Git won me over when I found out that I could make all kinds of commits willy-nilly. I make a lot of small commits to my local repo throughout the day. At the end of the day I then take the time to go through them, merging related commits and removing stupid commits before I send my changes upstream. I've found that it's much easier to avoid breaking the build this way.

Another way to not break the build is to add a local git hook that compiles your project before allowing a commit. Assuming you compiled and tested your change already (you did right... :) the compile hook will take no time at all. Using this I have only commited broken builds once or twice when it built on my macbook, but not on Linux (case insensitive file system) Wrote up more details on hooks along with some examples here:

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/10/git-hooks.html

I'm not.