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

🟨 Why progress plateaus - and why that’s a feature, not a bug

🟦 How markets mistake visibility for value (and how to escape it)

🟥 Why discernment - not speed - will define the next creative elite

This past week I was polishing the alpha release of Mulch, a small networking tracker app I’ve been testing with friends.
At first, I was in flow - fixing bugs five at a time, watching the product tighten.
Then I got greedy. I started adding new features.
Suddenly progress slowed, new bugs appeared, and the release slipped.

The bugs weren’t the problem. The bug was in my thinking:
I confused more effort with more value.

That’s the law of diminishing returns - every extra unit of input produces slightly less output until the system equalizes.
It’s not a failure of productivity. It’s a feedback loop.

Without that curve, systems would burn themselves out.
Diminishing returns are how nature whispers enough.

They’re the invisible brake that turns scarcity into stability - in markets, ecosystems, and even attention.
Push any resource too far - money, energy, time - and the payoff plateaus until rest becomes the only rational move.

 📎 Takeaway: Equilibrium isn’t rest. It’s restraint disguised as balance.

—🗃️—

Your perspective is entirely unique.
Even identical twins, born seconds apart, diverge into completely distinct selves.
That uniqueness is literal scarcity - and scarcity is what creates value.

But here’s the paradox: intrinsic worth ≠ economic worth.
Markets don’t reward meaning; they reward what’s measured.

Warmth, craft, and care all hold intrinsic value - but algorithms don’t price those metrics in.
The economy rewards visibility, not virtue.
In a feed-based world, what’s seen most becomes what’s worth most.

from Uber’s driver markets to TikTok’s content feeds - value flows toward whatever the system measures.
Craft, and effort may create real value, but they don’t always capture it unless the algorithm’s scoring logic sees them as scarce.

That doesn’t mean intrinsic worth disappears - just that it often goes unpriced.
And increasingly, what’s “valuable” depends less on effort and more on visibility within a system that defines scarcity.

📎 Takeaway: Your worth is constant. The world just needs to see it through the lens it rewards.

—🗃️—

In the 1800s, as industrial vineyards flooded Europe with cheap wine, quality stopped being the differentiator.
Out of that chaos emerged the sommelier - someone who didn’t make wine, but made sense of it.
Their value was in discernment.

That’s exactly where we are now.
Information, art, and content are infinite.
Creation is commoditized; curation is scarce.

AI lowered the cost of making things, but raised the cost of standing out.
When everything can be generated, clarity becomes the new craftsmanship.

The next “luxury worker” won’t be the best creator - it’ll be the clearest interpreter.

📎 Takeaway: In a world of noise, the highest signal is discernment.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Every system eventually meets its limit.
Every creator, investor, or thinker faces the same curve: effort stops compounding, options blur into noise, and more no longer means better.

That’s not failure - it’s the signal.
Scarcity is how systems know where value begins.

Without limits, everything collapses into sameness.
With them, meaning emerges.

Diminishing returns teach balance.
Uniqueness defines worth.
Curation gives shape to abundance.

What we call “scarcity” isn’t a constraint -
it’s how order exists.

Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 
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