The Invisico Counselor Library

Cal Newport

b. 1982 · American

Attention as the load-bearing variable in work, presence, and the lives they fund. American computer scientist behind Deep Work and Slow Productivity.

Best for work, focus, and tech-adoption calls where attention — not time — is the scarce resource

David Goggins

b. 1975 · American

Confronting comfort and expanding capacity through voluntary hardship

Best for decisions driven by avoiding discomfort, and ceilings that are psychological rather than real

Marcus Aurelius

121–180 CE · Roman

Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher whose private notebooks remain the most cited working manual for governing oneself under sustained pressure.

Best for decisions made under pressure where ego or fear distorts judgment, duty, and self-command

Seneca

c. 4 BCE – 65 CE · Roman (born in Hispania)

Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman who treated time as the only irreplaceable currency, and the gap between his counsel and his own life as the load-bearing question.

Best for time, urgency, and emotional decisions — does this still matter at the end?

Brené Brown

b. 1965 · American

Shame, vulnerability and connection as the load-bearing variables underneath stuck conversations. American social-work researcher behind Daring Greatly and Dare to Lead.

Best for hard conversations you're avoiding, and where shame or armor is the real obstacle

Daniel J. Siegel

b. 1957 · American

American psychiatrist behind interpersonal neurobiology and the mindsight skill. Looks underneath behaviour for the brain state or developmental layer doing the work.

Best for adolescent shutdown and co-regulation — meeting a dysregulated child (or self) at the right layer

John Gottman

b. 1942 · American

American psychologist whose Love Lab research at the University of Washington produced named patterns (Four Horsemen, bid-and-turn-toward) that predict relationship dissolution.

Best for naming the pattern in a relationship rupture — and whether a conflict is solvable or perpetual

Marshall Rosenberg

1934–2015 · American

Communication as needs-and-feelings work, not as scripts or persuasion. The American clinical psychologist behind Nonviolent Communication.

Philippa Perry

b. 1957 · British

British psychotherapist and bestselling writer on family rupture and repair, and what your own old pattern is doing in the present conversation.

Best for parent-child and partner ruptures where your own old pattern is alive in the present conversation

Charlie Munger

1924–2023 · American

American lawyer and investor who served as vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway alongside Warren Buffett. Treated rational decision-making as a checklist for avoiding stupidity, not for chasing brilliance.

Best for stress-testing a decision for hidden incentives, biases, and whether it's inside your competence

Peter Drucker

1909–2005 · Austrian-American

Austrian-born American writer and management educator whose central question was always whether an organization's stated theory of itself still matched reality.

Best for naming the real decision when activity is mistaken for progress, and what to stop doing

Peter Thiel

b. 1967 · German-American

German-American entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir. Argues that the goal of every new company is to escape competition rather than win it.

Best for startup positioning, category definition, and whether a bet is zero-to-one or incremental

Reed Hastings

b. 1960 · American

American co-founder of Netflix who built the company on the conviction that talent density is the load-bearing variable in performance, and that context beats control once you have the right people.

Best for hiring, exits, and autonomy-vs-process calls — the Keeper Test and reversible vs. irreversible bets

Steve Jobs

1955–2011 · American

American entrepreneur and product designer who co-founded Apple. Insisted that focus is subtraction and design is how something works, not how it looks.

Best for product and leadership calls about what to cut — focus, coherence, and saying no

Warren Buffett

b. 1930 · American

American investor and businessman who has chaired Berkshire Hathaway since 1965. Built one of the largest companies in the world by holding good businesses he understands, for a long time, with a margin of safety.

Best for long-term commitments — capital, relationships, business — and staying inside your competence

Leslie Lamport

b. 7 February 1941 · American

American computer scientist and mathematician, 2013 Turing Award laureate for distributed and concurrent systems and the inventor of LaTeX.

Best for distributed and concurrent design where correctness must be defined before any code

Martin Fowler

b. 18 December 1963 · British

British software developer, author, and ThoughtWorks Chief Scientist, known for refactoring discipline, microservice prerequisites, and the design payoff line.

Best for design-quality vs. speed trade-offs, technical debt, and microservices/rewrite calls

Martin Kleppmann

b. 1983 · British

British computer scientist and Cambridge associate professor, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications and a leading voice on local-first software.

Best for data-store and consistency choices — and whether a system even needs to be distributed

Andrej Karpathy

b. 1986 · Slovak-Canadian

Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and educator, known for the Software 2.0 thesis, the Tesla Autopilot vision team, and the Zero to Hero teaching series.

Best for deciding where an LLM belongs in a system — and how much to automate vs. assist

Chip Huyen

b. 1990 · Vietnamese

Vietnamese-born computer scientist and O'Reilly author focused on production machine learning — Designing Machine Learning Systems (2022) and AI Engineering (2024).

Best for taking an ML/LLM feature from notebook to production — evaluation, data, and whether AI even fits

Simon Willison

b. 1981 · British

British software engineer who co-created Django and writes about practical LLM engineering — prompt injection, evaluation discipline, and the line between disciplined LLM use and "vibe coding".

Best for shipping LLMs safely — prompt-injection exposure, evaluation, and where AI is the wrong tool

Camille Fournier

b. ~1975-77 · American

American engineering executive and author of The Manager's Path, focused on the IC-to-director engineering management ladder.

Best for diagnosing a stuck manager, team, or career ladder in a growing engineering org

Charity Majors

b. ~1980 · American

American software engineer and Honeycomb co-founder, known for observability-as-discipline and the engineer/manager pendulum.

Best for on-call load, deploy health, and the sociotechnical roots of reliability problems

Will Larson

b. ~1985 · American

American engineering leader, CTO at Imprint, and author of Staff Engineer, An Elegant Puzzle, and Crafting Engineering Strategy.

Best for engineering strategy, Staff-plus growth, and whether a reorg is the answer or an avoidance

Alan Watts

1915–1973 · British-American

Mid-20th-century philosophical lecturer who explained Eastern non-dual traditions to Western audiences, returning persistently to the seeking-trap and the illusion of the separate self.

Best for questions where the framing itself is the problem — identity, purpose, the pressure to be doing more

Annie Duke

b. 1965 · American

American author, decision-science consultant, and former professional poker player who teaches the separation of decision quality from outcome quality — process over result, calibrated uncertainty over false confidence.

Best for high-stakes calls under uncertainty — judging the decision by its process, not the outcome it happened to get

Carl Jung

1875–1961 · Swiss

Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology — depth psychology of shadow, archetype, and individuation — and held that the psyche is a reality in its own right, lived continuously in waking life as much as in sleep.

Best for recurring patterns, midlife reorientation, and what the psyche signals beneath the surface

Jiddu Krishnamurti

1895–1986 · Indian

20th-century Indian philosopher who dissolved his own movement in 1929 and spent the next 57 years questioning conditioning, authority, and the structure of self-improvement itself.

Best for questions you didn't choose and haven't examined — inherited beliefs about success, identity, purpose

Viktor Frankl

1905–1997 · Austrian

Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist who developed logotherapy — the search for meaning as the primary motivational force in human life — and survived four Nazi concentration camps after introducing the term a decade before his deportation.

Best for meaning, purpose, and unavoidable suffering where attitude is the only lever left