Everyone warned me the move would be hard. Pack up a life in America, haul it to a beach in rural Tasmania, start over. Big, scary, brave. That's how people framed it.
It wasn't the hard part.
The hard part is the gear shifter. It's on my left now. My right hand keeps reaching for it and finding the door. Decades of muscle memory, all of it firing on the wrong side.
The roads don't help. They're narrow out here, and the speed limits feel reckless. They are uncomfortably fast. Then a local takes the same bend at the same speed without a flicker, and I realize the speed was never the problem. I'm just calibrating to a road I don't drive anymore.
None of that was on the worry list. The worry list was the big stuff. The big stuff sorted itself out. It's the small reflexes nobody mentioned that catch me every time.
Here's why I keep thinking about it.
We talk about AI adoption like it's a decision. Use it or don't. Pick a tool, write a policy, send the announcement, done. That's the move. That's the part everyone braces for.
But the move was never the hard part.
The hard part is the reflex. Catching yourself halfway through building the stakeholder map by hand, the way you always have, when an AI tool could have done a first pass in a minute. Reaching for the old method because your hand knows the way, not because it's the better way anymore.
That's where change actually lives. Not in the decision. Not in the announcement. In the hundred tiny rewirings that never make it onto the project plan.
Nobody puts "unlearn your own reflexes" on the rollout timeline. It's the only thing that actually takes time.