Just

John Lennon asked us to imagine. Turns out, most of us forgot how. Your imagination muscle has gone soft. Not because of AI. Because of the way you live. You wake up, do what you did yesterday, and call it expertise. But expertise that never questions itself is just repetition with a nicer name.

I watched two things happen to people over time. They got comfortable. What they were doing worked well enough, so they stopped questioning it. And they got systematic. They found a process that delivered results and locked it in. Entire professions built their identity around "this is how we do it."

AI breaks both at once. The comfortable routines become optional. The walls between disciplines stop mattering. A manager builds their own tools. A strategist builds a working prototype. Someone who has never written a line of code ships software.

That's not a threat to anyone's skills. It's a threat to the boxes we've sorted ourselves into.

At the Academy of Performing Arts, I had a professor who said something that shifted how I work. We were working on a stage concept for Macbeth, and I was doing what I was very good at then: talking. Circling the idea. Going around it instead of making it.

He stopped me. "Stop talking. Build something. Make a model. Put something on paper. Anything. It doesn't matter if it's wrong. You can't edit air."

I see the same pattern around AI now. "I don't know where to start." "I'll get around to it when things calm down." Sometimes that's caution. Often it's just delay with better vocabulary.

The first thing I ever built with AI was a speedometer app. I needed knots and km/h at the same time. Built it on my phone, pushed it through GitHub, had it running that afternoon. On the water. No course. No plan. Just a real problem and enough curiosity to try.

The hardest part of AI isn't the technology. It's letting go of who you think you are. I spent years in theater and art production. When I moved into tech, I took the safe route: design. I tried learning C# once, got as far as a basic calculator, and hit a wall. "I don't code" stopped being a preference and became a verdict.

Then in the summer of 2022, the machine spoke my language. Not code. Conversation. That's when I had to loosen my grip on all of it. That was the hard part. Not the tools. The identity.