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:

🟨 How simple identities create fragile people

🟦 Why becoming T-shaped might be the single greatest career edge of the next decade.

🟥 Stop trying to fail fast - how to learn fast instead.

Some people seem uncategorizable. They move through the world without signaling allegiance to a single tribe. You can’t predict their politics, playlists, or posture. They are interesting because they’re layered.

A prime example I’ve been learning more about is Anthony Bourdain.
A classically trained chef who started as a dishwasher.
A punk who talked with presidents.
A recovering addict who approached the world with a monk’s curiosity.

What made Bourdain so compelling wasn’t just his ability to cook - it was that no single identity dominated the others. He moved through cultures with humility because he had learned, through his own contradictions, that no one is just one thing.

And that kind of cross-cutting identity isn’t just interesting - it’s protective.

Researchers on polarization consistently find that people with multiple, overlapping identities are more tolerant of outsiders. Not because they’re nicer, but because they aren’t structurally threatened by difference.

If you can hold complexity within yourself, you don’t fear it in others.

The root of intolerance isn’t ignorance.
It’s over-alignment.

When every part of your identity points in the same direction - your job, beliefs, politics, social circle - any cognitive dissonance becomes existential. You can’t afford to be wrong, because there’s nowhere else to stand.

But when your identity is woven from many threads - across cultures, roles, and communities - you gain flexibility.
Disagreement becomes curiosity.
Difference becomes texture instead of threat.

So if you want to be more resilient, more grounded, more impossible to shake?

Don’t double down on being right.
Become harder to categorize.

 📎 Takeaway: Extremism thrives on simple identities - resilience thrives in layered identities.

—🗃️—

I had the privileged opportunity to attend AWS re:Invent last week - my first time in Vegas - and between the expo and endless casino halls, it felt like stepping into the physical manifestation of the internet. I came home with a backpack full of merch from the companies whose tools I use every day.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the merch or the sessions.
It was a quiet moment in Dr. Werner Vogels’ final keynote.

Almost as an aside, he said:
“The Renaissance was powered by an emergence of curiosity.”

He was comparing today’s convergence - AI, robotics, cloud infrastructure - to the creative explosion of 15th-century Europe. It could’ve sounded cliché. But the more he explained, the more it became clear: this wasn’t metaphor.

He meant it literally.

The Renaissance didn’t begin because tools suddenly appeared. Tools appeared because people got curious again. They started asking broader questions. They drifted outside their lanes. They let one domain blend into another.

Galileo wasn’t just an astronomer.
Da Vinci wasn’t just an artist.
The Medici weren’t just bankers.

They were early polymaths - people with real depth in one area and intentional breadth across many. And that was Vogels’ message to developers - and really, to anyone building anything today:

Curiosity isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice.

We’re taught to specialize. To go deep. To narrow the aperture.

But in a world where every field is shifting under our feet, depth alone isn’t enough. Vogels offers a refreshing counter-model for the world we’re entering:
the T-shaped polymath.

• Deep in one craft

• Broad enough to understand how the pieces around that craft fit together

The depth gives you mastery.
The breadth gives you judgment.

You don’t need to know everything.
But you do need to understand the system around the thing you know best.

That’s what makes someone resilient - and irreplaceable. Not encyclopedic knowledge, but the ability to connect dots others can’t see.

In this new Renaissance, depth is the entry fee.
But breadth is the multiplier.

 📎 Takeaway: The winners of this era won’t be the people who know the most.
They’ll be the ones who understand the system surrounding what they know.

—🗃️—

If the first two articles were about expanding your T - widening your worldview, broadening your curiosity - this one is about the uncomfortable part that makes that expansion real:

To grow breadth, you must step into things you’re bad at.
To improve, you must be corrected.
And to learn fast, you must be corrected often.

It sounds simple. But it’s actually one of the most uncommon-sense truths in skill development.

Failure isn’t the teacher.
Correction is.

Werner talks about this in language learning. You can memorize vocabulary forever, but fluency begins the moment you speak out loud, get something wrong, and someone nudges you closer to the mark.

Failure shows you where the boundary is; correction reshapes the boundary.

High-velocity learners don’t fail more.
They collect more corrections per unit of time.

The people who become modern polymaths aren’t the ones who avoid mistakes - they’re the ones who enter streams of feedback willingly, repeatedly, and early.

 📎 Takeaway: The fastest way to expand your T is simple and uncomfortable:
Seek out the places where you can be gently corrected - and go there on purpose.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

Growth happens when you expose yourself to things you don’t yet understand.

Broad identity makes you harder to threaten.
Broad curiosity makes you harder to predict.
Broad skills make you harder to replace.

What I keep noticing is that the deepest expertise often comes from occasionally stepping outside it - just far enough to update your mental models, then bringing those updates back to your core.

The real takeaway:
Go where you’re not the expert, stay long enough to learn something real, and bring that back to the thing you know best.

That’s how people become resilient, multi-dimensional, and genuinely interesting.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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