From Talker to Doer, With Intent
Why I'm choosing mastery over speed this year, and what it means to build a body of work that shows how you make, not just how you think.
What started as a New Year’s intention writing turned into words I’ve long meant to write.
Last year was unique in many ways. I’ve been writing consistently for over two years now, I’ve been enjoying the humbling challenge of learning French, and practicing Pilates regularly has improved my health more than I initially imagined.
Now that I’ve adopted these habits for good, it’s time to reflect on what comes next, based on the current stage of my life and career.
This is the intentional focus of my year. It’s about being thoughtful about where I’m putting my energy, but just as importantly, about guiding my decisions to shape the next best version of myself.
Sharpening my craft
Most of my career, my focus has been on the early and middle stages of product development. In the last few years, I’ve come to understand the early stages more deeply. Still crafting the pieces directly, but also developing the product thinking to decide what needs to exist and why in the first place.
Shaping the strategy and vision has been a rewarding challenge to expand my skills, influence, and ultimately my impact. This time, I’m choosing to balance it by diving deeper into my own craft. More specifically, interactive animations with code.
I’ve been collecting inspiration for years. My own end-of-year compilation always includes one or more categories related to inspiration. My next frontier is making something heavy.
The people who can turn intent into output—who can think and make in the same motion—are the ones defining the future of craft… Strategy-to-pixels favors the doers, not the talkers.
— David Hoang
Writing and publishing my thoughts has become a healthy habit, but it’s time to be more of a doer and not just a talker. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still write, I love it, and I’m proud of the latest wordsmith work I’ve been putting out. It’s a body of work that represents how I think. Now I want to create a body of work to capture how I build.
Focusing solely on AI is tempting, but I want to sharpen my interaction skills first, then leverage AI more thoughtfully. I’m intentionally choosing difficulty as a moat. In an era when people are obsessed with one-shotting prod-ready apps, I’m choosing craft as the differentiator.
The outputs will speak for themselves, and I’m accepting the friction that’ll come as an investment, not as a cost.
Learning to shape the material
There’s a gap: it’s called crafting interactions that can be shipped. From a taste perspective, I can tell the difference between good and great. What I’m lacking is the skillset to make these myself.
My usual approach when I identify a skill gap is to understand the language, put in the reps, and ultimately build the confidence to consistently deliver great results. This is how I approached Design Systems, business acumen, leadership, and more. It’s time to look under the hood of interaction design.
I know which are the tools of the trade, and while I could achieve a similar output with my current toolkit, what I really want is to shape the material directly. It’s no longer about distinguishing good vs great; it’s about having the language to explain why something is working or not and the skills to execute on this vision.
I’ve got a list of dozens of pet projects ready to experiment with, so I’m not short on ideas. To bring them to life, I’ll be working with newer tools like Paper to play with shaders, picking up Rive for interactions, or building with native components in Play. It’s a mix of tools that serve distinct purposes. The big boss will be a CLI like Cursor, but I’ll be taking it one step at a time, because I don’t want to spread myself too thin.
This is about building mastery.
Signs of progress:
Experimenting with new tools
Taking interaction courses and putting them into practice
Building something new on a monthly basis.
Thinking fast, not only slow
While crafting interactions requires a slower pace to pay attention to details, I intend to pair this with regular AI prototyping.
As I mentioned in the previous article, I’ve now adopted a simple principle for visualizing ideas: if it’ll take me longer to explain, the more it needs a prototype, because nuanced ideas require clear visuals.
I like pairing this with a different type of fast thinking, which is all about leveraging ideas as a thinking partner. It has helped me with strategy, data analysis, and even pricing modeling, but I’m sure there’s still a lot of potential waiting for me to uncover, and it all starts with “what if”?
Both of these habits will feed back into a learning loop of sharing my experiments in public. I did a test last year, and I liked the results. Not because it went viral (it didn’t), but because it showed clear intent and a practical lesson I could share with the world. A doer, not just a talker.
This is about exploring what’s possible.
Signs of progress:
AI prototyping as a daily practice
Find new ways of leveraging AI as a thinking partner
Sharing my learnings and findings throughout my journey
Keeping the inspiration flowing
And last but not least, thinking fast and slow also requires much-needed breaks, but I like to be intentional about them too.
Whenever I’m doing activities related to art or games, that’s when I’m the most recharged with creativity. It might be my graphic design roots, or the fact that my origin story involved illustration, music, and video games.
Truth be told, illustration and music, in particular, took a back seat for years in my life because I was mostly focused on my career. Still, I’ve come to appreciate how liberating and inspiring it is to play without boundaries in those spaces. Slow, personal, and imperfect results of brush strokes in a digital canvas, grainy film photos, and song improvisations that are made with my own hands. This human imperfection infuses the results with a unique personality, and I love that.
To double down on my craft, I’ll be fueling it with scheduled creative breaks. Just like with AI pet projects, there’s a list of artworks I’ve been intending on painting, and video game challenges waiting to be conquered.
This is about feeding everything else.
Signs of progress:
Creative breaks on weekends with illustration, playing music, and video games
Level up my storytelling by reading at least 10 books, with a mix of fiction and non-fiction
Sharing my creative breaks as a way of working in public
Parting thoughts
For the longest time, I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery, trying to answer: What do I want as my differentiator? I’ve embraced a non-linear career path, but I’m also accepting an organic process of understanding based on where I am now, not some grandiose five-year plan.
The dust is finally settling.
My bio today reads: storyteller and product builder. It’s short, but it carries weight. Over the last two years, I’ve learned the many facets of being a product builder in the age of AI. But I’m first and foremost a storyteller. And storytellers work in many mediums.
This year’s challenge is learning to tell stories through motion. Not just describe interactions but build them. Not just write about ideas but prototype them. Not just consume inspiration but create it.
This essay is my way of working in public, of turning private intention into shared accountability. The journey will have plenty of friction. I’m counting on it. I’m ready to become someone who can make heavy things.
Shortcuts
Make Something Heavy. The challenge that ignited my focus this year, written by Anu.
Strategy-to-pixels, by David Hoang sharing how to turn intent into output.
Difficulty as a Moat, by Dan Mall. Because sometimes, doing what others won’t is exactly the way to win.
The Ceiling Is Far Higher Than You Think. Shreyas’ short but insightful essay motivated me to reframe “what should I do?” into “what should I learn?.”
That’s where curiosity led me this month. Your path will look different, because context always matters.
If this sparked something, let’s continue the conversation on Twitter. And if someone you know is navigating their own creative uncertainty, share this their way.
Keep exploring, Laura ✌️