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

🟨 Stop Hunting Niches: Why Your Weirdness Is the Only Strategy That Can’t Be Copied

🟦 Best Practices Are Silent Killers: How to Escape the Trap and Actually Build Momentum

🟥 Everyone’s Drowning in Noise - Here’s the Cheat Code to Turn It Into a Perspective No One Else Has

We’re told to “find a niche.” But niches are fragile - when trends shift, you’re obsolete. What isn’t fragile? Your lived experience.

I’ve been building apps and products for more than a decade. It started in middle school when I begged for a Mac every Christmas, finally got one, and hacked together a digital concordance app. It didn’t do much - but it got downloads in 149 countries. I didn’t even know what “distribution” meant at the time. The thrill wasn’t in the marketing metrics - it was in the magic of building something that existed yesterday only in my head.

A few years later, in college, I thought I’d gotten smarter. I spotted my Jersey Mike’s manager staying late with paper schedules, erasing and rewriting shifts until his hands were black with pencil smudges. There’s the problem, I thought. My friends and I dove in - built a web app, did market research, even filed LLC paperwork. It felt grown-up. But the truth was simple: we weren’t the ones living that pain every week. The app worked on paper, but without lived experience, we could never refine it into something people truly loved.

That contrast changed everything for me. When I build for myself - tools to solve problems I personally face - I know every edge of the problem. I can test daily, refine, and notice the subtle frustrations that never show up on a market survey. Those projects stick. They evolve because I live with them.

That’s the hidden edge. Niches are copyable. Your identity isn’t.

 📎 Takeaway: Future-proofing means realizing you are the niche. The more you solve your own problems deeply, the more others resonate with your solutions.

—🗃️—

Most people play to win. Grades, algorithms, trends - those are the scoreboards. And if you play well, you can win inside the system. But here’s the trap: once the system changes, your “win” evaporates.

That’s the nature of conformity. It rewards you only as long as you follow someone else’s rules.

In 5th grade, my teacher gave us a freewrite assignment. No structure, no rubric - just write. I remember filling page after page of a spy story until the bell rang, my hand still racing. Writing felt like play.

But school taught me how to kill that spark. “Intro, body, conclusion.” Essays became boxes to check. The game was simple: follow the rules, get the grade, move on.

Years later, I made the same mistake. When BeReal blew up, I spotted the perfect opportunity. I’d just finished Nir Eyal’s Hooked, so I wrote a case study: trendy, structured, algorithm-friendly. It did well. It checked every box.

And then the trend died and my article died with it.

That’s the problem with conformity: it doesn’t compound. It doesn’t last. It gives you a win today, and emptiness tomorrow.

This newsletter feels different. I don’t sit down to engineer a post for the algorithm or to “position” myself. I sit down to chase curiosity. To connect dots. To see what emerges.

And here’s the thing: because it’s authentic, it compounds. Each piece builds on the last. Energy grows instead of burning out.

 📎 Takeaway: Conformity is a finite game - you win only inside someone else’s rulebook. Authenticity is infinite - you create the game itself, and the rewards grow for as long as you keep playing.

—🗃️—

The common advice is: cut distractions, prune your feeds, subtract until you can focus. That’s useful, but it misses the bigger point.

Filtering isn’t just about blocking noise. It’s about shaping what stands out as signal and realizing that what you care about shapes what you even notice in the first place.

Picture two people at the same concert. One’s a drummer. One’s a guitarist. Same band, same sound - totally different experience. The drummer picks up the syncopation. The guitarist catches every chord change. Their filters weren’t chosen on the spot - they were shaped by years of obsession, repetition, love.

Ideas work the same way. The subjects you chase, the rabbit holes you dive into, the things you can’t not care about - they train your attention.

What looks like “noise” to others starts to stand out as “signal” to you. You start seeing patterns. With depth comes clarity.

This is why passion matters more than trend-chasing. Anyone can skim the surface. Few care enough to go deep. And depth is where your edge lives.

In a world of infinite information, your edge isn’t access. Everyone has access.
Your edge is the filter you’ve built through obsession, curiosity, and love.

That’s how worldviews are shaped:
Attention → Curiosity → Depth → Perspective

The future of creativity won’t belong to those who consume the most, but to those whose passions shape their filters so uniquely that their outputs couldn’t have come from anyone else.

 📎 Takeaway: What you notice is shaped by what you care about. In a world of infinite information, your passion is your filter, depth is your edge, and your unique contribution is the inevitable result.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

The thread through all three ideas is a kind of creator’s operating system:

• Identity: You are the niche. When you solve problems you live with, your work can’t be copied - it grows from who you are.

• Strategy: Play the infinite game of authenticity. Conformity pays once, then fades. Authenticity compounds forever.

• Skill: Filter signal from noise. The world is overflowing with information; the edge comes from shaping a perspective only you could see.

Taken together, these aren’t just tactics - they’re a way of being. They make you antifragile. The market will change. Algorithms will shift. Trends will die. But if you build from lived experience, keep playing your own game, and sharpen the filters that define your worldview, you’ll always have clarity to create from.

So here’s the invitation:
Ask yourself this week - are you solving problems you live with? Are you still playing by someone else’s rulebook, or your own? What filters are shaping the way you see?

That’s the work that makes you impossible to copy.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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