Altitude

On green chilli, and why I keep running out of things.

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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I have exactly one signature dish, and it is çılbır. If you do not know it, look it up. In my house, we call it “Turkish”, and it’s good because of my secret chilli combo, which I’ll take to my grave. The rest of the week I do not think about dinner at all, really, until my wife says, “What shall we have for dinner?” and I say whatever is in the freezer, and she decides on the healthy version. I shop for food, but only as a slave to the list on my phone. My wife tells the app. The app tells me. I obey.

But occasionally, when the stars align and I remember that I am a human with working hands, I cook. And when I cook I like to add chilli.

My fourteen-year-old does not like chilli. My wife does not like chilli. My eldest likes chilli but she has gone to university, so I am currently the sole defender of spice in the household. Which means my cooking involves declarations. There is no chilli in this one. None, I promise. The small sliver is a private rebellion, a bit of adult heat that survives the general family veto. But no one can complain.

At some point over the last few years, we worked out what made this my chilli (or come to think of it, garlic and ginger) obsession sustainable. We keep a bag of chopped green chilli cubes in the freezer. I’m saying this as if I discovered fire, but I’m sure many of you have been doing this for generations. My mum has, my mother in law has. It’s normal for them. The concept is simple. You can make it yourself, or you can buy it ready-chopped in little frozen cubes from any reasonable supermarket. I digress. The point is that the chilli is always there. I do not have to plan for it. I do not have to think about it. A sliver comes out of the bag and goes into the pan and the stir-fry is mine.

That is the whole trick. A small piece of kitchen setup that means I never have to negotiate with myself at six o’clock on a random Tuesday evening about whether there is enough heat in this dish to make it worth cooking.

Last week, though, the bag was not there. The bag is always there, and I had stopped paying attention, because even though the fam hates chilli, with our heritage, you gotta have a little. I opened the freezer with the wok already sizzling, and the bag was gone. Not there. Not in the drawer. Not in another drawer. Not in the fridge. Nothing. Small panic.

A few options, none of them good. I could leave the chilli out and eat a stir-fry that was a little less mine. I could walk to the shop, except nobody walks to the shop mid-cook. I could ask ChatGPT what to substitute, and it would suggest a spoonful of Nando’s sauce, because this is the world we live in now. Or I could have kept the freezer topped up in the first place, which I had been meaning to, and had not.

I ended up asking my wife and she said it was on the list on the app. The other list.

The word for this situation is altitude. The height at which you think about a thing.

The chilli and the dish are the lowest altitude. The weekly shop is higher. The freezer system is higher still. And higher than any of them is the question of whether I should be cooking this dish at all, whether to order on Uber Eats, or whether I just like the idea of being the person who cooks it.

The mistake is not the dish. The mistake is being excellent at the wrong altitude while the dinner burns.

My book, out in July, calls this Big Picture Thinking and places it among seven skills. I call it altitude because that is the word that survived my own kitchen. And most of the time, we don’t know we are at the wrong altitude until afterwards. Sometimes we don’t know at all.

This is the part that gets missed. Flitting looks a lot like flow from the outside. You have eighty browser tabs open, or I do. You are on Slack and email and a Google doc someone shared three minutes ago. The deck is still in the other window, the one with the unfinished slide you have been unfinishing for a week. Your hands are moving. Your screen is full. If you squint, it all looks like you are getting things done.

But flow and flitting are not the same thing. Flow lets the thought finish. Flitting never does. Flow is when you lose track of the hour because you are actually thinking. Flitting is when you lose track of the hour because you were responding.

My response to this, after years of getting it wrong, is embarrassing in its simplicity. My diary now contains blocks of time that are not meetings. They have names like Think. Read. Nothing. I used to see this in others’ calendars and thought it arrogant. Now I think it is the only way I have found to climb.

A few weeks ago, I was on a prep call that showed me another way up.

The call was with a woman called Penny, who was in Austria. Penny was chairing a roundtable I had been invited to speak at and she wanted to know what I was going to say. She told me she was at the airport, although the background was so silent I could not tell whether she was actually at the airport or whether she was simply the kind of person who plans well enough to find an empty corner in one.

Penny has spent her whole career in HR. She is significantly older than me and significantly more experienced at most things that matter. She is not a technologist. She does not use the word “stack.” She is, by any reasonable measure, exactly the kind of person the current moment is supposed to be leaving behind.

I had prepared three clear stories about what I was seeing in the work right now. I had expected her to pick one of the three.

She didn’t pick any of them. She listened for about four minutes. Then she said, with the slight apologetic tone of someone who suspects she is about to change the subject without permission:

“Isn’t the world a weird place right now?”

I laughed. It was not what I was expecting. It sounded, at first pass, like the sort of thing you say at the start of a call to warm up before the real conversation starts. It wasn’t. It was the conversation.

There was a pause after she said it. The airport behind her stayed silent. She was waiting to see whether I would treat what she had said as a warm-up or as the real thing.

She talked about how the last few years had broken something she had relied on for forty years, which was the background assumption that the senior people in a room probably knew roughly what was going on. That confidence had gone. She was watching executives in her client companies pretend to understand AI while the people actually using it were three floors below them. She was watching graduates arrive with tools their managers did not know existed. She said the phrase “people trying to stay up to speed when the world is zooming by in a space rocket” and I wrote it down because it felt like something Penny’s mother might have said and Penny had inherited.

Penny was doing something on that call that I only recognised afterwards. She was not pretending to know. She was saying, out loud, to a stranger, that she did not have the map. And the moment she said it, the whole call changed. We stopped trading positions and started actually thinking together.

That is a skill I don’t see talked about enough. The willingness, once you are senior, to say you don’t know. Penny’s altitude shift was admitting what she didn’t know.

There is another kind of shift. Not admitting. Moving. Putting yourself in a place where you can think differently. Six months ago I started using a small piece of software called Wispr Flow. It lets me speak into the machine instead of typing. That is all it does. It should be a minor convenience. It has not been.

Think about the speeds you work at. Handwriting is slow, a few thoughts a minute, if you are honest about how much of it you cross out. Typing is faster, maybe three times faster, which is why most of us have done most of our thinking at a keyboard for twenty years. Wispr, speaking into the machine with your thumbs doing nothing, is faster again. Not a little faster. A lot faster. Fast enough that you stop thinking in sentences and start thinking in paragraphs.

But speed is not actually the interesting bit. The interesting bit is where you can now think.

I used to type at a desk. That was where thinking happened. Now I think on the walk between the school drop-off and the car. I think in the five minutes before a meeting that used to be wasted. I think while cooking. I think while looking for chilli. A thought that would previously have waited until I got back to the desk, which usually meant it died on the way, now gets caught. The machine listens and writes it down. I keep moving.

That is not a faster version of the same thing. That is a different altitude. I am not thinking more quickly. I am thinking in places where I was previously not thinking at all.

And there is a next step coming. The next version of this is not speaking, it is thinking. Brain-computer interfaces that skip the mouth entirely and read the thought as it forms. When that arrives, the altitude will shift again, and the people who were still debating whether to try voice-to-text will be two altitudes behind.

I mentioned Wispr in this newsletter a few months ago, in passing. Several people wrote back afterwards to say thank you. Not for the tool. For being pushed. One said: I hadn’t realised how much I was thinking in the shape of the keyboard.

That is the second shift. Not admission. Movement.

The hardest shift of all is neither of those. It is leaving a place where you are already winning. In 1997, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were sharing a flat on Westbourne Grove. Albarn was the lead singer of Blur, three years past Parklife, at the top of Britpop. He already had the flow. He was not stuck. He was not running out. He was inside the most fluent version of himself a songwriter can be.

The two of them watched a lot of MTV together, and Hewlett said later that watching MTV for too long was “a bit like hell, there’s nothing of substance there.” It was the boy band explosion. Five handsome young men in coordinated outerwear, doing synchronous choreography in front of warehouses. Albarn could have responded the way most people at his altitude would. Make a better record. Out-Blur Blur. Defend the pie.

He and Hewlett did something weirder. They invented a band that didn’t exist. Four cartoon characters. A blue-haired vocalist. A Satanist bassist. Record labels did not know how to photograph a band they could not see.

Gorillaz was not a side project. It was an altitude shift. Albarn was standing at the top of one ladder and, instead of climbing higher on it, he stepped off it sideways and into the air and built a different ladder. He did not solve the boy band problem by writing better songs. He zoomed out so far that the problem stopped being the problem.

Look at the photographs from those years. In the Blur pictures he is the frontman, pointing at the camera, doing the mockney lad the British press had cast him to play. Then the cartoons arrive and his face disappears from the cover entirely. The mask he picked up gave him his face back. What the altitude shift bought him was the right to pick.

That move, stepping sideways from your own success, is what I don’t see enough of in the leaders I work with. The excellence is the thing that locks them in. What you probably didn’t know is this: Gorillaz sold more than two times more records than ever did and streams three times more on Spotify. The sideways step went up and allowed Albarn to “crack” America. The ladder he built turned out to be taller than the one he left.

Three shifts. Admitting. Moving. Stepping sideways. The same move at different heights.

And none of them are a place you arrive. Altitude is a habit, and the habit fails. You forget to restock. You schedule the thinking time and then fill it with email. You give the keynote about flitting and then spend a week flitting. You write the book about big picture thinking and altitude and then catch yourself, on a Tuesday, at the wrong altitude, asking your wife about the strategy you had made unnecessary six months ago and had, apparently, made necessary again without noticing.

You don’t climb once. You keep noticing when you have drifted back down. And then you climb again.

I write about altitude and I keep running out of green chilli. Big Picture Thinking is one of seven skills, and the other six fail in the kitchen too, on a Tuesday, without announcement. The people I actually want to learn from are not the ones who live at altitude. They are the ones who notice, a second sooner than the rest of us, that they have come back down.

My book, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, is published by Kogan Page on 3 July 2026. You can pre-order 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

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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

1. Us grown-ups are brilliant at filling every minute. Then we are confused why clarity and curiosity feel harder to find. This from Taylor Hughes is genius.

   Not because it is some sort of magic. Not because it tells you to slow down.

   But, because it shows you what you lose when you don’t.

2. Stuart Russell, who literally wrote the textbook on modern AI, uses King Midas to explain what we’re getting wrong. A Greek myth about a king who didn’t know what he actually wanted.

3. Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity -
   Amidst the breathless hype of the AI revolution, a dose of cold, hard reality. A massive survey of CEOs reveals a startling paradox: despite the billions invested and the endless pilot programs, the actual, measurable impact on productivity and headcount remains stubbornly flat for many. It’s a crucial counter-narrative that suggests we might be in the “installation phase” of this technology, where the tools are deployed but the organizational rewiring required to actually benefit from them hasn’t happened yet.

4. Why UBI is making a comeback - Universal Basic Income is back in the discourse, but the driver this time isn’t utopian idealism—it’s Silicon Valley pragmatism. As tech companies face mounting backlash over AI-driven displacement, a check in the mail is increasingly viewed as the necessary shock absorber for the coming economic transition. Casey Newton unpacks why the tech elite are suddenly so keen on reviving the UBI conversation, and why we should perhaps be skeptical of their motives.

5. The Ozempicization of the Economy - Kyla Scanlon has a knack for coining the perfect phrase for our current malaise. “Ozempicization” isn’t just about weight loss drugs; it’s a metaphor for an economy—and a culture—increasingly reliant on quick-fix interventions that suppress symptoms without addressing underlying structural rot. From biohacking to the financialization of everything via sports betting, she weaves together a compelling thesis about a society looking for shortcuts in an age of profound uncertainty.

Next

1. Google: 75% of new code now AI-generated - We’ve been talking about AI-assisted coding for years, but this metric from Google feels like crossing the Rubicon. When three-quarters of the new code at one of the world’s premier engineering organizations is generated by machines and merely reviewed by humans, the fundamental nature of software engineering has changed. We are moving from an era of writing code to an era of editing and orchestrating it.

2. Engels’ Pause and the Permanent Underclass - History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. This brilliant essay draws a parallel between our current AI boom and “Engels’ Pause”—the multi-decade period during the Industrial Revolution where technological progress exploded, but working-class wages stagnated. It’s a sobering historical framework for understanding the potential societal fallout of AI, warning of the creation of a permanent digital underclass if the gains of automation aren’t structurally distributed.

3. Chinese tech workers training their AI doubles—and pushing back - A viral GitHub project in China that allows workers to clone themselves into reusable AI agents has sparked a fascinating labor movement. What starts as a productivity hack quickly morphs into an existential threat, forcing Chinese tech workers to confront the reality of training their own replacements. It’s a crucial dispatch from the front lines of the AI labor transition, offering a glimpse into the pushback and negotiations that will soon define workplaces globally.

4. Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training

   The data hunger of modern AI models has reached a new frontier: the granular, micro-movements of human workers. Meta’s move to capture employee keystrokes and mouse movements isn’t just about surveillance; it’s about training agents to mimic the exact cadence and workflow of human productivity. It raises profound questions about the future of work when your daily digital exhaust becomes the training data for your eventual replacement.

5. AI ping pong robot beats elite human players We’ve grown accustomed to AI mastering digital domains—chess, Go, coding. But the physical world is messy, unpredictable, and governed by physics, not just logic. That’s why a robotic system capable of beating elite human table tennis players is such a milestone. It requires real-time perception, split-second physical actuation, and strategic planning, all happening simultaneously. The gap between digital intelligence and physical robotics is closing faster than we thought.

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.