Quote of the Day: Alan Kay on Science

In the early 1980s, as the personal computer escaped the lab and entered living rooms, the culture of “smart” became synonymous with faster chips, bigger memory, more horsepower. That era’s optimism still hums beneath today’s AI race, except in 2026, speed isn’t scarce; attention and judgment are. Against that backdrop, Alan Kay’s blunt line lands like a systems upgrade: “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

Kay isn’t flattering us; he’s warning us. Raw intelligence can grind through a problem, but it often does so inside the same mental box that created it. Perspective is the escape hatch: the ability to rename the problem, to switch frames, to ask what you’re assuming without noticing. The difference between “How do we work harder?” and “Why is this work necessary?” is not incremental, it’s transformative.

This is why perspective functions like a force multiplier. It makes hidden options visible and turns complexity into structure. Borrow a mental model from another discipline, design thinking for engineering, statistics for public debate, psychology for product strategy, and the puzzle rearranges itself. In groups, perspective also doubles as empathy: understanding constraints, incentives, and fears turns stalemates into negotiations, and negotiations into leadership.

Alan Kay, a pioneer of object-oriented programming and a visionary of personal computing, spent his career building tools that changed how people think, not just what they can do. He knows that innovation is less about genius in isolation than about choosing the right lens.

On Saturday, June 17, 2023, many of us were simply trying to get through a June weekend, half-resting, half-dreading Monday. Apply Kay’s advice today by picking one stubborn problem and changing the question you’re asking about it; that small act of reframing can unlock resilience faster than any extra effort ever will.