Making Your Art/Passion Your Career (Long-Term) with Rob Hardy of Ungated

Inspiring Careers: The Podcast!

Join me for this transformative conversation with Rob Hardy, the founder of Ungated.Media — a website and community dedicated to helping creators attract their “1,000 true fans,” a concept coined by Kevin Kelly in 2008. Rob wants to “make the Internet weird again.” 😁

Ungated and Inspiring Careers are both in similar places right now, and this conversation was incredibly therapeutic for me. I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

Topics we cover:

• 90% of business/marketing/career advice out there is complete bullshit — and most of us feel that way
• Avoiding get-rich-quick schemes, courses, coercive methods of marketing, etc. and instead being be generous and simply making better things because we care.
• Gaining a deeper relationship with our selves, our intuition, our feelings of what’s good and true and meaningful — and being pleased with the results when we act on it (thinking less and feeling + doing more)
• Creating meaningful change in the world, and letting the money come (if it does)
• Finding the people for whom your work would be a missing puzzle piece in their life! Rather than making mediocre, mass-market stuff that comes out of the traditional marketing advice
• Building a business from your own weird, that you love running, that feels easy and genuine and authentically you — and being compensated accordingly by these people who want to reciprocate that value back to you
• Immersing yourself into online spaces where you find these kinds of people, although you may not find a specific community or subculture that perfectly reflects what you believe or resonate with
• Developing a good enough idea of the type of person you want to reach — their values, desires, fears, dreams… creating for them, and seeing how they respond to your work… and making friends!
• Understanding what you do that makes you feel alive, and doing more of it
• and so much more

Basically, Rob‘s current advice to creators is: Don’t jump into full-time creatorship at first. Don’t rely on it to make a living.

Make cool shit—whatever you want—without worrying about how it earns money, and meet your financial needs in other ways. Earn your income from a job or clients or something else. Then, over time, if you play the long game and if what you make is valued enough by “the others,” the money will come—and it’s truly sustainable.

It just takes time.

Connect with me at [e-mail] or anywhere on the web @rarelyJeremy, and connect with Rob at ungated.media.