Welcome to Verstreuen, meaning “to scatter.” Each week I share highlights from my Workframe system, the process I use to turn books and notes into structured insights. Here, scattered ideas find connection and become something worth sharing.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 16 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Why the Smart Move Is to Choose Your Suffering

🟦 Why Luck isn’t found - it’s manufactured.

🟥 How Your Margins Reveal Who You Are

There is no easy path. Every option comes with headaches. The trick isn’t to hunt for the painless route - it’s to treat pain like a currency and spend it on what you actually want.

This hit me watching Weaver’s talk between client calls. If I stay in consulting, my “price” is endless meetings, context switching, and decks that vanish by next week. If I switch to thinking in public, the price is lower paychecks for a while, messy drafts, and beginner awkwardness. Both paths are hard. But only one buys me things I actually want: a body of work, reader trust, clearer thinking.

Pain is unavoidable. The uncommon move is to choose yours deliberately. Name the pains you’re willing to pay, and make sure they purchase outcomes worth owning.

📎 Takeaway: Don’t avoid pain - choose pains that build the life you actually want.

—🗃️—

We like to treat luck like weather - something that just happens, out of our control. But most “good fortune” isn’t random lightning; it’s the harvest of seeds planted long before. What looks like chance is usually hidden machinery - emails sent, drafts published, follow-ups made.

Luck grows with surface area:
→ what you know × who knows you
→ and it compounds the more shots you take.

This newsletter is proof. Notes I captured months ago in my Zettelkasten - a Milton line, a Patrick McKenzie essay, an Altman riff - resurfaced as raw material. By the time I sat down to write, the thread practically wrote itself. Not luck. Just deposits in a jar, filled one idea at a time.

📎 Takeaway: Luck is the echo of design - born from systems, multiplied by visibility, and sharpened by repeated action.

—🗃️—

Luxury branding isn’t about the product - it’s about how the margin is used.
Brands like Louis Vuitton charge a premium not just for the item, but to create surplus - in time, budget, and attention. That surplus is then spent to craft identity: through theater and care - months-long craftsmanship, overstaffed service, flagship stores that double as monuments.

None of that is waste - it’s signal.
The margin becomes the message.
You don’t need to see the logo to recognize the brand - you can read it in how they spend their surplus.

And we’re no different.
The effort we put in should earn us margins we actually care about - time, space, attention - and the systems we build should turn those margins into visible craft.

If I “waste” an afternoon refining an essay, growing social channels, or expanding my Zettelkasten, that’s not indulgence. It’s surplus spent in service of what I value: clarity, connection, and compounding knowledge.

Identity isn’t declared. It’s revealed - in how you spend your extra time, money, and attention.
Luxury in life isn’t about stuff. It’s about how you use your margins.

📎 Takeaway: Spend your margins deliberately. “Waste” them on craft and signals that reflect who you’re becoming.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Pain, luck, and surplus may look unrelated, but they’re all currencies - and most people spend them by accident.

• Pain: traded away on things they don’t care about.

• Luck: left to chance instead of designed.

• Margins: bled out in distraction.

In a world addicted to ease and comfort, growth isn’t found - it’s forged by how you spend what others waste.

The point isn’t to escape the price - it’s to pay it toward something worth owning.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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