Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)
Filed under the name Teresa · July 29, 2026
Sixteenth-century Spain didn't have productivity apps, task managers, or a single podcast about deep work, and yet Teresa of Ávila still out-output most of my LinkedIn feed. She wrote 'The Interior Castle' and a body of spiritual work that people are still studying five centuries later, which, as someone who has personally abandoned three side projects and one Master's program, I find both inspiring and mildly threatening. There's no version of this where she had a notes app or a co-founder to split the work with — just an absurd amount of discipline pointed at something she actually believed in, sustained over a full lifetime, no pivot required. I try to be careful about turning every historical figure into a startup-founder meme, because it flattens what's actually impressive about them, but I'll admit the instinct is hard to resist here. What actually gets me, once the jokes settle, is how her writing is still read as genuinely useful centuries later — not as a historical curiosity, but as something people return to. That's a shelf life most of us should be so lucky to have.