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

🟨 Why your best ideas get ignored (until you teach people how to see them)

🟦 Curiosity isn’t a trait - it’s the spark that pulls you through doorways

🟥 The plan that saves hours - even when it’s wrong

One of the most overlooked truths in collaboration is this: value is not rejected because it isn’t there - it’s rejected because the other person doesn’t have the frame to recognize it.

A few weeks ago, we presented a solution to a client that we thought was simple, elegant, and effective. Yet the room went quiet. Heads tilted. Eventually, someone asked: “But what’s this Bronze, Silver, Gold?”

We hadn’t realized it, but they were locked into their own existing framework. To them, any solution that didn’t map neatly to it didn’t look like value - it looked incomplete.

Our ideas weren’t wrong. They simply weren’t legible in the client’s mental language.

The turning point came only after we slowed down and explained the why - why our approach worked, how it was structured, and what it meant for them. In other words, we didn’t just pitch a solution. We transplanted a new framework into their way of seeing.

And once they had that frame? The very same ideas they had dismissed suddenly made sense.

This is what Jon on the team called “an education exercise.” Every time you share a new way of thinking, you’re not just transferring value - you’re building the mental scaffolding that lets others recognize it in the first place.

So the next time your work feels invisible, ask yourself: Am I assuming the framework that makes my value?

Because until you do, your best ideas may remain hidden - sitting in plain sight, but unrecognized.

 📎 Takeaway: Explaining value is often less about persuasion and more about education. It’s not selling - it’s teaching someone how to see.

—🗃️—

Most people think of curiosity as a trait - something you have. But in practice, curiosity is less of a fixed quality and more of a signal. It’s the flicker that pulls you into the unknown.

When curiosity strikes, it doesn’t feel like idle interest. It feels like openness - like the door to a new room has cracked open, and part of you can’t help but peek inside.

This signal marks the start of a transition. First comes the spark of curiosity. Then, if you follow it, comes a phase of intensity - a season where learning accelerates, engagement deepens, and progress compounds. You’ve probably felt it before: those weeks or months when you can’t put the book down, can’t stop tinkering, can’t think about anything else. Curiosity becomes fuel.

But that season doesn’t last forever - and it isn’t meant to. What follows is the consistency phase: the period where the new baseline becomes your normal. Curiosity has done its job. It carried you across the threshold into a higher state of being.

Curiosity isn’t just about collecting more information. Its deeper function is movement - moving you from child to learner, outsider to insider, novice to practitioner.

This is why curiosity shows up at the edges of human development. It’s the emotion that primes us for growth. Tool use, sharing, even culture itself - all of it begins with someone noticing something strange, leaning in, and saying: “What if?”

In that way, curiosity isn’t just a fleeting feeling. It’s humanity’s ignition point - the spark that keeps pushing us toward new thresholds.

📎 Takeaway: Treat curiosity not as a personality trait, but as a signal. When it shows up, it’s telling you you’re standing at a doorway. The only question is: will you step through?

—🗃️—

Vision without a plan is just hallucination. But here’s the twist: a plan isn’t a map - it’s just an interface.

Think about it like software. You don’t interact with the full complexity of the code; you interact with the user interface. The UI translates potential into something usable. That’s exactly what a plan does for vision.

Over the past few months, I’ve been planning a lot more - often as an exercise in problem-solving without doing the actual work yet. I’ll sit down, sketch out how I’d approach a challenge, and walk the path on paper before I ever take a step in reality. Again and again, this process has saved me countless hours. Roadblocks that would have blindsided me halfway through become visible early. And sometimes, seeing them in advance changes how (or whether) I even start.

That’s the uncommon truth about planning: its value isn’t in being “right.” It’s in giving you a surface to push against. The very act of drafting a plan creates traction. You “ship clarity” the moment you translate vision into something structured, even if the specifics later shift.

Plans aren’t supposed to predict the future - they’re supposed to let you interact with it.

And like any good interface, the goal isn’t perfection. It’s usability. Does the plan move you forward? Does it help you see the terrain more clearly than before? If so, it’s doing its job.

📎 Takeaway: Don’t chase the perfect plan. Chase the plan that gets you moving, saves you wasted effort, and gives you a usable interface between vision and action.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week’s notes circle back to a single principle: clarity emerges through translation.

• Connection requires translating your value into the other person’s framework.

• Curiosity is the emotional signal that translates possibility into growth.

• And planning translates vision into usable action.

Each one is an interface. Each one is a doorway. And each one reminds us: progress rarely comes from holding more ideas in your head - it comes from giving them a form others (and even you) can interact with.

So the challenge this week: pick one area of your life - work, learning, or vision - and build the interface. Translate the invisible into the visible.

That’s how scattered ideas become forward motion.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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