Verstreuen [ver-ˈstrɔɪ̯-ən]

verb (German)

1. to scatter; to spread widely.

2. (versehentlich) to spill, often by accident.

Verstreuen is my weekly ritual of revisiting notes to find the ideas worth carrying into the next week.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 116 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 How to stay calm when everything is actually on fire

🟦 The failed project that might still make you money later

🟥 Why your customer decides what business you’re really in

To say it was a difficult week would be an understatement.

Six flights. Four cities. A presentation I did not feel ready for. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, our production system was deleted.

Not just the app. The config too cascading into everything else.

I found out mid-flight after connecting to Wi-Fi somewhere over Texas and got the message:

"Dude this is bad."

What I remember was not panic but quick action.

A group chat formed. We put together a doc: who was most impacted, what needed to be restored first, what actually had to exist for the demo to happen the next morning. We handed off to the offshore team as they came online. I got to the hotel around 12 p.m., ate dinner and rebuilt slides around an environment that no longer existed, and tried to sleep.

The next morning we were all quietly taking bets on exactly how the demo would fall apart.

and yet, somehow, it went… well.

Looking back, what made that possible was not that we stayed calm in some detached, “everything-is-fine” way. The situation was objectively bad. The pressure was real.

But there was never much room to spiral - because our focus was on one question:
What needs to be true for this presentation to happen tomorrow?

That question made the problem small enough to act on and gave the team something to organize around.

"Everything is broken" is technically accurate but completely useless. We could have said this but It invites panic as it treats every possible consequence - everything that might still be broken, everything people might think - as equally urgent all at once.

But most of those things were not needed yet. They might become real later. But in that moment, they were just noise.

Calm is not a personality trait. It is not indifference. It is not pretending. It is a filtering mechanism - the ability to look at a genuinely bad situation and ask: what here is actually real, right now, and what is just noise or overthinking?

Crisis does not mean caring less. It means staying oriented. Not wasting energy performing panic. Keeping the field narrow until the next move becomes obvious.

Stress grows when you let imagined problems carry the same urgency as real ones. The way through is not to care less. It is to stay in the room you are actually in, not paying any mind to the ten rooms you might have to deal with later.

 📎 Takeaway: Calm is not the absence of pressure. It is the refusal to work on problems that do not “exist” yet.

—🗃️—

A few years ago I built Tangram Tools.

A template directory - a place where developers could find and share project starters. I believed what a lot of builders believe the first time around: if the product is clean enough, people will find it and use it - They didn't - Not because the idea was bad, but because I treated distribution like an after thought. The directory never became the marketplace I imagined.

But the repository survived. And it has became one of the most valuable things I’ve made.

Every new project still starts the same with premade templates that allow me to get moving faster, not reinventing the wheel every time.

As a product it failed. but the infrastructure is still around and valuable.

Builders do what markets do - just with time instead of money.

You pour months into a vision that doesn't pan out. The original bet fails. But what got built in the process doesn't disappear with it. Skills sharpen. Systems form. The artifacts are still usable next time.

Markets call this a bubble. Most builders just call it a failed project and move on.

That is the mistake.

Bubbles are civilization-scale R&D programs. The dot-com crash left behind fiber cables, cloud infrastructure, and a generation of engineers who knew how to build for the internet. The speculation collapsed. The foundation stayed.

The bubble was wrong about the timeline but not wrong about what the future needed.

Most of us evaluate projects by their outcome. Did it find users? Did it make money? Did it become what we said it would?

And those are validThose are the wrong closing questions.

The right one is: what did this make possible that wasn't possible before?

Some failed bets are just bad bets. But some leave behind roads - and the next thing you build will be faster because of work that looked, from the outside, like waste.

The wreckage and the foundation are often the same thing.

📎 Takeaway: Before you write a project off, look at what it left behind. Time poured into a failed product isn't lost. It's just infrastructure you haven't used yet.

—🗃️—

The other day I was describing Workframe to a friend: the system, the structure, the Zettelkasten, the way notes link to sources, how ideas surface across disciplines, how it all feeds into Verstreuen each week.

My wife, half-listening from across the room looked up and said: "You mean like academia?"

She was right.

Compile sources, put them in conversation with one another, produce something on the other side that adds to the field. Academics have been doing this for centuries. I had spent months building a personal version of it - trying to figure out where it lived. Productivity? Knowledge management? A thinking system?

One comparison and the whole thing had a home.

That is how category actually works. You can aim for a market but you do not get to decide where the solution lives in someone else's head.

Founders think category is something they invent. Pick the market. Name the space. Write the positioning doc. But category is not created in a strategy document. It is created in the comparison someone makes when they are trying to understand you.

That is not a positioning exercise. It is a perception exercise.

Most positioning starts from the inside: what are we, what do we do, what makes us different? But customers do not shop from the inside. They shop from their own frustration. They already have a shelf in mind. They already know what relief would feel like.

Listen to the words people use when they finally understand you. Listen to what they compare you to. Listen to the moment their face changes and they say "oh, so it's like…"

That is your category. Not the one you wrote. The one they found.

Your category is not what you sell. It is what they compare you to.

 📎 Takeaway: Pay attention to how other people explain what you do - especially the ones who get it immediately. That is finding the category.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week’s ideas all point to the same uncomfortable truth: most progress begins when you stop arguing with reality.

In a crisis, reality is the one problem in front of you - not the ten imagined ones competing for your attention. In a failed project, reality is not just what didn’t work, but what still exists because you tried. In a category, reality is not how you describe yourself, but how someone else finally understands you.

Clarity is not just thinking better. It is seeing cleaner.

It is the ability to separate the real from the unreal, the failed outcome from the useful infrastructure, the intended category from the perceived one. And once you can see what is actually there, the next move usually gets easier to spot

The work is not always to invent more, explain more, or worry more.
The work is to notice what reality is already telling you - and be humble enough to build from there.

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Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋