Actual Intelligence

I have always been too early.

Jun 28, 2026

My book SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is out THIS WEEK on 3rd July 2026. Pre-order at superskillsbook.com or on Amazon

I work with organisations and leadership teams on SuperSkills, human capability, and AI-era decision-making through speeches, workshops, keynotes and advisory work. In person or virtual. UK, Europe, global. → Book a discovery call | → Explore: thesuperskills.com

Friends,

My book comes out this week, and I have been waiting for most of my life for it to come out.

Roughly 33 years ago, I sat at the front of a lecture theatre at Loughborough University. I had chosen the course because it blended computing with real work, the actual doing of things, and I liked that. I sat at the front on purpose. I had decided long ago that the front was where you kept up without distraction, and I was not sure I could keep up. Behind me were students from across the world, and at the bottom of the room, right in front of me, a lecturer was talking about artificial intelligence. He spoke about algorithms. He never once spoke about what any of it would do to a person.

I understood almost none of it. I remember the specific fear of it, the sense that everyone else had been handed a key I had missed. The fear was not really about the algorithms. It was older than that room, and I still cannot say exactly what it was. Sometimes you have no thesis, because you do not understand the thing well enough to have a thesis. Sometimes you are just too immature. Sometimes you have no framework, because you do not yet know what a framework is. The schooling I had taught me what to think and never how to learn. I would spend the rest of my life learning how to learn.

There are writers who pounce on an idea at the exact moment the world turns to face it. They are not always the cleverest. They are the best timed. And there are writers who pounce on an idea years before anyone wants what they are holding. I have spent my career in the second group.

I was building online tutoring before most parents would trust a screen to teach their child. I was putting AI and blockchain in front of schools and businesses long before either word meant anything good to them. Too early is a strange kind of failure. You are right, and it does not matter, because being right before anyone is ready is indistinguishable from being wrong. You spend the years explaining instead of selling, and by the time the world arrives, someone else is standing where you stood, taking the applause you waited for.

So I do not know what this week is. The book might be on time. It might be too early again, the thing I keep doing. It might already be too late, the argument overtaken while I was launching it. I have stopped being able to tell the difference. I only know I have waited long enough.

When I was a young child in primary school, a teacher would serve us our lunch. The shepherd’s pie went cold on the plate while we sat and waited for the whole table to be served, and only then did we say the Lord’s Prayer, and after it a grace. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen. I am not Christian. I still know every word of the Lord’s Prayer. Permission to begin was a thing you waited for, and the waiting was the point, not the pie.

Years later, I lived in Abu Dhabi, and during Ramadan, I watched the same lesson taught harder. I was sitting in a Pizza Hut, of all places, one of those iftar deals where you pay once and eat as much as you can in an hour. Around me sat young men and boys with seven slices of pizza in front of them, untouched, silent, listening for the call to prayer that would allow them to eat. When it came they fell on the food, and it was gone in minutes, and within the hour they looked ill, because they had eaten too much too fast. Waiting is a discipline you are taught as a child and then spend the rest of your life forgetting.

We have built a world that punishes the wait. Everything is now, and I am as impatient as anyone, frustrated by the very machines that thrilled me a few years ago. I have four or five Alexas in the house. When I bought the first one, it felt as though the future had walked through the front door. I had visions of a connected home, the lights and the music and the heating all answering to a word. We managed it, briefly. Now they are a radio and a way to time a poached egg. A platform that looked as though it was waiting for its moment, and waited too long, and the moment left without it.

I have been reading the biography of Jensen Huang. Nvidia was founded in 1993, in a booth at a Denny’s. Thirty-one years later it became the most valuable company on earth. That is the loud version of waiting, the one that gets a book and an award and a place on every shelf. I am not Jensen Huang and I have no illusions of grandeur. This is not Nvidia. The scale is certainly not shared. Only the shape is.

The waiting I recognise belongs to someone smaller, and older. Samuel Pepys was known in his own lifetime as a naval administrator, a man of committees and ledgers. He kept a diary in shorthand, for himself, expecting no reader. It was published more than a century after he died, and only then did anyone understand that he had recorded a whole society remaking itself, the fire, the plague, the ordinary terror of a changing world. In his life, nobody knew that writing was the thing. The thread does not always announce itself as you spin it.

The ideas in my book did not start with me. They came from people who waited before I was born, and they will date me to whoever reads them after I am gone. I am a thread, not the beginning of one.

None of my waiting was idle. I have written Box of Amazing since 2017, five hundred or so Sundays, and for a long time almost no one read them at all. Before any of that, I wrote travel guides, ebooks nobody remembers, including me on most days. I thought those were the thing. They were not the thing. They were practice for the thing.

A machine can now write a competent version of this essay in four seconds. It does it by swallowing everything human beings have already written and handing back the average of it. The four seconds is the part that impresses people. The 30 odd years is the part it cannot fake. The waiting is the proof a human made it.

There is artificial intelligence, which is what that lecturer was describing without knowing where it would lead. There is actual intelligence, the human kind, the slow kind, the kind I was so afraid I did not have at the front of that room. And there is emotional intelligence, the one the machine cannot reach at all, the one that knows when a person needs you to stop talking. The seven skills in my book are those last two put to work. The frightened boy in the front row did learn, in the end, how to learn. It only took him a very long time while he was still growing up.

There is a difference between perfect and good enough, and a harder difference between both of those and finished. Perfect is a standard you can wait at for the rest of your life. Good enough is a lower bar you still cannot clear on the days you believe the worst of yourself. Finished is neither of them. Finished is the moment you stop waiting and let the thing go.

None of those bars were mine. Someone set the height early, a teacher, a room, a tone of voice, and I have spent a life measuring against a mark I never agreed to. What I have called patience was often just that measuring. It was the fear that if I delivered the thing, someone would confirm what I had suspected since the front row. And finishing does not end the fear. I will hand over the book on Friday morning and it will still be there, because it was never really about the book.

On Thursday, the day before the book, I’m hosting a book launch in London for everyone who has supported me. There will be 250 people or so. I am an introvert. I have waited years for this and I dread it, which is an absurd thing to admit and a true one. The dread is not new. It is the same tightening I felt at the front of that lecture theatre, the same certainty that I am about to be found out. The body knew before the mind would say it. The student and the author are the same person, and he is still afraid. Maybe Thursday is the day he finally grows up, the day before the book, in a room full of people, 30 plus years late.

This has been my waiting, and you have your own. It might be a course you never took, or work that has been finished enough for a year in a folder you do not open, while you wait to feel worthy of sending it. I do not know what yours is. I know the voice telling you to wait a little longer is almost never your own.

We call ourselves the human race. I have always wondered about that word, race. A race against who? Against time, against each other, against the version of ourselves that was meant to have arrived by now. I do not know if the race ever stops, or whether waiting makes the thing worth more or only makes it late. Maybe the book is too early, the way I usually am. Maybe it is too late. Maybe, this once, it is on time. I have waited long enough to stop minding which.

The wait ends on Friday. The fear will not, and I am letting the book go anyway.

It was never about the book. It was always about the realisation, which took most of my life to arrive, that the waiting itself was the work, and that the frightened boy at the front of the room already had the one thing he was sure he lacked. That realisation, and the nerve to release the book while the fear is still here, is what I have waited my whole life to reach.

My book, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, is published by Kogan Page this week, on 3 July 2026. You can find it at superskillsbook.com.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
→ superskillsbook.com → thesuperskills.com → Book a discovery call

PS. If your organisation is thinking about AI and human capability, I keynote and advise on this.

SuperSkills in the Wild:

David Boyle writes Saturday AI Thoughts, a weekly reckoning with what AI is doing to how we work. Twenty-five years in data and audience insight, a sceptic's eye, and a gift for calling these tools what they are: an electric bike for the mind. He opened SuperSkills expecting to argue with it. He did, then talked himself into recommending it anyway. A rave is a favour. A sceptic who fights your argument and still tells people to read the book is something you can only earn. His essay is here.
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