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.

⭐
Creative Intention: Start creating the various assets I need to launch The Arena and invite other people to join it with me.

What I Shipped

The Arena - A Primer
A process for coming alive in your creative work, and becoming who you are
UngatedRob Hardy
A long essay about what the Arena is and why I built it.
The Arena
A week-long experience that helps creatives come alive, trust themselves, and rediscover joy
UngatedRob Hardy
A very half assed sales page.
Arena Logs
A captain’s log of the many creative and artistic experiments I’m running in my life.
UngatedRob Hardy
Arena Log: UngatedOS Workshop
In which Rob spontaneously decides to create his first paid workshop for Ungated.
UngatedRob Hardy
Arena Log: Ungated Life Launch
In which Rob launches a new website, and makes the Ungated cinematic universe more unified.
UngatedRob Hardy
Arena Log: Imperfect Guitar Videos
In which Rob busts out his guitar and does some shit that scares him!
UngatedRob Hardy
Arena Log: Make Podcasting Fun Again
In which Rob rekindles his love of podcasting by making it very, very simple.
UngatedRob Hardy
Arena Log: Ungated Business Foundations
The first ever Arena Log, wherein I document my attempts infuse my creative life with aliveness.
UngatedRob Hardy

Reflections

  • Proud of the essay I wrote on Monday and Tuesday. Was cool to knock out a 3K word piece that quickly, and I got lots of great feedback on it. Which is super cool given that it was a product announcement basically.
  • I wanted to get a proper sales page written this week, but didn't. There was so much resistance. Ugh.
  • That said, the shitty place holder sales page I slapped up actually drove a handful of sales, so that's pretty cool. Just goes to show we don't need the fancy version of these things.
  • On a whim, I did a bunch of these "arena log" posts, and they added so much easy credibility to my arguments, and they showed me that I'm way more prolific than I realize. Was cool to look back at how much I'd shipped. I plan on doing one of these for every round going forward, and might encourage participants to do it as well!
  • Aliveness Score: 6 out of 10. This week felt annoyingly meta to me, especially once I started working on the sales page. Not a lot of aliveness in that work for me.