Verstreuen [ver-ˈstrɔɪ̯-ən]

verb (German)

1. to scatter; to spread widely.

2. (versehentlich) to spill, often by accident.

Verstreuen is my weekly ritual of revisiting notes to find the ideas worth carrying into the next week.

_{Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more}

🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 37 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 The advantage you’ve been ignoring because it feels too easy

🟦 Why saying no feels worse than missing out

🟥 The simplest way to beat competitors (that no one uses)

I once said no to something I should’ve wanted - smart people, the right room, the kind of thing that signals you’re moving in the right direction. I didn’t have a strong reason. I just didn’t feel pulled toward it. So I passed.

And then it stayed with me. Not the event itself, but the version of me who would’ve gone - the one who says yes to everything interesting, who is more connected, more ambitious, more in motion. For a few days, it felt like I had made a mistake. Not because I missed something, but because I might have gone down a wrong path.

FOMO isn’t really about opportunities. It’s about identity.

Every opportunity carries an implied version of you. Say yes, and you step into that identity. Say no, and that alternate reality disappears. What lingers isn’t the event - it’s the sense that you’ve closed off a path.

FOMO is what happens when every choice feels like a verdict on who you should be. You’re not stuck because there’s a perfect option - you’re stuck because you think there is. FOMO disappears the moment you stop treating decisions like final judgments.

Grounded people aren’t optimizing their schedule. They’ve made peace with who they’re not going to become.

📎 Takeaway:
You’re not deciding between better and worse versions of yourself. You’re deciding which version gets to exist.

—🗃️—

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time modding games.

Not in any serious way. I wasn’t building full mods or shipping anything. I was just poking around - editing files, changing values, trying to understand how things worked under the hood. Sometimes I’d break the game completely. Sometimes I’d accidentally make something interesting.

It didn’t feel productive. It felt like messing around. Other people were getting better at the game. I was trying to rewrite it.

Years later, I realized something: that play was work.

What I was actually doing was learning how systems fit together - how small changes cascade, how to debug when something breaks, how to navigate unfamiliar structures without instructions, how to figure things out from first principles.

We’re taught to respect effort that looks hard - formal training, clear credentials, visible struggle. But specific knowledge rarely feels like that. It shows up as what you do without being asked, what you return to without discipline, what feels so natural you assume it’s common.

That’s the trap. The things that are most you look the least impressive, because you’ve never experienced not having them.

For me, it looked like curiosity without direction - opening files, testing limits, breaking things just to see what would happen. Over time, that became the exact set of skills I now use every day as a software engineer.

What felt like messing around was actually pattern recognition, systems thinking, and debugging practice in disguise.

Most people overlook their advantage because it doesn’t feel earned. It feels obvious, effortless, sometimes even trivial. But that’s exactly why it’s hard to compete with.

📎 Takeaway:
Your best advantage is usually something you’ve been doing long before you knew it had value.

—🗃️—

I didn’t realize how much friction I was tolerating until I switched from a PC to a Mac at work. On paper, nothing dramatic changed. Same apps, same workflows, same tasks. But something felt different almost immediately: I could stay in flow.

No random slowdowns. No weird crashes. No moments where the system would hang just long enough to break my concentration. Everything just… worked.

What surprised me most wasn’t how much better it was - it was how invisible the problem had been before. I had adapted to the interruptions, it was just part of my day at work. I didn’t think of them as a solvable issue. Just part of using the work laptop.

But once they were gone, it was obvious: the real value wasn’t speed or specs. It was the absence of friction.

That’s how most categories evolve.
Companies benchmark what others do well - better features, nicer design, more capabilities - and everything slowly converges. But categories don’t break because of strengths. They drift because of shared weaknesses.

The small delays. The confusing steps. The overlooked moments that interrupt momentum. The things everyone experiences but no one questions.

Reverse benchmarking flips the question.
Not “What should we copy?” but “What friction has everyone learned to live with?”

That’s where the leverage is.

This is the exact lens I’ve been using on a project I’m working on called Link2.

Link tracking is one of those categories that looks “solved” until you actually try to run real campaigns across multiple channels. Every tool benchmarks on the visible strengths: shorten a URL, use a branded domain, show clicks in a dashboard.

But the normalized frustration shows up once you scale: dozens of links, scattered across campaigns, turning into a spreadsheet of disconnected rows. The structure disappears. The system becomes hard to see.

So Link2 is my attempt to be exceptional at that weak point.

Instead of managing links as isolated entries, Link2 lets you visualize your traffic architecture as a map. The “where does traffic flow?” question becomes obvious at a glance, and missing tracking becomes hard to ignore.

You don’t need to be exceptional at everything. You need to be exceptional at the thing people feel every time they use it.

Fix one normalized frustration, and it can outweigh being average at everything else.

📎 Takeaway:
Competitive advantage often hides in frustrations everyone else has learned to accept.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

These ideas seem different on the surface, but they point to the same pattern:
What matters most is often what gets dismissed.

Your natural strengths feel too obvious to value.
The paths you don’t choose feel like loss instead of direction.
The biggest opportunities hide in problems everyone has learned to ignore.

Clarity isn’t just about seeing more.
It’s about seeing what others overlook and taking it seriously.

That’s where leverage comes from.

Not from doing more.
But from using what you have to the fullest extent.

🟨🟦🟥 Join the Workframe Community

A small group of thoughtful people exploring ideas, refining their thinking, and sharing what they’re noticing with others doing the same.

→ Come hang out!

Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋