Six months of observing before acting.

I had been designing digital products for four years when I bought the one-way ticket. What followed was six months of not being an expert in anything — a hostel volunteer in Guatemala, a farm-stay guest in Nicaragua, a stranger asking for directions in Panama.

What surprised me was how much of my design practice quietly transformed on that trip. Not the software craft — that stayed at home. The listening. The tolerance for ambiguity. The ability to sit in a room, or a market, or a hostel kitchen, and observe long enough that patterns began to reveal themselves without me forcing them.

Every discovery skill I now bring to a research kick-off — asking one question and waiting through the silence, watching who defers to whom, treating body language as data — I sharpened somewhere on that trip.