Wisereads Vol. 117 — Mike Levin's advice for students, Brie Wolfson on Inside Cursor, and more

Last week, we shared an American classic perfect for fall: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. This week, we're sharing H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, a cornerstone of science fiction.

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Aimed at both high schoolers and PhD candidates, Biology professor Dr. Mike Levin shares guidance for navigating niche academic paths, including finding mentors and handling feedback: "If someone gives you a specific critique of your experiment, data, or writing – that’s gold. You don’t have to agree with them, and it doesn’t even have to be stated kindly or come from a place of support, for you to profit from it. Even hostile jerks have important things to teach you."

Brie Wolfson, CMO of Colossus, reports from inside Cursor, highlighting a culture of focus, calm, and drama-free execution. "When it comes to making something wonderful, the magic is in the mundane. Greatness is created through the collision of little sparks, ignited by people at the peak of the craft who care a lot and won’t stop working until it gets there."

AngelList cofounder and investor Naval Ravikant reveals his founder’s playbook for recruiting, culture, and product rigor. "The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement and veto, that’s a sad day. That’s the day that the company’s no longer being driven directly by you."

Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal Method, considers how the arrival fallacy and the rigidity of traditional goal-setting can block the path to a fulfilling life. "Traditional goals are like airports. If you don’t land the plane on the runway, it’s kind of a disaster. There’s this sense that you have to get it right before you even begin, which prevents many goals from ever taking off. Intentional goals are more like lighthouses. Sailors... use lighthouses to help them navigate unfamiliar territory."

Join Bryan Johnson on his magic mushroom trip as he unpacks his vision of a future without death. "While in this mushroom-induced dimension, it felt clear that we are about to start waking up from a slumber that has hypnotized us into accepting death. This will happen faster than people think. Once people see a practical path to extending a healthy life, they will adopt ferociously."

In his Thanksgiving news release, Warren Buffett hands off the writing of Berkshire’s annual shareholder letter to Chairman Greg Abel and reflects on legacy and aging. "Father Time, to the contrary, now finds me more interesting as I age. And he is undefeated; for him, everyone ends up on his score card as 'wins.' When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood."

Although The Time Machine wasn’t H. G. Wells’ first take on time travel, it was the novel that introduced readers to a device that lets its inventor leap across centuries. In just a hundred pages, a Victorian scientist journeys 800,000 years into the future and finds a world beyond human civilization.

"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence."

This edition of The Time Machine is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high-quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Engineer Scott Werner writes Works on My Machine, a hands-on newsletter on AI, developer tools, and product craft. From The Only Skill That Matters Now: "[Gretzky] didn't become great because he predicted the puck. He became great because he could actually get to ANY position on the ice and be open. The prediction was secondary to the skating. That's where we are now. Except our skates are prompts. Our ice is context windows. Our edges are knowing how to talk to Claude or Gemini or whatever comes out next that makes both of them obsolete."