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

🟨 Why the best kind of profit gives more than it takes

🟦 Why your best ideas die - and the ritual that can save them

🟥 What the Zettelkasten taught me about staying on the growth curve

If profit is energy, the question isn’t “How much did I keep?”
It’s “How much more capacity did this create for everyone?”

At a small scale, extraction often looks like efficiency.
You cut corners, skip documentation, or rush the project “just to ship it.”
It works - until the next person touches it. Then you pay the tax in confusion, rework, and hidden maintenance.
That’s bad profit: output that burns tomorrow’s energy for today’s win.

By contrast, a few weeks ago I wrote a short internal guide on how to access our systems at work - mostly for myself.
A few days later, new teammates used it to onboard without having to ask me questions.
That tiny artifact turned personal convenience into shared capacity.
That’s good profit: energy that outlasts direct effort.

Good profit widens capacity. It lowers activation energy, builds infrastructure, and leaves more than it takes.
Bad profit only works when the view stays narrow.

The real test of profit isn’t what you earned - it’s whose capacity grew when you did.

 📎 Takeaway:
Profit that endures multiplies energy beyond you.
Bad profit ends when you stop pushing.

—🗃️—

There’s an article I’ve been “working on” for weeks - collecting ideas, quotes, and metaphors, hoping clarity would appear on its own.
But clarity doesn’t arrive that way. Not even an avalanche of inputs can deliver it.

What finally worked was a forcing function: one hour, one whiteboard, one marker.
Seeing everything at once revealed the structure that thinking about it never could.
That hour didn’t finish the piece but it surfaced the form it wanted to take.

That’s what forcing functions do. They’re not pressure; they’re preservation.
They’re the rituals that keep ideas alive long enough to become real.
Deadlines, drafts, teaching, publishing - these aren’t limits.
They’re scaffolds that stop curiosity from rotting in potential.

The only way I found the structure of that article was by giving it ritual - dedicating space and time to turn curiosity into form. 
Not thinking about the piece, but thinking through it.
The act of doing reveals what the idea is really about.

Deadlines, commitments, publishing cycles - these aren’t artificial constraints. They’re catalytic friction. They turn the fog of scattered ideas into artifacts that can live in the world.

 📎 Takeaway: Forcing functions are rituals that preserve curiosity by giving it shape.

—🗃️—

In an earlier issue of Verstreuen, I wrote about assets that compound - knowledge, relationships, habits, attention.

But compounding’s hardest part isn’t starting - it’s staying the path.

The first stretch of any compounding curve feels painfully flat.

• You add notes but nothing connects.

• You work out but see no change.

• You publish but nobody seems to notice.

That’s when most people pivot.
But every restart erases the invisible progress that was beginning to build.

When I first built my Zettelkasten, each note felt isolated - fragments without a pattern.
But one day, two old notes connected unexpectedly, and something clicked.
The system had begun to think with me.

That moment only came because I didn’t quit during the flat part of the curve.

Compounding rewards patience - the willingness to keep showing up before the payoff appears.
Because once it does, momentum turns to leverage.
Each note sharpens the next.
Each connection multiplies the last.

 📎 Takeaway: Every compounding system has a fragile phase. Protect it.
Don’t restart the cycle just because you can’t see the curve yet.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Creation is a system, not a spark.
First you learn to build work that adds energy instead of consuming it.
Then you learn to give that energy form through ritual and friction.
And finally, you learn to stay with it - long enough for the system to start creating with you.

The real curve isn’t profit, or clarity, or even compounding.
It’s the shift from chasing ideas to building engines that keep generating them.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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