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!

_{Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more}

🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 14 new additions to the Zettelkasten—here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 How some people have unstoppable leverage while others stay stuck

🟦 You think better… just by writing things down

🟥 Why most goals fail—and what it takes to make them real

I’m currently writing this on a short flight from Charlotte to DC, I found myself enjoying these short hop flights where there is just the quiet middle between departure and arrival. No internet. No notifications. Just a head full of thoughts, a blank page, and an hour of solitude.

Sometimes the best tools aren’t the digital ones that solve every problem for you—they’re analog and take effort. That blank page ended up holding the rough sketch of something I’ve been playing with for some time:

Vision.
Agency.
Knowledge.

Three words from a book. But they felt like a framework.
Dan Koe calls it the critical factors for profit, I called it The Fire Triangle of Progress.

Like a fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen—progress needs all three:

Knowledge (awareness of what’s possible)
Vision (a direction to move in)
Agency (the will and ability to move)

Remove one, and nothing catches.

There are seasons in my life where I’ve obsessed over specific components of this framework like knowledge: watching YouTube for hours on end and later in college reading as many non-fiction books as I could in a week. Information gave me energy. It still does.

More recently, I’ve shifted toward vision—trying to shape a clearer image of what I want to build and why.

But here’s the truth I’ve had to admit:

I’ve been lacking agency.

Not in the dramatic sense. Just in the daily one. Not enough space. Too many loose ends. Energy spread thin.

No fire—not because the ideas aren’t good (at least I think)
but because the conditions aren’t right.

That’s what agency really is: clearing the conditions that allow ideas to become actions.

When I finally started to reclaim that—clearing hours, reworking priorities—everything began to slowly move again.

It wasn’t the tools that changed. It was me.

—🗃️—

Funny enough, the idea for all this started in my notes app,

That’s a habit I’ve come back to lately: note-taking when deep in thought. Especially when my head feels like a storm of half-formed thoughts just begging to be pulled together into something meaningful.

What i’ve found is that there is a constant swirl of ideas that can be hard to direct or focus but using pencil and paper, or the digital equivalent it is possible to do just that, control the flow of ideas and focus your work when you get distracted.

Here’s how I use it:

1. Start with stillness. Sit quietly. Stare at the sky or out a window. Let the ideas come and go on their own terms.

2. Pick one. Choose a single idea that stands out—and write it down.

3. Follow it. Your brain will naturally begin to circle that idea and its neighbors, expanding the landscape around it.

4. Map it out. Add related ideas to the page—keywords, fragments, arrows, sketches.

5. Watch the clarity emerge. A framework, a metaphor, a sentence worth saving. Insight made visible.

Lately, I’ve been using Apple Notes. It’s fast. Always there. But honestly?
Whether it’s an app or a pencil, the function is the same:

Controlled exploration.

Nothing fancy. Just a quiet conversation between you and your own thoughts.
A place to begin.

—🗃️—

life is about choosing the things we want and then committing to them, trusting the process that the things we do repeatedly will compound towards meaningful outcomes. Habits are the actions of pursuits, without them no meaningful goal is achieved. This is why auditing your habits is so important. the goals you achieve are the outcomes you sustained, unhealthy habits, unhealthy life.

The framework I’ve been using to audit my habits is aligning everything back to core principles

• Core Principles: the ways of working and unwavering ideas you live by

• Visions: what you see in your future to build towards

• Goals: a measurable piece of what success looks like for your vision

• Projects: the thing you’re going to move the goal metric

• Tasks/Habits: the actual work; the compounding actions

This all ties back to something deeper I’ve been thinking about:

Its hard to rise to the level of our goals. But easy to fall to the level of our habits.

And our habits only make sense in the context of our principles.

If the habits don’t support the project, they go.
If the project doesn’t serve the vision, it pauses.
If the vision isn’t aligned with the core—scrap the whole thing and recalibrate.

Simple. But not easy.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

It’s been an stress-filled chapter. I’ve been stretched in ways I didn’t feel ready for across more obligations and complexity than planned. But here’s what’s saved me: community.

This past weekend, friends traveled hours to be part of a family celebration. Parents hosted, fed, laughed with us. It reminded me that I’m not doing this alone.

And that’s why I’m writing this:

Because I don’t want to wake up in 10 years chained to something I never chose.

Just for what matters:

Build a future with freedom. Build something sustainable. Live like a nomad.
And do it all while staying true to what makes this meaningful.

Because when you know what you want—and have the tools to act on it—you don’t need more time.

You just need to light the fire.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 
Until next week

-GH