32 Sam Bennett: author, teacher, consultant, actor

Originally from Chicago, Sam Bennett is an author, keynote speaker, consultant, and creativity/productivity specialist. She is the author of the perennial bestseller "Get It Done: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes a Day," which Seth Godin called, “An instant classic, essential reading for anyone who wants to make a ruckus.”

Her second international hit book is "Start Right Where You Are: How Little Changes Can Make a Big Difference for Overwhelmed Procrastinators, Frustrated Overachievers and Recovering Perfectionists."

Her latest book is the award-winning "The 15 Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done."

Sam also wrote the script for the hit musical “In a Booth at Chasen’s.” She is an award-winning marketing expert, having spent 15 years as a Personal Branding Specialist for Sam Christensen Studios, and she has been honored as an Ultimate Marketer Finalist at Infusioncon. She is also a Keap Certified Consultant and Reseller. Recently, Sam became a top instructor on LinkedIn Learning with over 1.2 million students worldwide.

Samantha Bennett
TheRealSamBennett.com

Kathie's note: I met Sam in 2014 when she hosted a conference in San Diego called The Big Yes." My late friend Beverly and I went and had a blast. My first trip west of Texas! I decided that a collective noun of sea lions should be called a slather. I mean, that fits, doesn't it?

In this episode, Sam mentions that the arts contribute more to the gross national product than trucking does. Research challenge accepted, Samantha!

In a 2024 press release from the National Endowment for the Arts (arts.gov), the arts contributed 4.3% of the GDP in 2022, pouring $1.1 trillion into the United States economy.

A 2024 press release from the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (bts.gov) noted a 3.5% contribution to the GDP in 2022 from “for-hire transportation.” 

Jump in your own rabbit-hole research for GNP vs. GDP. But yeah, the arts and trucking. We need both.

Writers Rotation intro/outro recorded at Dynamix Productions in L

Transcript

Sam Bennett [00:00:00]:
My name is Sam Bennett. I'm an author, a teacher, and consultant, and writing is a love letter to life.

INTRO [00:00:05]:
Hi. Welcome to the Writers Rotation podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Stamps. I love words and writing and people and talking. So I'm talking to people who write all kinds of things in different professions. It's a Writers Rotation. 

Kathie [00:00:26]:
Sam! how are you doing? So how are we getting things done these days? In 15 minutes?

Sam [00:00:30]:
In 15 minutes. In 15-minute increments. Every single time. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Kathie [00:00:34]:
How many books do you have? Three? Yellow, blue, orange.

Sam [00:00:39]:
Three. They look like sisters, don't they? They go together.

Kathie [00:00:41]:
They do. They do. What was the first one?

Sam [00:00:44]:
The first one's “Get It Done: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes a Day.” That's just had its 10th anniversary. It's still in print. It's selling. It got endorsed by Seth Godin, which I am totally not over. The second one was Start Right Where You Are: How Little Changes Can Make a Big Difference for Overwhelmed Procrastinators, Frustrated Overachievers, and Recovering Perfectionists.” And the most recent one is “The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done.”

Kathie [00:01:09]:
And you've done the audio versions also.

Sam [00:01:12]:
Of all three, yep.

Kathie [00:01:14]:
What was that process like?

Sam [00:01:17]:
It's so fun. I mean, you gotta remember my background's in theater. Right? I'm an actor.

Kathie [00:01:21]:
Right.

Sam [00:01:21]:
I did a lot of voice work. I did a lot of radio work. So I love being in the booth. It's really delightful. It's a really fun experience to read. And especially “15-Minute Method,” which, you know, I talked about this in the book, I was really unwell during a lot of the writing of that book. So I never had a very good perspective on it and it really wasn't until I was recording the audio version that I was like, you know, this book is really quite good. I quite like this book.

Kathie [00:01:52]:
Oh, it is. It is. When you're reading your own words, aren't you like, Oh, I should say this instead of that. Oh, I want… Did you just want to edit it all the time? Or did you treat it as any other script?

Sam [00:02:04]:
I mostly treated it like a script. I'm not much of an editor. I'm kind of a first draft writer.

Kathie [00:02:10]:
Really?

Sam [00:02:10]:
Yeah. Which for years made me believe that I wasn't really a writer.

Kathie [00:02:14]:
You're the gifted kind!

Sam [00:02:15]:
Well, I don't know. It's just the way my brain works. I don't rework stuff a lot. And I don't have an urge to like, anytime there's a “re” in front of something, I'm like, oh God, no. No. Revise, redo, rewrite renovate, reread. And I'm like, oh, that sounds awful.

Kathie [00:02:33]:
That is interesting. And what about as you're writing? Do you write sequentially, or do you kind of put it together later?

Sam [00:02:44]:
It depends. Generally, no, I do not write sequentially. For “Get It Done,” I had the idea for the book, and I thought it was a good idea. I liked the idea, but then I was immediately paralyzed. Like, oh my gosh. What do I even do? How do I even do this? Should it be a workbook? Should it be one person's journey through the process? Should it be an allegory? Should it have a fictional element? Because, of course, I had that thing in my head of, Oh, it's gotta be perfect inside of my head before I even start. Right?

Sam [00:03:12]:
But luckily, I've been doing this for a long time, and I was like, nope. So I just started writing down on index cards. Anytime I had an idea of something that I thought should be in the book, I would put it on an index card. And then I dropped it into a big Manila envelope labeled “genius” on my desk. And then after, I don't know, a month or so, I poured them all out onto my big dining room table and just started to sort. Here's all the stuff around perfectionism, and here's all the stuff around marketing, and here's all the stuff around self-belief and negative self-talk. So I sort of started to let the book tell me what it wanted to be. Tell me how it wanted to go.

Sam [00:03:42]:
And then often, when I was writing, if I wasn't inspired to write something, I would just reach into the envelope and be like, okay. That's what I'm writing about today. So that was the first one. And it does have an internal structure of sort of moving inside to outside, like working on the inner work first

Sam [00:03:56]:
And then the actual doing, and then the marketing and dealing with other people. So there is sort of a concentric circle, an inner structure to it. And I'm a big believer in structure of books. A book needs a good skeleton.

Kathie [00:04:09]:
And there are several types of skeletons.

Sam [00:04:11]:
Oh, yeah. There's I mean, you can't go wrong with hero's journey. You know, it's just right there. That's tried and true.

Kathie [00:04:19]:
12 steps right there.

Sam [00:04:20]:
12 steps right there. Seasons, going through the winter, spring, autumn, and fall. That will work. There's all kinds of ways to do it, but have one. Definitely. “Start Right Where You Are” has 63 really teeny tiny chapters. So a lot of the chapters are just a page or two pages. This is Chester who apparently wants to be in the podcast.

Kathie [00:04:42]:
Hello, Chester the cat.

Sam [00:04:44]:
It's really designed to be a book that you can kind of pick up, read a page or two, and put it down again. So it's not meant really to be read all the way through, although you certainly can.

Sam [00:04:51]:
And then “15-Minute Method,” I actually had a really hard time with the structure. I had all the pieces, but like I said, I was unwell. And part of the being unwell was I was having a hard time sort of conceptualizing on any kind of big level. So I kept looking at all these pieces and being like, I don't know what the structure is. And I knew that the book had a running order problem. I was like, this book is not paced properly. Again, my background's in theater and comedy, and one of the things you learn is that a show's running order is very important. You have to open a certain way, there's things you can put in the second slot that you can't put later on. You know, what you do right before intermission, what you do right after intermission, the way you close the show, the 11 o'clock number. All of these things create tentpoles that hold up the show. And then the same thing is true with books. There's different tentpoles that hold up the pace of the book. And I really felt like it was just off. And finally, I sort of cried uncle, and I handed it back to the editors. And I was like, there's something terribly wrong with this book. I'm not entirely sure what it is. I think it's a running order problem.

Sam [00:05:55]:
And here's kind of how I think it's playing out. And, but I don't really know how to fix it. Please be editors and fix it. And they did. We cut some stuff. We moved it around. We reordered things a little bit and it got a lot better.

Kathie [00:06:07]:
Cool. It's also a book that you can pick up and read any page.

Sam [00:06:11]:
Definitely. Definitely.

Kathie [00:06:12]:
I did that today. I love this one. “Does it hurt?”

Sam [00:06:17]:
“Or is it just hard?”

Kathie [00:06:19]:
Tell that story. I love it.

Sam [00:06:20]:
I was in a workout class that was really hard. And let me just say, I really advise anyone, creative people, especially, and especially people in leadership positions, see if you can find a way at least once a week to be doing something that you're pretty terrible at. Something in which you are not a leader, in which you are not the best person in the room. It's really important, I think, to continue to humble yourself. You need to be like, wow, I’m bad at this. And to watch your ego flare up and watch your defense mechanisms come up and be like, wow, apparently, I am really taking this personally or, oh, I really have an issue with this.

Kathie [00:07:02]:
It doesn't have to be in public, does it?

Sam [00:07:03]:
No. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Practice the recorder in the privacy of your own bathroom. Like, it doesn't. But it kin of helps if it's in public. It was great to be in this workout class. They didn't know who I was. They didn't care who I was. I was 20 years older than most of them. I was invisible, practically. And to watch how hungry I am for praise, to watch your own self play out. And to remember, this is probably how your clients feel. This may be how your team is feeling. This may be how people in your family are feeling. Increase your empathy. Plus, it's just good to be in a learning state.

Sam [00:07:37]:
So that's my lecture. But what was actually happening is, yes, I was in this really hard workout class, and we were doing this really awful backwards bear crawl thing that was impossible. And I'm sweating and crying and spitting, and I'm bright red, and, oh my God this is awful, and really struggling. And part of me is like, you could just leave.

Kathie [00:07:54]:
This is America. You can still get up and go.

Sam [00:07:57]:
This is America. You're an adult. You've paid to be here. You can just walk out the door. You do not actually have to do this. And then there's another voice in my head going, you can be terrible at this. You can go slow. You can't quit.

Sam [00:08:10]:
So I was trying to persevere and trying to not quit. And finally, the trainer comes over to me, and she looks down at me and she goes, does it hurt or is it just hard? And I was like, oh, damn. I said, yeah, it's just hard. And she goes, good, and walks away. Kind of fabulous. Right? I thought that is such a good life question too because sometimes there are things you know, if something in your life hurts, that's a sign to stop. That's a sign to assess.

Sam [00:08:44]:
That's a sign to get help. That's a sign to get out. That's a sign that this is really costing you something and will have deleterious longterm effects. But if it's just hard, well, welcome to it. That's the work. And that's how we get better is doing hard things.

Kathie [00:09:01]:
Yes. We can do hard things.

Sam [00:09:02]:
We can do hard things.

Kathie [00:09:04]:
The difference between creative and artistic.

Sam [00:09:07]:
I'm so glad you asked because if I could buy a billboard in Times Square, I think this might be what I would put on it. “Everyone is creative. Not everyone is artistic.” There has been a conflation between these two words in in our culture, and it's a real problem because we tend to think of them as synonymous. So people will say, Oh, I'm not creative. Meaning they don't paint or sing or dance.

Sam [00:09:33]:
That's artistic. Not everyone has artistic talents. That's true. They can be learned and cultivated. Many people don't want to. They're not interested. That's fine. Everyone is creative.

Sam [00:09:42]:
Creativity has to do with innovative problem solving. If you have ever solved a problem differently than anybody else has ever solved the problem, congratulations. You are a creative genius. And whether that's tying flies or raising children or coding a program or teaching English to seventh graders or whatever it is you do, that thing that you bring to it is your creative genius. And it bugs me how the word has also been sort of demonized. Like, there's a lot of people who don't want to be creative. Like, creative means weird.

Sam [00:10:14]:
Or broke or unreliable. And that's not true either. 

Kathie [00:10:19]:
Do you know the origin of that saying of the starving artist? What is up with that and how can we get rid of it?

Sam [00:10:26]:
You know, I think it's rooted in jealousy, maybe. This idea that if you were going to enjoy your work as much as creative people enjoy their work, then you should somehow be punished for that.

Kathie [00:10:44]:
Oh, okay.

Sam [00:10:44]:
It is also true that highly creative… I've made a little study of what I think of as highly creative people, and they have a number of traits. The first one is having a grillion ideas all the time. You have ideas in the morning, have ideas at night, have ideas about other people's ideas, have ideas when you're in the middle of one of your ideas.

Kathie [00:11:01]:
My ideas have ideas.

Sam [00:11:02]:
Your ideas have ideas. Exactly. Often, autodidacts, we like to teach ourselves. We like to learn things for ourselves. We like to prove things to ourselves. If I told a highly creative person that it's raining, they're going to stick their head out the window to check. And we're suspicious of anything that's too popular.

Kathie [00:11:17]:
Yeah, I'm over that one.

Sam [00:11:19]:
I can't believe the number of people that have been like, Oh no, I can't read Harry Potter, everybody likes it too much. I'm not gonna read it. Or when 10 people tell you, You’ve got to see this movie. It's so great. And you're like, great, no, I'll never see it because everybody's told me I have to. But one of the other characteristics is: We're not super motivated by money or power or prestige. That's not really what gets us out of bed in the morning. Consequently, we tend to ignore things like money and power and prestige.

Kathie [00:11:44]:
Bills.

Sam [00:11:44]:
Yeah. So if you're one of those people, that's okay to not be motivated by money and power and prestige. It's kind of good. I mean, it makes us sort of an incorruptible. You know? We can't really be seduced by those things. But there should be someone on your team who is aware of money and power and prestige and will look out for it.

Kathie [00:12:00]:
Show BUSINESS.

Sam [00:12:03]:
That's right. Who looks out for it for you. Yes. Your agent, your manager, your team, all of them should be a little more on board with that kind of stuff. But otherwise, yeah, it really annoys me, especially when the arts, know, in terms of gross national product, is bigger than trucking. The arts contribute an enormous amount to our gross national product, and I'm really tired of people acting like it doesn't matter when the only thing that matters to us is story. All we do all day long is we want to read stories.

Sam [00:12:33]:
We want to watch stories on TikTok. We want to peer through the window at people. We want to hear about their gossip. We want to read letters by them. We want to read books. We want to watch movies. We want to watch more movies. We want to watch shows. We want to watch reality shows. Like, we cannot get enough of human stories.

Kathie [00:12:46]:
And when was that, and where was that, and who was that. Who, what, when, where, why, and how?

Sam [00:12:51]:
Right. And then what does that mean to me? And, oh my gosh, I saw this story, and it made me think this. Oh, I love this, and I love these stories, and I don't like those stories. It's our major addiction.

Sam [00:13:02]:
You know, what's the line from The Big Chill about how

Kathie [00:13:05]:
“I’m not into this completion thing.” I remember that one.

Sam [00:13:08]:
Not into this completion thing. No. He says, you know, most people can't go six hours without a good rationalization.

Kathie [00:13:13]:
Oh, yeah.

Sam [00:13:14]:
And it's true. We can go three days without water. We can go three weeks without food. We can't go three minutes without telling ourselves a story about something that's going on.

Kathie [00:13:23]:
How did you get into theater? What age?

Sam [00:13:25]:
Born this way.

Kathie [00:13:27]:
Oh, okay. Summer camps?

Sam [00:13:28]:
I definitely I went to theater camp for sure. Somebody asked me one time what was the first show I remember doing, and I said I remember doing a production of Stone Soup when I was in kindergarten. You know that folktale Stone Soup? And my mom was nearby at the time, and she said, Oh, Samantha, you didn't just do it. You produced it. You made them do it. You brought in the costumes. You brought in the script, and you made them do it.

Kathie [00:13:54]:
That's awesome.

Sam [00:13:54]:
I'm not sure how I knew what a play was, but it just made sense to me. I love to read. I learned to read very early, and I still love to read. It's my major pastime. And I think it's a fairly short step from reading and loving a story to wanting to share the story, to wanting to act out the story.

Kathie [00:14:13]:
Yes.

Sam [00:14:14]:
So yeah, I was always that kid. I did all the plays in school, went to theater camp, went to college for theater. That was what I did. Dropped out of college, dropped out of Northwestern University to take a job at Second City Theater in Chicago.

Kathie [00:14:25]:
And you met some people who are still out there doing it?

Sam [00:14:28]:
Sure did. Sure did. There's a picture from my first wedding, and you can tell it's me because I'm in the big white dress because it's my wedding. And all our work friends. I met my first husband at Second City, so it's me and him, and then Steve Carell and Steven Colbert and Jim Belushi and Amy Sedaris and Nia Vardalos and Ian Gomez. And later I worked with Adam McKay and Dave Koechner and Rachel Dratch. And, you know, we were all just kids together doing comedy.

Kathie [00:14:59]:
So cool. You formed a company, the Organized Artist Company.

Sam [00:15:03]:
The Organized Artist Company, in early 2009. So my acting career was one of those acting careers that went well enough that you didn't want to give up on it, but not so well as to be able to support a person. So that meant that I always had a grillion different jobs and gigs and projects and shows and auditions and productions, and this and that running across town. And it was creatively very satisfying, financially disastrous. Right about New Year's 2009, I had this sort of big hole in my schedule that I'd been working for a production company who laid off two thirds of their people, including me. And something I thought I was going to be doing fell through. And I was like, oh, shit, I gotta get another gig.

Sam [00:15:42]:
But I had started to do some of this teaching. I'd been teaching the class Get It Done once or twice a year, for fun, for like 11 people in a church basement in Van Nuys, California. And I thought, well, I wonder if I could do that full time. And then I thought, I guess I should order business cards. I knew nothing. I knew nothing about entrepreneurship. I knew nothing about sales. I knew nothing about marketing.

Sam [00:16:04]:
I knew nothing about email. I knew nothing, but I made it my business to learn pretty quick. And, and it turned out I was something of a marketing savant. I won an award for my marketing, my first year in business, and it just rolled out from there. It turns out that I loved it.

Kathie [00:16:18]:
That's so cool. You have a cool definition of marketing.

Sam [00:16:22]:
I have a number of different definitions of marketing.

Kathie [00:16:24]:
It's anything you do…

Sam [00:16:26]:
Yeah. That's not unique to me. That's a pretty common phrase. Marketing is anything you do to help people know you, like you, and trust you. But what I really want, especially for you creative people out there, to hear, is: ANYTHING you do. Hear the freedom in that. You could buy a billboard in Times Square.

Sam [00:16:44]:
It's the way you dress. It's the perfume you wear. It's the car you drive. You could host a regatta. You could give your best clients fireworks. Anything you do to help people know you, like you, and trust you. By which we mean, they go, “Oh yeah, her. Oh yeah, them. 
I know them.” Right? That's it. And it's different from sales. Sales is a sacred exchange of energy, like a handshake or a hug or sex. So marketing and sales are two different things. And sometimes people go, I get so nervous, marketing. Right, because you're trying to do sales. You're proposing marriage before you've even bought them a drink. You know, buy them a drink first.

Kathie [00:17:22]:
So your acting and writing, are using the same parts of your brain, kind of sort of? They're just part of you?

Sam [00:17:31]:
Yesss… they're very closely related. Acting to me is actually closer to teaching and closer to improvising than it is to writing. Because what happens when I'm performing, I don't know if it's when everybody's performing, is that it's really using all of me. It's using all of who I am, physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, psychically, as a Midwesterner, like, all the parts of me get to be engaged and plugged in.

Sam [00:18:01]:
And it's the best feeling in the world. It's the deepest communion with another player, with an audience. I know sometimes people think like, Oh, actors just love the applause. That's not really it. Most of us don't love the applause. If we could do a show without a curtain call, that would be better. But the curtain call is not for us. It's for the audience.

Sam [00:18:19]:
I mean, of course, some actors are ego freaks, but, you know, some dentists are ego freaks.

Kathie [00:18:24]:
Sure. People are people.

Sam [00:18:25]:
People are people. The writing is a little different. Although I will say one of the things I love about writing is also getting to use all the elements of my life. You know? That thing my aunt Nana used to say, that thing I remember from third grade, that color I saw in that sunset that one day. All of a sudden, everything becomes fodder. Everything is useful. And that really appeals to my sense of reduce, reuse, recycle.

Sam [00:18:49]:
And I say all the time, most people just have to live through their lives. We at least get to turn it into something, you know?

Kathie [00:18:54]:
Yep. What's your next book?

Sam [00:18:57]:
Well, that's a good question.

Kathie [00:18:59]:
What about fiction? Have you ever tried your hand at fiction?

Sam [00:19:02]:
I wrote the book to a play, to a musical, actually. I wrote the script to a musical, and I have an idea actually for another play. I've never tried to write fiction-fiction because, as it happens, I have no gift for plot.

Kathie [00:19:19]:
Oh, yeah. The pesky plot.

Sam [00:19:21]:
I can do character. I can do dialogue. If you tell me the plot. There was one time I tried to set out to write a little screenplay for something, and I thought it was a really good idea. It's still a really good idea. And I sat down for the first six weeks, and I was like, okay, so they're in the elevator. No, they're outside in a barn. Okay, she's wearing a tracksuit and she walks down… like I have no ability to, like, picture things. This is not my medium.

Kathie [00:19:51]:
So we're going to stick with nonfiction.

Sam [00:19:53]:
I like sticking with nonfiction. Writing the book to the musical was really fun, partly because my coauthor, who did the music and lyrics, said to me before we started, he said, This is the worst job in show business because you have to write everything up until something interesting happens, at which point they will start to sing. And he goes, and if the show is a flop, they will blame the book, which is the script. If the show is a hit, they will never mention the book. And I was like, that's all fine with me.

Kathie [00:20:21]:
Oh, that's so interesting.

Sam [00:20:22]:
I will say that I think one of the best ways to become a better writer is to be a better reader and to read a wide array of things. I have to be a little careful when I'm in the writing process for a book or a specific project, I can't read any anything that's too close to what I'm doing because there's too much crossover. Like, it starts to feel weird. But it's fun to read something historical. It's fun to read something that I've read before, rereading things. It's beautiful.

Sam [00:20:52]:
It's a wonderful thing to have your work out there just floating around the world, helping people. And sometimes I hear about it, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes people are nice and they write me and say, here's what happened, or here's what I did, or I read the book and this happened. I have a dream that someday I will find my book, like, at a secondhand shop or in a garage sale or something. That, to me, will say that I've made it. If a book’s in circulation that somebody's gotten rid of it, that will make me feel like I made it.

Sam [00:21:20]:
It wasn't until I got my first one-star review on Amazon that I felt like, okay, now I'm a real writer.

Kathie [00:21:24]:
Oh, what did they say? Did they say something?

Sam [00:21:27]:
They did. It was very funny. They said Well, this is all that rahrah you can do it stuff.

Kathie [00:21:32]:
Yes, how dare you?

Sam [00:21:34]:
I'm like, well spotted. The book's called “Get It Done.” Like, what you were buying? And then they said something about, like, she just got all her celebrity friends to endorse her. And she's probably just really annoying. And I'm like, oh, those two things are definitely true. And in fact, I sent Steve Carell an email when I was looking for endorsements for this new book. And I said—Can I swear on this show? Of course.—I wrote him an email and said, Hey Steve, I've got this new book coming out. And I hope this isn't too star fucky of me, but I'm wondering if you might endorse it.

Kathie [00:22:05]:
What did he say?

Sam [00:22:07]:
He said he couldn't because he was actually under contract for another thing. It was his own writing thing. It was a complicated situation. But his producing partner, Charlie Hartsock, who has also been a friend of mine since the dawn of time, wrote me back and said, “You know, super sorry. We can't help. Because he goes, you could have my endorsement. Here's what I would say. I haven't read this book yet, but I'm sure I'll get to it eventually. And I'm sure when I do, it'll be very good.” And I thought that was hilarious. So I asked my editor, and I wrote Charlie back. And it's in there.

Kathie [00:22:35]:
Love it.

Sam [00:22:36]:
Writing, to me, is the love letter to life. It's the love letter we write to life. It's the way we commemorate our experiences. It's the way we share. It's the way we bring meaning and purpose to the otherwise random and often painful events of our lives.

Kathie [00:22:54]:
Oh, that's so good.

Sam [00:22:56]:
And, yeah, next to reading, it's my favorite.

Kathie [00:23:00]:
Thank you so much for being on the podcast. This has been just so fun.

Sam [00:23:04]:
My pleasure. Thanks for giving me the forum to talk about it. Keep in touch. Thanks, Kathie. Talk to you soon.

OUTRO [00:23:08]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Writers Rotation. Like and subscribe for more. And remember, writing is a marketable skill. Smiling is a remarkable skill.