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.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 27 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 Why efficiency is making you fragile

🟦 What happens when being wrong has no cost

🟥 Not everything profitable is valuable.

I’ve always loved optimizing things.

Packing a suitcase, to me, feels like a competitive sport.
Every inch utilized. Every variable minimized. Maximum efficiency.

So when I read “optimizations become a liability” in The Great Mental Models, it caught me off guard.

It felt wrong. Isn’t optimization always the goal?

But optimization is a form of specialization.

When the environment is predictable and stable, it makes sense. Specialization wins.
But when the environment is uncertain or constantly changing, specialization becomes a liability.

Optimization assumes the rules won’t change.
It assumes you understand the terrain.

I’ve been reflecting on this at work this week. I’m on a fast-paced project where requirements seem to change every day.

I’ve always been a big believer in long-term vision - in optimizing toward a clear destination - so I’ve been looking for ways to make things more efficient on the project.

But this was my revelation:

Unless that vision is already validated, things are still too uncertain to begin optimizing.

Experiments need to happen.
Assumptions need to get tested.
Direction has to evolve.

The goal is learning.

Optimization too early locks you into unvalidated assumptions.

Optimization narrows variance.
And the narrower the variance, the less room you have to adapt.

Packing a suitcase perfectly works if you get the weather right and don’t deviate from the planned path.

But things change - the weather isn’t always perfect - and some of the best destinations require getting lost.

When your bag is packed to perfection, there’s no room for the unexpected.

Over-optimization removes margin.

And margin is what makes adaptation possible.

📎 Takeaway:
Optimize after validation.
Before that, leave margin.

—🗃️—

Public values change when violating them stops being costly.

Exaggeration used to carry a heavy reputational penalty.
Being publicly wrong had consequences.

Reading the news today, it feels like something drastic has changed.

Bold claims travel faster than carefully researched ideas.
Conviction earns more engagement than caution.
Narratives move quicker than verification.

Social platforms have optimized for attention.
Attention rewards intensity, and intensity outperforms nuance.

When being loud is rewarded more than being accurate, behavior adjusts.

If stretching the truth gains more attention, momentum, or advantage - people will stretch it.

Not because they’re immoral, but because incentives shape behavior.

And when the reputational cost of dishonesty appears low, dishonesty increases.

This is a shift in public values.
Not through revolution, but through normalization.

Truth is what allows strangers to coordinate at scale, but when shared reality becomes negotiable, the systems built on top of it become fragile.

📎 Takeaway:
When truth becomes flexible, trust becomes fragile.

—🗃️—

Markets are often treated as the default authority on value.

If someone will pay for it, it has value.
If many people will pay for it, it becomes a market.
At scale, price becomes the signal.

This logic is incredibly powerful. It shares information across an entire system, allows strangers to coordinate, aggregates preferences, and moves resources efficiently.

But it also collapses something important.

Markets do not distinguish between value creation and value extraction. They adopt price as the definition of value and optimize accordingly.

A hedge fund extracting rent and a scientist inventing mRNA both increase GDP.
Both generate revenue and “create value” in market terms.

But only one expands human capability.

When price becomes the authority on value, extraction gains the same legitimacy as creation.

GDP counts dollars, not direction. It measures activity, not whether that activity strengthens the system or drains it.

If we let price define value, we start optimizing for what sells rather than what compounds.

For visible returns rather than durable capacity.
For extraction rather than expansion.

In the long run, survival belongs to systems that expand capability - not just revenue.

📎 Takeaway:
Price signals demand - not contribution.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week’s thread is simple:

We become what we optimize for.

Optimize for efficiency too early, and you lose adaptability.
Optimize for attention, and truth erodes.
Optimize for price, and extraction starts to look like value.

Metrics don’t just measure behavior.
They shape it.

And over time, what they reward becomes what feels normal.

The danger isn’t optimization.
It’s forgetting that every metric is a choice.

Every system - a company, a platform, a market, even a person - is always optimizing something.

The only real question is:

Did you choose the target - or did the target choose you?

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Until next week
-GH

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋