My book SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is out 3 July 2026. Pre-order at superskillsbook.com
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Friends,
There is a particular kind of phrase that only gets used over dinner, after the second drink, when the table has relaxed enough that people say the thing they actually mean.
One day I’ll write a book.
One day I’ll go to Japan.
One day I’ll leave the job and do the thing I started out wanting to do.
One day I’ll post the recipes properly. People keep asking.
One day I’ll reinvent myself.
You know how it goes. The friend who has been saying it for as long as you have known them. The colleague who raises it every time the conversation turns to work. The cousin whose business idea has been the same business idea for eight Christmases in a row. It is the warmest phrase in the English language and it is also the saddest, because most of the time there is no day. There is the phrase, and there is the dinner, and there is the laughter, and then there is next Thursday, which is exactly the same as this Thursday. One day is a room in the house where nobody ever lives. People furnish it, walk past it, point to it when guests come round. Nobody sleeps in it. Nobody uses it.
I said it for ten years.
If there is one thing I want from this newsletter, and from the five hundred or so Sundays I have now spent writing to you, it is for you to be better at the end of reading me than you were at the start. Not wiser in the abstract. Better. Closer to the version of you that actually does the thing. This letter, more than any other I have written, is about that.
Ten years
I decided I was going to write a book in Shanghai, in 2014. I had been working in and around the field for years already, but 2014 was the first time I watched a machine learning system do something I had only ever seen humans do. I did not know what the book would be about. I only knew that I wanted to write one, and that what I was watching meant the world was going to change in ways that most of the people I knew had not started thinking about yet. The more I went back to China over the following years, the more this conviction hardened. Something was coming. Somebody was going to have to write about what it meant for the humans in the middle of it.
I started a newsletter in 2017. I did not start it because I was working up to a book. I started it because I could feel something changing and I needed a place to think out loud about it every week, and I have written it every Sunday since, which is now about five hundred Sundays in a row. For five years the newsletter was just the newsletter. Then ChatGPT happened, in late 2022, and the thing I had been watching in research labs showed up on everybody’s phone at once. That was the trigger. The book had been abstract for eight years. It became urgent in a week. And it turned out, when I looked back, that the newsletter had been the on-ramp to the book the whole time without knowing it. If you have been reading me for a while, you have been reading the book in instalments and neither of us realised.
Ten years is long enough that the friends who heard you say it the first time stop asking. Long enough that you stop bringing it up yourself. You are forty, forty-one, forty-two. Something happens that is not in your plan, and then something happens again. You come home the second time and something is different, although you cannot yet say what.
For a long while, I told myself that writing the newsletter was enough. Maybe writing every Sunday was impact enough. Maybe a book was old-fashioned in an age where people have stopped reading them. But in an oddly old-fashioned way, a book is a legacy at a time when clarity is needed. A book is a moment. It is a calling card. It is a reference point. It is a body of work. It is proof.
Some of the people I told, back at those early dinners, laughed at me. Not unkindly. A few of them thought I was joking. A few of them thought I was serious and were embarrassed for me, which is worse. A few of them said the thing people say when they do not believe you but do not want to be rude about it, which is worse than being laughed at directly. A legitimately published book, on a subject that matters, from somebody whose day job is something else entirely. Who does that. I could feel the room adjust.
Maybe some of the laughter was mine. Maybe the voice in my head had been doing it for longer than any of them had. You can spend a long time at a table of people who love you and still be the person at the table saying the least about their own work, because the loudest voice in the room is the one inside your head asking who you think you are. Mine did.
You may have been laughed at too. You may even have laughed at yourself, because saying the dream out loud from inside your own head can feel ridiculous. Maybe you are reading this right now and thinking: how can this guy have written an actual book? Fair question. I have asked it of myself more times than I am going to count.
The gap is not where you think it is. You think the gap is about you: your discipline, your talent, your courage. That is not where the gap lives. The gap lives in a set of assumptions about what it costs to start, and those assumptions are out of date.
What actually changed
The story people assume, when they hear that I wrote a book, is a story about willpower. That I pulled myself together. That I developed a routine. That I found the discipline I had been missing. This would be a neat story, and it is not what happened.
What happened is that, while I was spending ten years not writing a book, the cost of doing almost everything collapsed. I did not notice the collapse until I walked into it. The world I had been putting off the book in was not the world I was now living in, and the reasons I had been giving myself for not starting had, at some point while I was not looking, stopped being true.
I built a website for the book. It is at superskillsbook.com, and you can go and look at it right now if you want to test the argument I am about to make. I needed a website: a proper one, clean, readable, with the right tone, something I could send to a journalist without flinching. So I did what writers do. I asked for a quote. The quote came back at between fifty and sixty thousand dollars, from a web developer who had built sites for some of the best non-fiction authors in the business. I had asked because I wanted to understand what that kind of work actually costs at the top of the market. Now I know. I read the email and closed it. And deleted it. And decided no, I wont do that.
Five years ago, that is where the story ends. You either pay the sixty thousand or you do not have a website, and if you do not have a website you explain to people that it is coming soon and it never comes. The quote is the wall, and the wall stops you, and the wall is not about the website at all. It is about whether the book is real.
This time I did not stop. I built the site in Claude Code over a weekend, talking into my laptop rather than typing. I am not a technical person. I did a computer science degree in the last century, which is a sentence I enjoy writing, but the gap between what I learned then and what is possible now is so wide that the old knowledge barely helps. What it does give me is the absence of fear. I am not afraid of the keyboard. Everything else, I made up as I went along.
The site went live in a weekend. The direct total cost was under ten dollars. Most of the time was not spent building. It was spent thinking about what the site was for and what somebody arriving from a cold link needed to see in the first three seconds. That is the part that is always going to be human, and it turns out to be the part that takes the time.
Sixty thousand dollars is what the best web developers in the business quote for a serious non-fiction author. Ten dollars is what I paid. The gap between those two numbers is the gap the whole world has fallen through while most of us were still saying one day. That is not a story about me. That is a story about the ground shifting under everyone who has been waiting.
The hierarchy
The website was not the hardest thing. The hardest thing was the book itself. People have asked me, more than once, whether I got ChatGPT to write it. They ask it like a clever question. It was boring the first time, and it has worn thinner with every repetition. The short answer is no. The longer answer is the whole point of this section, and it is more interesting than the question deserves.
At the bottom of the hierarchy: I used Grammarly. That is the only AI that touched the actual prose. I used it to catch the spelling mistakes I have been making for forty years. I used it to tidy up my commas. Writing that sentence out loud is embarrassing for a man publishing a book about human skills in the age of AI, and it would be less embarrassing to leave it out. The embarrassment is the point. AI did the bottom layer of the writing, the mechanical layer, the spell-check layer. It did not do the thing in the middle.
In the middle of the hierarchy: research, analysis, and everything that counts as the thinking around the thinking. I surfaced academic papers I would never have found on my own. I surfaced books I had not heard of. I chased citations down rabbit holes I would not have had the patience for unaided. I read what people in other languages were writing about the same questions. I anonymised client data and found patterns in it I had felt but not yet named. I analysed the market. I looked at how the best non-fiction books of the last decade were structured, and built a blueprint from what I learned, because I wanted to write something that sat alongside them without copying any of them. I built workflows for the repetitive parts of the process and ran them until they ran themselves. AI was a thought partner for all of that, in the way a good junior researcher would have been in 2015. Cheaper, faster, tireless, and occasionally wrong in ways I had to catch. Sometimes there were hallucinations. Sometimes I hallucinated. I think.
At the top of the hierarchy: the website, the book trailer, the cover concepts, the social graphics, all of it. These are the things that would once have required a production company. An agency. A small team of people on a retainer. They now require a laptop and an afternoon.
I will give you a specific example, because it is the kind of example that makes people ask me the question again about whether I really did this myself. I did a full analysis of every non-fiction book on the market about AI, human capability, work, and the future of skills. I looked at the covers. I looked at the titles. I looked at what was working and what was not, and I reached a conclusion that surprised me, which was that the cover of my book should be black. That is a weird conclusion for a book whose whole argument is about hope. It is also correct. I tested the concept against synthetic audiences, sent the brief to my publisher, and to my surprise they agreed. Black was the right colour. They came up with the final design from there. I am telling you this because the part of the process people imagine AI did, which is the writing, is the part it did least. The part AI did most is the part people never think about. The analysis. The tactics. The patterns. The decision about what colour the book should be.
And then, sitting above all of this, outside the hierarchy entirely, is the thing AI did not do.
It did not write the book. It did not hold seventy thousand words in one head for a year. It did not stay up at two in the morning trying to remember whether the chapter on adaptability already referenced the fishermen in Kerala or whether that was a note I had made for a different chapter and then forgotten about. It did not feel the strange, private pain of realising, when the typeset proof came back from my publisher, that I had forgotten some of what I had written. There was an example in an early draft about Airbnb and how they pivoted during the pandemic. I loved that example. I thought it was still in there. When the proof arrived I could not find it. It turned out I had killed the darling myself, months earlier, and forgotten I had done it. You lose things in a book the way you lose things in a house you have lived in for too long. Not because you do not care. Because there is too much of it for any one mind to hold.
It also did not rewrite chapters. I did that. I rewrote chapters. I rewrote the whole book, more than once. My first draft was not good enough. Neither was the second. Neither, if I am being honest about the way a perfectionist reads their own typeset proof, is the final version. It is the best I could do with the time and the mind I had, and the thing I had to learn to say out loud was that the best you could do with the time and the mind you had is what shipping is. Nothing is ever ready. The date on the calendar is what makes you stop.
The book took a year of my life. It took more than that, actually, because the year of writing was sitting on top of a decade of thinking, and a lifetime of knowing what I wanted to say without being able to say it. AI helped with the work around the work. The work itself was mine.
Four words
I have written about being ill before. If I keep doing it I will have to rename the newsletter. But it matters here, briefly, because two stays in a hospital bed did something to how I thought about time, and without that I do not think the book would exist.
I came home the second time and I was not well, and I was not sure I was going to finish the thing I had been saying I would do for ten years. It was a Tuesday afternoon. I was on the sofa pretending to read. I had not written anything in weeks. She came in and sat down, not across from me but next to me, and she said four words. I am not going to tell you what they were. The specific words are not the point. The point is that they were said by a human being, in a room, for free, and nothing I have built since would exist without them.
The cost of doing almost everything has collapsed. The cost of being carried through the part where you almost do not finish has not. It was never going to. The ground has shifted on the outside. It has not shifted on the inside. The question for the next decade is how we use the first fact to protect the second.
The augmented mindset is not the tools. It is what the tools free you up to notice.
There is a name for this. It is one of the seven skills the book is built around, and I call it a skill deliberately, because it behaves like one. You get better at it with practice. You get worse at it with neglect. Nobody is born with it. You cannot buy it by buying a better model. The mindset is the muscle. The tools are the weights. The muscle is what you are actually building.
The shoot
I made a book trailer, which is a ridiculous thing to do. Books do not have trailers. Films have trailers. Books have blurbs and jacket copy and, if you are lucky, a good cover. The category of book-trailer-as-documentary barely exists, because a book is to be read and a video is to be watched, and the two things live in separate worlds. I made one anyway, because the argument of my book is easier to feel than to explain, and I wanted people to feel it before they decided whether to read it.
The thinking happened on a morning walk. I walk in the mornings to clear my head before the day starts, and on the walks I talk to Claude on my phone about whatever I am trying to work out. This is not extra time. It is the same walk I was already doing. The only difference is that the walk now produces something. By the time I was home I had the structure.
I recorded it in one afternoon. My wife, who hates being on video almost as much as I do, agreed to be the interviewer. She sat off-camera and asked the questions we had written. Her voice does not carry the whole piece, but it carries the beginning and the end, and the beginning and the end are the arc. She is the reason the trailer has a shape.
My fourteen-year-old daughter was the director. She took the videos. She held the phone. She watched the screen and told me things like no, that was not good, you fumbled that one, you need to do it again. The credits of the trailer list her as director, and she earned it. When she said action at the start of each take I kept bursting into laughter, because she is fourteen and she was serious and she was in charge, and the gap between her seriousness and the whole ridiculous situation of her middle-aged father trying to be on camera for his book was funnier than anything I could have planned. At the end of each take she said cut. She said it the way a director says it, not the way a fourteen-year-old says it, and I am not going to forget the sound of her saying it for as long as I live.
If you watch the trailer you will notice that the phone is slightly wonky. I set it up myself and I got it slightly wrong, and she can tell, and I am not going to call her out on the angle because the mistake is mine. The whole thing was edited in CapCut over half a day. The total cost was zero. I have never wanted to be a TikTok influencer, or an Instagram influencer, or any kind of person whose job is being in front of a camera. The experience of making the trailer was, privately, horrific for me. I did it anyway, because my idols, the David Epsteins and the Simon Sineks, do this kind of thing all the time, and at some point you have to stop explaining to yourself why you are different, and step out, and do the uncomfortable thing.
The trailer is not perfect. It is good enough. Good enough, in this age, is a miracle that used to cost between twenty and fifty thousand pounds, and now costs the afternoon you were going to spend on something else.
The trailer is at the bottom of this newsletter. Watch it or do not. What matters is not whether you watch the trailer. What matters is what is in your house, right now, that you could make with your daughter this weekend if you decided to.
Your one day
What is your one day?
I am not asking rhetorically. I am asking as someone who spent ten years inside the same sentence you are inside. What is the thing you have been telling people at dinners for as long as any of us can remember? What is the one-day that you no longer bring up yourself because you have heard how it sounds? The book. The business. The move. The trip. The recipes. The career change. The thing you were going to do when you retired, except retirement has moved and the thing is still waiting.
In the old world, execution was a filter. A hundred people wanted to do what you wanted to do, and most of them never finished, because the building was too expensive and the coordination too hard and the money ran out. The filter did the work of thinning the field for you. You did not have to be the best of the hundred. You only had to be one of the ten who made it through.
The filter is gone. Not weakening. Gone. You are not competing with the hundred people who want the same thing as you. You are competing with the ten of them who will notice, first, that the filter has gone.
The filter used to protect you from having to be brave. It let you tell yourself the reason you had not done the thing was that the thing was too expensive, or too hard to build, or too dependent on somebody else giving you permission. Those were true reasons once. They are the reasons you are using to hide from the fact that what was stopping you was never the thing you said it was. Being brave is the only differentiator you have left. The people who figure that out first are going to be unstoppable, and you already know whether you are one of them.
Maybe if I had been early, it would not have worked then. I probably needed the decade. The tools did not exist in 2015 and neither did the version of me who could have used them. That is the one excuse I am allowed, and I am holding on to it carefully, because it is the only one I have. You do not have it. The tools exist for you right now. You have no excuse left.
You either do it or you do not do it. That is the whole thing. I said it for ten years, and then I did it, and the version of me that did it is not braver or more disciplined than the version that did not. The version that did it is the version that noticed the filter had gone.
The launch date
My book launches on the third of July. That is seventy days from now, give or take, depending on when you are reading this. I have said the date so many times that I no longer believe it. I know the day itself is going to be an overrated moment. Launch days usually are. I will believe it when I am holding a physical copy in my hand, or when I walk into a bookshop and see the book sitting on a shelf next to books I spent my twenties reading, and I can take a picture to prove to myself that the shelf is real and the book on it is mine.
A lot of you have already pre-ordered the book. Some of you have ordered three copies. A few of you have ordered ten, which I understand comes mostly from companies buying it for their teams, though I know one or two of you are doing it as a favour to me. I have been carrying your names around in my head for months. I do not know most of you in person, and I have still spent actual mornings thinking about what you will think when the book arrives, whether the chapter you will like best is the one I hope it is, whether you will recognise yourself in the bits I wrote late at night. When somebody I have never met pre-orders a book I spent a year of my life on, it is not a transaction. It is a bet. You bet on me before there was anything to bet on. I know, and I will not forget.
If you are reading this and you have been waiting to see whether the book is a real thing before you decide, it is. The people who bet early made it real. The date is the third of July, and I would like to meet you at it.
I did it with AI. I launched it with AI. I wrote it alone. I wrote it because I have spent twenty years watching people try to work out how to be human in a world that keeps changing the rules, and I had something to say about it that I could not say in a keynote, and one day I decided that one day had run out.
You have the same tools I have. You have a phone. You have a laptop. You have a morning walk or a commute or twenty minutes between meetings where you could be talking to a model about the thing you have been carrying for a decade. You have a person who, if you asked them, would say four words to you that would carry you further than any tool ever could. That person exists. You already know who they are.
Go and find them. Tell them what you are going to do.
Then do the thing. Not one day. This one.
Cut.
SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is published by Kogan Page on 3 July 2026. You can pre-order at superskillsbook.com.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
PS. If your organisation is thinking about AI and human capability, I keynote and advise on this. I also do bulk book orders for teams.
Tools I Use:
Jamie: AI Note taker without a bot. You join the meeting. The Bot doesn’t.
Wispr Flow: Just dictate everything to your laptop and phone. Game Changer
Refind: AI-curated Brain Food delivered daily. Pick your intelligence.
Meco: Newsletter reader outside your inbox. Organise your intelligence.
Prompt Cowboy: Prompt Generator. Extract intelligence.
Manus: Best AI agent to do things for you. Agentise your intelligence.
Chat Hub: Multi-model intelligence
Claude Cowork: Delegate complex tasks to your friendly Claude Agent
Recommend Reading:
Now
The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt “Historians and nonfiction authors often glide over lived experience. They prefer actions, citations, details, dates.” A brilliant essay on the challenge of conveying emotional truth and lived experience in historical narratives.
Curiosity Is No Solo Act - An argument that curiosity thrives not in isolation, but within interconnected relationships. “It gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making.”
You are what you consume - An interesting economic and cultural argument: personal identity should come from the things we get to choose for ourselves, rather than the circumstances we are born into.
Finance leaders warn over Mythos as banks prepare to use powerful Anthropic AI tool - Release of new Claude model, so far limited to US firms, will expand to British institutions in coming days
An end to cervical cancer is possible - And some countries are already on track to do so.
Next
How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous for the Wild
The AI company’s own experts warned Mythos could hack the systems beneath most modern computing. Banks and government agencies are racing to gauge the threat.
The Great American GLP-1 Experiment A look at the rapidly expanding, off-label use of GLP-1 drugs. Beyond weight loss, people are now experimenting with these medications to treat everything from concussions and long Covid to drug addiction and arthritis.
On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang - Some podcasts are self-recommending on the ‘yep, I’m going to be breaking this one down’ level.
The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived - AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning.
The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Organizations Are Flying Blind
If you enjoyed this, forward it to someone who’d find it useful. And if you haven’t yet, pre-order SuperSkills at superskillsbook.com - out 3 July and get the pre-order bonuses.
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