Sam Beckbessinger: Creative Curiosity and Exploiting Unique Craziness
In this episode, I chat with one of my closest friends and best-selling author Sam Beckbessinger about working through a lack of inspiration, harnessing unique personality flavours and why consistency is so crucial for output in a creative space.
On a quest to find out “how to adult”, Sam writes by trade and follows her curiosity, recording interesting things obsessively in her pen-and-paper notebook and exploring them later through her writing. From writing to entrepreneurship to enabling and tapping into curious flairs and intrigues, Sam has a unique take on work titles, self-improvement and work ethic as a professional creative.
The difference between “verbing” and “nouning”
With Imposter Syndrome often rearing its ugly head, Sam identifies as a person who writes but battles to look at herself as a writer. The noun of a career path refers to the ownership of the thing and defines you forever. On the other hand, the verb is just an action of the thing you're doing right now.
“The difference between verbing and nouning; so I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable figuring out what the noun is for myself. I’ve been a lot of things. I’ve been an entrepreneur, a developer, a UX designer. I feel much more comfortable with the verb. I love writing, it’s my greatest passion and my greatest love. I love starting businesses and talking to people and listening to people. I love doing all of these things. So what’s cool about the verb state is that it isn’t definitional. You don’t have to meet that standard. Simply, it’s an action, you’re in progress, you’re doing that thing. So writing is the great romance of my life, where I sit having conversations with my imaginary friends and regardless of what that makes me, or what noun I have achieved or not, the verb is great.”
The power of self-knowledge over self-improvement
After trying to ‘improve’ certain aspects of herself, Sam has found that trying to combat the insecurities or “problem” areas is not always particularly helpful or sustainable. It’s better to aim to understand unique things about one’s self (both good and bad) and lean into them as much as possible. Knowing things and gaining self-knowledge can offer a way to garner authenticity and individualism rather than trying to improve to adapt to society.
“If you understand yourself, you can harness your particular flavours of crazy that are helpful for you. “
Not only does it help resolve the attempts to slot into what society deems “right”, but exploring self-knowledge and how you can exploit unique characteristics also sets much more achievable goals than changing to become a different person.
Feeding creativity and curiosity
To Sam, there are two different phases of creativity. Ever, the wordsmith, she uses the analogy of a larder and storage of ideas before executing the creativity. In the first phase, she “stocks her larder and stores ideas in her vault.” In this gathering phase, she follows her curiosity to add interesting things to her larder and ensures that she banks any interesting experiences through thorough note-taking and obsessive documenting.
In the second phase, comes the making things from the things stored in the vault. As she puts it:
“The creativity of making things out of your larder which comes from making interesting connections between things. So kind of introducing some serendipity to the process of making your recipe. And I think that you have to do both. You have to have interesting ingredients in your larder and then you have to combine them in an interesting way… The richer and more varied the ingredients, the more interesting will be that you make.”
In a creative industry: Working at your own pace
While some creatives thrive under deadline pressure and mess around until it comes time to properly crunch, others (like Sam) prefer a consistent and steady pace. Others still are a combination of both. It’s not important to try and adapt to either method, instead - working in a way which works for you is the best to discover, understand and tap into.
Choosing the right inspired thought - design or whatever creative component you use in your field - and trying to get the idea out successfully can be brutal. It’s such a subjective field and so creativity will never be perfect. What seems to work for many creatives who make money from their creativity resides in aiming for quantity within quality; since “perfect” doesn’t exist aiming for prolific often yields better results.
Every career has something which sucks
As an author, Sam finds that the most difficult thing in executing success is in the actual marketing of the product. Getting the work done, leaning into inspiration, letting the words flow; that’s where she flourishes. But getting the work out and marketing it to sell is what she finds difficult. Others might have the reverse, where marketing is easy but getting pen to paper is a struggle. Of course, it’s natural that we all have different skillsets and pure passion lies in different avenues, so it’s important to realise early on what skills you will enjoy using and which ones will take effort and grit: and seeing the “final product” to the end is where success comes in.
If you want to get in touch with Sam, you can find her on Like A Fucking Grownup.com or her personal website where she follows her curiosity “hang out with her” through her newsletter.
