The End of Surprises
What the brown envelope taught me
My book SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is out 3 July 2026. Pre-order at superskillsbook.com
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
In addition to this newsletter, I recommend a few others. All free. Check them out here.
There’s a 40% off sale on right now until the end of May 2026, which is the biggest discount available anywhere and the cheapest it will be before the book comes out. Use this link or go to koganpage.com. and use LINKEDIN40 for 40 per cent off. Would make a great summer read or gift for a teenager thinking about their future. If you’re interested in attending my book launch in London, register at SuperSkillsbook.com, and I will send you an invitation. [limited spots]
Friends,
My book came in a brown envelope, the kind that gets pushed through the letterbox with a soft slap, the kind you assume is third-party packaging from Amazon. I nearly did not open it because I thought it was something for my wife. It was lighter than I expected, and I almost left it on the side table for the evening. When I opened it, I found an uncorrected proof, not the final version but close enough that it would be the last version I would meet as a stranger, because every later version I would already know before I opened it.
I did not film it, and I did not record an unboxing. Instead I looked at it, and I felt it, and I held it on its spine to let it fall open in my hand. I smelled it too, which I had not planned to do and could not have explained if anyone had walked in on me. It smelled like a library, which is to say it smelled of nothing in particular to do with the book in my hand, and everything to do with every other book I have ever opened. I eventually took one photograph, which felt cheesy and obligatory and exactly like the kind of photograph every other author takes when their book arrives. I had told myself I would not. I did anyway.
There was a month I forgot what my own arguments sounded like. That is the book.
I had seen the cover for months, and I had read every word inside it more times than I could count. I had read the printed proof, approved the typography, and argued about the spacing of the chapter openings. I knew exactly what the book would be.
And the moment it was in my hand, I was surprised.
I was not surprised by the object, because the object was as expected. I was surprised by what I felt, which was not what I had predicted I would feel, and which I could not name even now if you asked me directly. It was some mixture of relief and disbelief and tenderness, and a little embarrassment that I was feeling so much about a piece of card-bound paper. Whatever I had pictured, it was not this.
Surprise is the distance between the model in your head and the world in front of you.
The next frontier model is released, and I read the announcement and make sure I download it. Two years ago I would have put down my tea. I do not put down my tea. I am already using it.
This weekend it is hot in London. It is probably the beginning and end of the Summer, and I am not surprised by that either.
I made myself a coffee last week with orange marmalade stirred through it, having seen someone recommend it online. I had no model for orange marmalade coffee. It was good. Interesting. Actually it was damn good. I stood in my kitchen and laughed, the kind of small laugh that escapes before you can decide whether you want to make it.
A stranger walked up to me at an event recently and high-fived me before saying hello, because someone had told them I was the high-five sort. I do not know how this signal travels. I do not know who decided I was a high-five person, or how it became a fact about me that could be passed between people who did not know me. I had no model for it, the high-five landed cleanly, and I have been secretly smiling about it on and off.
The territory of surprise has not shrunk. We have just been looking for it in the rooms where it used to live. We have stopped modelling each other with the care we used to give it.
I worked alongside someone every day for three years, and our WhatsApp chat is a morgue. The banter stopped one day for no apparent reason, the kind of banter that happens without thinking, and I do not know why. When I open the chat now, the media is no longer there. The links to the photos and the voice notes show as expired. The profile picture has reverted to two initials on a coloured circle. I think it is possible I have been deleted as a contact and would not know. When I bumped into them last year, they were not the person I remembered, because I was not the person they remembered, because neither of us had been talking to the other for long enough that the models could update.
The brown envelope is still on the kitchen table. I have not moved it. The book is on it. The book that nearly did not happen during the month I forgot what my own arguments sounded like. The book whose every word I had read before I touched the object that contained them. The book that should not have been able to surprise me, and did. The book that probably saved my life.
That might have surprised you.
When did you last build a model of a person, not a product?
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 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.
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:
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Why running Britain is so hard, no matter who does it - In the past 10 years, six people have had the job of running the United Kingdom. All failed to turn the country around. Good luck Wes, Andy, or Angela — you’re going to need it.
Bad Bad Bad Roomate - How a nightmare housing situation drove a bleeding-heart progressive to home surveillance, eviction law, and calling in law enforcement.
The 100 best Novels of all time: The greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. It’s that time when I feel sad that I don’t read fiction any more. How many have you read?
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The Last Six Months in LLMs in Five Minutes: Simon Willison’s annotated PyCon lightning talk is the single best summary of where LLMs are right now: the November inflection point, coding agents getting good, OpenClaw personal assistants, and local models wildly outperforming expectations.
No Slop Grenade: Stop Throwing AI Walls of Text Into Conversations: A manifesto against “slop grenades” — the increasingly common practice of pasting AI-generated walls of text into Slack, email, and group chats. Short, punchy, and deeply relatable.
Google Declaring War on the Web: Google’s transition to AI-generated search results is replacing direct links with a controlled abstraction layer — effectively declaring war on the open web that made it.
This chick hatched from an artificial egg - The scientists behind the synthetic egg say it’s a crucial step to the de-extinction of species like the giant moa and the dodo.
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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.