The Arena is my process for approaching creative work from a place of aliveness and play. Every trip through The Arena lasts one week, and is guided by singular creative intention. Other than that, there really are no rules other than to follow the aliveness. These "logs" are just for me to document what I did during any given sprint, along with how I'm feeling about it.

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Creative Intention: Make podcasting joyful again. I used to believe podcasting had to be tedious and time-consuming. So for this trip through The Arena, I played with doing single take, fully improvised, zero-editing podcasts, where I just found a topic that felt fun, hit record, and then published. Plus I did a few where I did dramatic reading of some of my essays, also in single take fashion with zero edits. The intention was to publish daily.

What I shipped from May 9th - 16th, 2022

Reflections

  • This was the first week I did The Arena with a group of other people, and it was freaking awesome. Doing it communally adds so much additional energy and enthusiasm into the process.
  • I had a 3 day publishing streak, then had a really shitty day where I beat myself up. The next day I came back and recorded 4 episodes in a single morning. These things aren't linear, and I need to remember to follow the energy when it's there, and be kind to myself when it's not.
  • Aliveness Meter: 7 out of 10 - I absolutely loved how easy and fast all of these podcasts were to record and put out. It completely shattered my old story about podcasting having to be time-consuming and laborious.