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Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Entrepreneurs benefit from setting ambitious goals, even though most people do not need grand ambitions at all.

  Their words

  And I will say I've actually changed my mind on that a little bit. I spent quite a lot of time speaking the other book that there are a lot of people who don't actually need those ambitions. And I also-- That's also true. We don't want 8 billion Elons running around the world. Would be rather crazy, I think. But I've come to realize that for entrepreneurs, it's healthy to have suitable chunky goals.

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Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

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  A cabin in literature typically serves as an escape from trouble or a place where new trouble is found.

  Their words

  The cabin is a classic literary setting. It's the getaway spot where characters can flee to escape their troubles or journey to in order to find new ones.

  Processing: How Josh Riedel Edited Thirty Cabinscountercraft.substack.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

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  Digital Minimalism

  Their words

  Podcast. Cal Newport’s new book is a great distillation of what I’ve come to believe is the right, sustainable, healthy approach to social media, and technology more broadly. Browse less, make the best of it, and live more.

  radex.io

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

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  Saying no and setting boundaries are acts of self-preservation, not selfishness or letting others down.

  Their words

  Saying no is not selfish; it's an act of self-preservation. Setting boundaries is not about letting others down-it's about standing up for yourself.

  The Truth About People Pleasingadamgrant.substack.com

Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

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  The only style worth having is the one you cannot help; setting out to develop a personal style is the wrong goal.

  Their words

  And that there might come a moment, while reading a new, just-edited-for-the-thousandth-time draft, where that true self, or voice, pops out at you, suddenly revealed, as if someone else, not you, had done it.

  On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

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  The mind's planning and goal-setting function is only a small fraction of a person's overall intelligence.

  Their words

  The planning part of your mind, the one that generates ambitions and hypothetical situations, is a small part of your overall intelligence.

  Surrender as a non-stupid life strategysashachapin.substack.com

Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.

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  Benjamin Britten is the benchmark among English-language composers for setting the work of intensely musical writers like Shakespeare and Keats to music.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  In the English-language arena, Britten sets the standard for handling writers of inborn musical power-the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Hopkins.

  Liner notes to What Belongs to Youtherestisnoise.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  A theory gets abandoned when the old explanation becomes visibly insufficient: special relativity made Newtonian gravity's action at a distance impossible, and that was the forcing function.

  Their words

  Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.

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Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

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  Big companies will lose about half of their engineers, because that is where everybody is setting the dial.

  Their words

  And so, what's happening is everybody on average is setting that dial to about 50% and we're going to lose about half the engineers from big companies, which is scary.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  New Year's goals are merely the path toward a person's underlying purpose, not the destination itself.

  Their words

  People make this mistake of setting new goals every January 1st, but forget that goals are the path, not the destination.

  4 Simple Steps to Change Your Lifemarkmanson.net

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

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  After a decade of Swiss minimalism, design is about to swing back to something far more expressive.

  Their words

  I think we're going to swing back to being way more expressive and draw as part of that story.

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Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  The value of an ambitious experiment target is not hitting it but the conversation about what would have to be true to hit it.

  Their words

  And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal.

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Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.

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  Ensorcelled

  Their words

  Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper is genius. It’s a unique format that can be read in one setting. The writing is beautiful.

  feld.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Setting a worse task against the one you are avoiding is a procrastination hack that actually works.

  Their words

  It’s when you really don’t want to do a thing that you imagine a thing you don’t want to do more that’s worse than that and then in that way, you procrastinate by not doing the thing that’s worse. It’s a nice hack, it actually works.

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Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.

  Their words

  Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.

  lg.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY; co-author of Rework, Remote and It Does Not Have to Be Crazy at Work.

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  Making something brand new gives you room to explore new design approaches; the gravity of an existing system bends you back towards conforming.

  energy

  Their words

  The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.

  Why new when?world.hey.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Weightlessness, not weight, is the purest experience of gravity — what you feel sitting in a chair is atoms interfering.

  Their words

  To be falling. That is the purest experience of gravity. The experience of gravity, unfettered, uninterrupted by atoms is weightlessness.

  youtube.com

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  There may be no theory of quantum gravity to find, because gravity is not fundamental — it emerges at large scales out of quantum phenomena.

  Their words

  I think that this is suggesting that there might not be a theory of quantum gravity, that gravity will emerge at a macroscopic level, out of quantum phenomena. Now, we don’t know how to do that yet, but these are all hints.

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Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

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  Efforts to rebuild American industry will fail until global trade and financial imbalances rebalance

  America

  Their words

  Until the global economy rebalances, efforts to rebuild American industry are fighting economic gravity.

  The Strategy Behind the Stupiditysecondbest.ca

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  The Inca stones were not fitted by patient pecking with hammer stones; they were fused with acid.

  Their words

  The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.

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Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

From one piece Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #433 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Treating the universe as deterministic is an artifact of how laws have been written down since Newton, not a fact about the world.

  Their words

  Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.

  youtube.com

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  The frontier of new physics is not high-energy particle physics or quantum gravity, but the problems of life and intelligence.

  energyTrauma

  Their words

  I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.

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American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

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  Muji pens

  Their words

  It was around this time, in the summer of 2021, that I discovered the Muji pens. I discovered them as every minimalism fetishist discovers them perhaps.

  blgtylr.substack.com

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

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  Zojirushi

  Their words

  Turn on the rice cooker for normal or quick cooking (I have a Zojirushi, either setting works).

  kylechayka.substack.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  The Black Company

  Their words

  I enjoyed the first book a great deal: it’s in a fairly stock medieval setting, but it handles the dark fantasy well

  gwern.net

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

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  The Lincoln Highway

  Their words

  Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes.

  gatesnotes.com

Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

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  The only thing a productivity system can do for you is help you choose slightly better what to do right now.

  Their words

  In the end, the only point of any personal productivity system, goal-setting technique or "life planning" exercise is to help you make a slightly better decision about what to do, right now

  List one task, do it, cross it outoliverburkeman.com

Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

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  Moon Pod

  Their words

  But Instagram has gotten pretty good at it and now I own a gravity blanket , a moon pod , stretchy jeans , a great hoodie , and like 19 fidget toys and physics toys and other stupid things that make me happy .

  waitbutwhy.com

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  Gravity Blanket

  Their words

  But Instagram has gotten pretty good at it and now I own a gravity blanket , a moon pod , stretchy jeans , a great hoodie , and like 19 fidget toys and physics toys and other stupid things that make me happy .

  waitbutwhy.com

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

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  uBlock Origin

  Their words

  I block distracting parts of websites with uBlock Origin’s amazing “element blocker,” which lets you select and remove any part of the page. As a fan of minimalism in web design, I really enjoy being able to adversarially enforce it on any rogue webpage.

  benkuhn.net

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

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  Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe

  Their words

  Jim Baggott has a very good new book out, entitled Quantum Space

  math.columbia.edu