenge more difficult than the last.

But reading The Inner Game of Tennis, I was struck by a different way to frame challenge.

In the book the author describes the surfer who doesn’t chase calm water but instead waits for the big wave—not to prove to others he can do it, but to test himself and find out the true extent of his abilities.

The surfer waits for the wave that’s big enough to require all of them.

What if the challenge isn’t the obstacle in your way—
but the medium that shows you what you’re really made of?

Because it’s not the easy days that define you.
It’s the ones that ask for everything:

• Every failure you’ve already survived.

• Every skill you’ve collected in the downtime between.

• Every ounce of grit you didn’t know you had.

The challenge isn’t here to test your worth.
It’s here to reveal your edge.

And the more you avoid it, the more that edge stays dull.

You don’t grow by staying on the beach.
You grow by paddling into the wave.

—🗃️—

Most bad habits aren’t flaws.
They’re tools—until they aren’t.

They soothe, distract, protect.
Until they begin to cost more than they give.

That’s why willpower fails.
Remove a habit, and your nervous system doesn’t register freedom—it registers loss.
You didn’t just delete a behavior—you deleted a coping mechanism.

The better approach? Replacement, not resistance.

Think of a baby learning to walk.
He doesn’t “quit” crawling.
He simply begins walking—because it works better.

There’s no shame. No inner war. Just natural succession.

The same applies to you.
You don’t need more discipline.
You need a more useful version of yourself.

Not: How do I quit this?
But: What was this doing for me—and what can do it better?

Because change doesn’t last when it’s forced.
It comes from becoming someone who simply… doesn’t need the crawl anymore.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week’s notes aren’t just about growth
they’re about how growth actually works.

It doesn’t come through force, control, or guilt.
It comes from cooperation with what already is.

The seed doesn’t strive to become a tree—
it allows itself to become one.

The surfer doesn’t fight the wave—
they enter it with trust.

And the baby doesn’t quit crawling—
they walk, because it works better.

Each of these ideas points to a deeper truth:

You’re not becoming something new.
You’re returning to something true.

When you stop trying to add to yourself—
and start listening to yourself—
growth becomes inevitable.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH