Everyone hired you for your taste and experience. You just forgot that, and started believing the job was knowing the software.
Kevin Surace holds 95 worldwide patents and built the first human-like virtual assistant in the late 1990s, decades before Siri or Alexa. His new book, The Joy-Success Cycle, carries a foreword from Goldie Hawn and argues that joy comes before success rather than as its reward.
He tells Maryrose Lyons why he does not open Excel to build a spreadsheet, what happened when he pointed a model at a folder of raw video and it offered to edit the film itself, and why he thinks software interfaces disappear once a model has learned the file format underneath them.
For architects, engineers, and anyone whose value feels bound up in a tool they spent years learning.
Inventor and entrepreneur with 95 worldwide patents. Built the first human-like virtual assistant in the late 1990s, decades before Siri or Alexa. His book The Joy-Success Cycle has a foreword by Goldie Hawn.
• They hired you for your taste. Describe a building in natural language and the drawings, measurements and fire requirements come back done. Kevin's point is that this was never where an architect's value sat. 'Nobody cares how long it takes you to get that hallway right in AutoCAD.'
• One complaint a day. Count every negative thought tomorrow from the moment you get up. Most people reach 60 or 80. From the day after, you get one, and that is your lot.
• Joy comes first, not after. We are taught that joy arrives once you are successful. Kevin argues it runs the other way, and that joy is what produces the curiosity the success comes out of.
• He does not open Excel. For a spreadsheet he goes to Claude or Gemini first, and opens Excel only because he has to share the file. That is what he means by AI first.
• It edited the video on its own. He pointed a model at a folder of raw footage and asked for a storyline. It came back with the storyline, then offered to edit the film, music and voiceover included.
Kevin on LinkedIn, where he posts daily.
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