For most of my career as a musician, I was precise. Classical training demands it. You practise until you can reproduce what is written on the page with as much accuracy as possible, refining your technique across thousands of hours until you develop something most people spend their lives working toward: genuine mastery. I was winning competitions. I was being recognised as one of the finest classical flautists South Africa had produced.
But at some point, something began to bother me. There was a ceiling - invisible, but real. And the ceiling wasn't skill. The ceiling was the discipline itself.
Then I became obsessed with Carlos Santana's guitar. Not with Santana the person - with the sound. That electric, almost human quality in the notes. The way a single phrase could move from precision into pure feeling, from the composed into the uncontained. I couldn't ignore it, and I couldn't replicate it with what I had. My flute, played classically, couldn't go where that sound went. The Bach precision I had spent years perfecting, the technique that had served me so well - none of it would create what I heard in that guitar.
For a long time, I agonised over that gap. What Santana represented seemed to require something I had been trained to suppress. And then I understood something important: what I had learned thus far was not going to create the transformation I wanted - not because it wasn't valuable, but because transformation requires stepping beyond what already exists. I had to be willing to strip away what no longer served me - the trained accuracy, the safety of the defined parameter, the comfort of knowing exactly what good looks like. I had to risk, unlearn and explore in a discipline I had spent decades mastering.
What came out the other side was something I couldn't have predicted - an electric flute sound that nobody had seen or heard before. Not a copy of Santana. My own version of what he had awakened in me. I had stepped into my own Santana.
That story, it turns out, has almost nothing to do with music. A few years ago I found myself in a situation that felt remarkably familiar - stepping into the world of technology and artificial intelligence, a world where my existing expertise counted for almost nothing. The same dynamic played out. The mastery I had built elsewhere wasn't going to create the transformation I needed. Familiar instincts, trusted approaches, accumulated knowledge - all of it was useful, but none of it was sufficient. What was required, again, was the willingness to strip away the comfort of competence and become a beginner. And again, though I didn't enjoy it at the time, something on the other side of that discomfort turned out to be extraordinary.
I think about this often in conversations about artificial intelligence and the future of expertise. There is understandable anxiety about what happens when much of what we have spent years learning becomes accessible to anyone with an internet connection. But I wonder if that is the right question. Perhaps the more useful one is simply this: am I willing to become, once again, a beginner? Every meaningful transformation I have experienced has required exactly that - the willingness to move toward something I couldn't fully see yet, to risk looking foolish, to strip away the familiar and discover what lies beyond it.
Expertise gets us to where we are. The willingness to go beyond it tends to determine where we go next.
Bring Carina to your stage.