My dad bought our first computer in the 90s, back when a computer in the house felt less like an appliance and more like a visiting dignitary. We had no internet, no connectivity, no mysterious Wi-Fi signal floating invisibly through the rooms. There was just this beautiful machine standing in my parents’ bedroom on one of those narrow computer stands that looked as if it had been designed by someone who believed technology should always be stored vertically and slightly off-balance.
Compared with what I use now, that first computer was a bulky little kingdom of separate parts: monitor, keyboard, hard drive on the bottom shelf, and a drive that accepted floppy disks and stiffy disks. I remember the stiffy disks were about 1.44 MB, which now feels almost spiritual. Today, one casual photograph from a phone can bully 1.44 MB into early retirement.
I cannot remember the size of the hard drive. I had no idea what RAM was. I did not understand operating systems, file structures, drivers, backups, or why the machine sometimes behaved as if it had taken personal offence. I only knew one thing with absolute certainty: this thing was going to change the world.
Naturally, I broke it.
I broke that computer so often that reinstalling the operating system became part technical process, part emotional endurance event. I would sit there shaking my right leg, waiting for the system to reinstall, reboot, and then accept whatever I could feed it from those floppy and stiffy disks. Some people remember their first dance. I remember watching a progress bar and wondering whether I had destroyed the family’s future.
That was probably when I developed my first form of computer-related stress. It had symptoms: leg shaking, shallow breathing, silent bargaining with the machine, and the occasional promise that I would never touch anything ever again if it would just start properly this one time. Naturally, I touched everything again.
Later, during my early teaching career, I found myself at a high school in one of South Africa’s smaller towns. Once again, I had access to one of these glorious possibility machines. And once again, I could not get it to do what I wanted. I wanted to write lessons, plan properly, create stories, structure ideas, and produce things that felt useful. The computer, however, had other plans. It was less of a tool and more of a moody colleague with boundary issues.
At another point in my career, I had to switch back to a typewriter. Since I still had romantic notions of becoming a famous writer, I told myself this was part of the process. Real writers used typewriters. Real writers struggled. Real writers had ink on their fingers, dramatic pauses in conversation, and an unresolved relationship with breakfast. The manual typewriter, however, was not interested in my literary destiny.
Eventually, I found a second-hand electronic typewriter, which felt like progress until I discovered its own special personality. The amount of resetting, correcting, and wrestling required to produce a clean page was enough to make any aspiring writer question whether fame was worth the admin.
Then came Windows 3.1, and for me, that was a game changer. The machine belonged to the theatre company I worked with during my early teaching career, and it was magnificent. Suddenly, the writer in me had room to breathe. I wrote every day. I wrote plays, newspaper promotional material, novels, short stories, fragments, ideas, and several things that should never be read by another human being under any legal or emotional circumstances.
I was in hog heaven.
Of course, I also developed some deeply questionable writerly habits. At the time, smoking and wine drinking were essential parts of the creative process (I thought). Writers were supposed to be hedonistic, dramatic, slightly troubled, and permanently surrounded by atmosphere. Let’s leave it there, except to say this: I still smoke like a chimney, my right leg still shakes when I must wait for something to happen on a screen, and I remain completely in love with the machines.
Over the years, I have used second-hand laptops, brand-new laptops, a MacBook Pro — don’t get me started — and now I have come full circle with a Windows 11 HP laptop. It works. It helps. It does the job. But, of course, I want more.
That is the beautiful problem with early adopters. We do not only want the tool. We want the possibility hiding inside the tool. We want to test it, push it, irritate it, break it, reinstall it, customise it, and see what happens when it stops behaving like a product and starts becoming a partner in our thinking.
A friend once told me not to worry too much about breaking things because you can usually fix them, especially if you have backups. That simple advice gave me permission. So, I broke things. I reinstalled apps, tested freeware, explored open-source tools, downloaded strange little programmes with promising names and questionable interfaces, and kept going back for more like a man who had learned nothing and everything at the same time.
Through all of it, that original instinct remained. These machines were going to change the world. They were awkward, temperamental, confusing, occasionally rude, but they were also full of possibility. I could feel it long before I could explain it properly.
When I first encountered OpenAI a few years ago, I felt that same instinct again. Generative AI was not just another tool to add to the digital shelf. It opened a universe of possibility. For someone who thinks, writes, designs, teaches, builds, reflects, and constantly rearranges ideas in search of meaning, AI felt less like software and more like a new kind of creative terrain.
I could not turn back.
Yes, there are still moments when I sit in front of the screen thinking, “What exactly am I trying to do here?” What am I trying to build? What am I trying to say? What am I trying to put into the world? But the breaking has changed. I am no longer only breaking software, layouts, files, templates, and systems. Now I am breaking old thinking patterns.
I am breaking the habit of vague ideas. I am breaking the comfort of random thinking. I am breaking the assumption that creativity must always be chaotic to be authentic. AI has not made thinking easier. That is one of the great misunderstandings. It has made lazy thinking more visible.
With AI, the work becomes more demanding in a unique way. It asks for clearer thinking, sharper questions, better judgement, and more intentional creativity. It rewards curiosity, but it also exposes confusion. It can amplify a promising idea, but it can also turn a half-baked thought into a confident casserole.
I have drafted books, developed learning content, created images, built learning systems, shaped product ideas, and turned fragments of thought into structured, future-facing work that can help other people. None of this happened because the tools were magical. It happened because the tools gave me something to wrestle with, and the wrestling forced me to become more precise.
That is the part we often miss.
Breaking things is rarely the end of the story. Very often, it is the beginning. You break something, and then you learn what it was made of. You break a process, and then you understand its hidden assumptions. You break an old habit, and then you discover how much of your work was being shaped by fear, comfort, routine, or the dangerous little phrase, “This is how we’ve always done it.”
This is where we misunderstand AI adoption. The real problem is not simply that people are afraid of AI. The deeper problem is that people are afraid of what AI may require them to break: old workflows, old job descriptions, old measures of competence, old habits of thinking, and old ideas about who gets to create, publish, design, teach, build, and innovate.
We want the promise of AI, but we often want it on our terms. We want it to improve things without disturbing anything. We want the magic without the mess. We want transformation with clean hands, polite disruption, and preferably no awkward conversations in the meeting room.
But meaningful change is rarely that well behaved.
New tools do not simply add capacity. They reveal friction. They expose weak systems. They challenge comfortable routines. They force us to ask whether we are protecting quality or merely protecting familiarity. That is uncomfortable, yes. It is also useful.
And yes, sometimes they break things. Sometimes they break a workflow that should have been retired years ago. Sometimes they break a habit that was masquerading as professionalism. Sometimes they break the illusion that being busy and being effective are the same thing.
But breaking things can create new perspectives. It can open new directions. It can reveal better questions. It can help us rebuild with more intention than we had before.
So early adoption has never really been about being first. It is about being willing: willing to test, willing to learn, willing to look foolish for a while, and willing to disturb the old arrangement so that something more useful, more honest, and more future-facing can emerge.
So go on, break it.
Then rebuild it better.
