“The human mind once stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I’ve always been fascinated by technology and improving processes. Not so much the ‘what’, but the ‘how’.
From as early as I can remember, I had a knack for dismantling and trying to reassemble whichever electronic or mechanical devices that fell into my hands. As a child then, it never occurred to me to take notes first on where each of the broken down parts came from. I simply relied on my memory and perhaps intuition. Unsurprisingly, with the more complex devices, my greatest challenges lay in trying to put back together the parts I found most confusing. But for every successful teardown, a new world of discovery opened up, and like a moth drawn to a flame, my addiction to unravelling how things worked only grew.
In retrospect, I was probably very lucky in managing to reassemble some of those devices without much fuss, convinced that like the famous women of Bletchley Park, I’d actually cracked some sort of special code. In some cases, my ‘curiosity’ and ‘experimentation’ led to some heated conversations with the adults around me.
I must’ve been about seven when I was first introduced to the world of computers in the nineties. At the time, this was a rare experience for kids my age anywhere in the world. I know this might be hard to believe in today’s world where the “Gen Zee and Alpha” lot have easily swiped their way through a tablet computer before they’ve even learnt to speak. How the world did change indeed.
By the time I was 10, I had memorised some 100 DOS commands, which was just enough to use an IBM computer efficiently. I’m probably giving away my age with this revelation but this small feat of memorisation became very quickly redundant the moment Bill Gates and Microsoft graced the world with the much friendlier Windows operating system (Thanks Bill, for making my hard-earned skills obsolete overnight.) I learnt a bit later on in life on a personal visit to Palo Alto, California that there was a bit of ugly politics at the time between Bill and Steve (yes, Jobs, of the Apple brand) that brought about this rush. But I digress and that’s a whole story (or trivia, if you like) for another day.
Fast forward a few years and I found myself at university and reading a course that dealt with the science (and art) of machines and running them effectively. It’s here that I came into my own learning and developing my craft around topics like coding, software design, forensic computing, cyber network security, robotics and ethical hacking (emphasis on the ethical).
Now while at uni (college, in case you’re American reading this) I had this odd habit where I’d regularly drop into lectures that had absolutely nothing to do with my own field of study. I did this out of nothing but pure curiosity. I felt there was always something new for me to learn and I often found these little side quests of mine very useful in revealing new things that I could apply to my own technology application. Looking back now, I realise it wasn’t just curiosity. That was me pushing boundaries and refusing to let myself be defined by just one thing.
Once I graduated, I immediately stepped into the world of global business and it’s here that my creative problem-solving skills began to really stretch their legs. But strangely to me, the people in this new world had their own fixed ideas of what they wanted a young Tech graduate to do. Let’s just say, I’ve never been great at fitting neatly into anyone’s box. Being more square peg, round hole, I naturally kept pushing the boundaries even at work – learning a little bit of everything around me and refusing to stay in just one lane.
The more I stuck my head outside the boxes that people tried to define me with, the more I realised how really vast the technology landscape was, especially in the world of global business management. What really fascinated me though were the people and the processes behind the scenes: the gears that made things run smoothly or not.
I soon realised that what began as childhood fascination dismantling remote-controlled cars to understand their inner workings had evolved into something far more sophisticated: the art of deconstructing billion-dollar enterprises and rebuilding them with precision. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was now performing the same surgery on corporate mechanisms, except this time the stakes were infinitely higher and the “missing screws” could cost millions.
I’ve skipped over a few bits in this story mostly for privacy reasons and also ongoing NDAs, but suffice it to say, my hobby quietly transformed into my niche area of expertise and life’s work, crafting solutions that don’t just meet the moment, but define it. From bedroom floors littered with circuit boards to boardrooms filled with balance sheets which have become the new ‘playground’, only that the ‘toys’ are now also exponentially more expensive. And thankfully the other positive change also being that being a lot older and experienced now, when I take something apart, I actually know how to rebuild it stronger than I found it. It’s essentially corporate acceleration without the carnage.
Each day brings with it complex puzzles that demand inventive solutions, problems that would have stumped my younger self armed only with a screwdriver and boundless curiosity. The tools have also evolved from tiny screwdrivers to sophisticated analytics, but the core mission endures: taking apart what’s broken, understand why it failed and rebuild it to run smoother than before. Some obsessions, it turns out, are worth growing up with.
