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

🟨 When clarity disappears because every option is “fine”

🟦 Why difficult decisions trigger mental noise

🟥 Playing the long game requires real strategic power

One of the strange privileges of adulthood is choice. You get to decide where to live, what to work on, and who to become. The hard part isn’t bad options - it’s mediocre ones.

I’m naturally pretty go-with-the-flow, so I try not to over-optimize every decision. One tool I return to often comes from Jeff Bezos: one-way doors vs. two-way doors.

If a decision is reversible, don’t overthink it. Walk through the door and adjust later.

But some choices aren’t like that. Where you live. What long-term project you commit to. Which direction you point your career. These are one-way doors, or at least expensive to undo.

When I’m stuck between options that feel roughly equal, I use a simple rule:

Add more dimensions.

Two choices can look identical when you only evaluate them on one or two axes. But as you layer in more factors - environment, constraints, lifestyle, energy, second-order effects - differences start to emerge.

For example, two states might feel interchangeable until you consider climate. Or proximity to people you care about. Or what kind of daily life they enable. At some point, you hit a decision factor - a variable that actually matters to you.

The algorithm is simple:

If the decision is hard and irreversible, don’t wait for clarity.
Increase the resolution until clarity emerges.

You’re not missing the right answer.
You’re missing the right frame.

 📎 Takeaway: Don’t wait for clarity - build it by adding dimension.

—🗃️—

There’s a term I came across this week: mind virus - the moment when one thought cascades into imagined worst-case futures.

It’s not the information itself that overwhelms you.
It’s the mental model your brain builds in response to it.

Neuroscience has a term for this: prospection - our ability to simulate future scenarios using past experiences. It’s the same mechanism that helps us plan, invent, and strategize. But under stress or uncertainty, prospection becomes pathological: the system overfits. Small inputs yield massive, fear-driven forecasts.

Left unchecked, the mind doesn’t reflect reality - it distorts it through recursive simulation.

So what do we do?

One helpful strategy comes from cognitive defusion, a technique used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). The idea is simple but powerful:

Treat thoughts as events - not truths.

Instead of interrogating or arguing with the spiral, you step back and label it:
"Ah, here’s my mind doing that thing again - running models without data."

This reframes overthinking not as a mirror of reality, but as a generative process - flawed, biased, and often unhelpful. You don’t need to shut it down. You just need to decentralize it.

Mental clarity, in this case, isn’t found in stopping thought but in stepping out of identifying with it.

 📎 Takeaway: Thoughts are not truths. Let the simulation run without giving it control.

—🗃️—

It’s easy to confuse momentum with strategy.

This week I was reminded of a core idea from 7 Powers:
Value creation gets attention. Value capture determines survival.

I saw this play out while watching Gold - a story about a prospector who claims to discover a massive gold deposit. The company explodes in valuation. Investors pile in. Media swarms.

But there’s no gold. Just the illusion of it.

It’s performative power: something that looks like strategy from the outside - attention, hype, capital - but has no structural advantage underneath.

Early traction feels like success. But unless it’s backed by real power - switching costs, scale economies, a cornered resource - it decays.

If others can replicate your position easily, you haven’t built strategy.
You’ve just bought time.

Real strategy isn’t what gets you noticed.
It’s what keeps you protected when attention fades.

📎 Takeaway: What looks like leverage isn’t always power. Strategy is defense, not momentum.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week reminded me that uncertainty isn’t a failure signal.

Most of the time, it means the problem isn’t emotional - it’s dimensional.

When decisions feel impossible:

• Add clarity by adding context

• Reduce noise by respecting cognitive limits

• Think long-term by protecting what compounds

Clarity rarely arrives like a lightning bolt.
It emerges after you decide what actually counts.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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