Episode 95: Ready, Set, Finish with Financial Advisor, Author, and Speaker Bassam Tarazi
Podcast
Episode 95: Ready, Set, Finish with Financial Advisor, Author, and Speaker Bassam Tarazi
“My relationship with creativity is committing to the verb.” —Bassam Tarazi
Welcome to this week’s episode, which is all about carving out time for creative projects and breaking down the big vision into small steps. I’m joined by Bassam Tarazi, a financial advisor, author and speaker. His commitment to his creative practice is inspiring, in this episode he shares how he sits through discomfort, overcomes procrastination, and prioritizes what he values.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create.
What’s in This Episode:
Bassam shares how his creative process is closely linked to his relationship with time. Rather than focusing on the finish line, he zeros in on where he can find thirty minutes in his day. He sets his phone to airplane mode, puts on a timer and rides the wave all the way until the end. Bassam’s approach is strategic and realistic, listen as he shares how he breaks down huge projects into verbs and small action steps.
Bassam highlights the importance of committing to these bite-sized chunks of time where possible as a new father and full-time financial advisor. He also discusses his mindfulness practices, finding value in the discomfort, and his method for getting to the root of procrastination. Bassam firmly believes in the power of small, consistent efforts over time to achieve significant results. You can learn more about Bassam’s course, book and blog here.
Topics Covered:
Using your own personal life experiences to create something from out of thin air
Committing to 30 minutes a day inside of your creative practice and releasing the finish line
Behind-the-scenes of crafting a TED Talk (Watch Bassam’s TEDx Talk!)
Sitting through the discomfort of the creative process
Practicing presence by being where your feet are
Getting honest about the source of procrastination and and releasing self-judgment when creativity has to take a temporary back-burner
I am excited to hear your thoughts! Let’s continue the conversation on IG. Tag me @chefcarlacontreras and @bassamtarazi
Eat Well,
xo Chef Carla
PS: Are you working on your visibility and expanding your presence on or offline this season? Maybe you want to start your own podcast or Substack? Join us inside The Confident Content Collective
Disclaimer: Always seek the counsel of a qualified medical practitioner or other healthcare provider for an individual consultation before making any significant changes to your health, lifestyle, or to answer questions about specific medical conditions. This podcast is for entertainment and information purposes only.
SHARE THE PODCAST
Wherever you are listening, please rate, review + subscribe to Nourishing Creativity. Send the podcast to your friends, post in your stories on Instagram & tag me @chefcarlacontreras
About Bassam Tarazi
Bassam Tarazi is a schooled mechanical/nuclear engineer whose career has spanned the worlds of mortgage banking, construction management, consulting, public speaking and marketing. His labor of love in helping people do what they want to do in life is his course: Ready. Set. Finish. This is buttressed next to his day job as a Financial Advisor for Edward Jones
He’s the author of: The Accountability Effect, In 5 Years You’ll Be Wrong, and Borders, Bandits And Baby Wipes. He or his work has been featured in Backpacker, Forbes, Young Entrepreneur, GOOD and many other outlets. A wanderer at heart, he’s also traveled to 75 countries and all 7 continents, having had such absurd experiences such as getting to Everest Base Camp and the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, driving from London to Mongolia in a 42 HP car, living on an Alaskan glacier for 8 days, surviving a run-in with Fidel Castro, and being hunted by a pig-tailed macaque in the jungles of Borneo (Long stories. We’ll need some Scotch for those.)
When he’s not doing things that might make a good story one day, he’s probably reading, throwing one of his networking events (Magnet), supporting his beloved Arsenal Football Club, or enjoying time with his wife and young son in Portland, OR.
Find + Work With Bassam:
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Nourishing Creativity. The cycle of the last few years has left you and me feeling mentally, physically, emotionally and creatively drained. Nourish your very full life through interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs about how they create and move through their creative blocks. If you don't know me, I'm Chef Carla Contreras, a food stylist and content strategist.
You can find me, Chef Carla Contreras, across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. Basam, welcome to the podcast. I am so grateful to have you here. We have known each other for 12 years, and I am just in awe of how your journey has unfolded.
Can you share with us who you are and how you serve your community?
Oh, Carla, first of all, thank you so much. You're such a joy to listen to and to read and to follow. I feel like the inspiration is reciprocal. I serve my community in a full-time way. I'm a financial advisor. That's my craft, I'd say.
But I think I serve my community in a lot of different ways than I always have. I'm really a student of the human experience. And so really figuring out why people do what they do and how to get people to do the things they say they want to do has been very important to me.
And so I write a lot. I've written a couple books. I have a blog where I try to wrestle complex topics and try to make them simple. And I had a course called Ready, Set, Finish, amongst other things. So I'm always just trying to help people get to live the life that they're trying to do.
And I've done the course. And I actually have finished a lot of things. Let's talk about your last meal. I'm a trained chef, so I'm always curious. What was your last meal and or drink?
Yeah, I eat the same breakfast every day. We can get into all that creating habits and routine and all that. But I start with a banana and almond butter and I cut the banana up in like six pieces and each piece gets a little bit of almond butter.
And then I have a bowl of muesli with some flaxseed, some honey, some blueberries, some cashews and some almond milk. And I have a glass of water with all that.
This is incredible. We'll get into habits. Big question. How do you define creativity?
I think we're all dying to create something. I'd say people don't want to write a book. They want to walk on stage and have people clap. And what I mean by that is it's the joy of creating something out of thin air. Right. Self-expression, sure, is part of that. And I think it is a two way street.
I think we like to self-express, but we also like to have somebody say, hey, that was cool or that was neat or that shaped my life. So I do think this notion of out of thin air, that's using your own personal experiences in life to connect certain dots and say, hey, I see the world this way.
I would like to share this view, whether it's through art or writing or food or whatever it is. And so I think it's just the stamp of you and your little glimmer of time on this planet that gets to say, hey, this was my POV. What does anybody else think about that?
Let's talk about how you nourish your creativity. What is your creative process?
So I try as much as I can. My creative process, I've really shaped this through many, many years. It is my relationship to time. And I try to let go of the finish line. I joke. and that to do anything, to get anything done is a verb, right?
Every second of every day, five seconds goes by, we can express those five seconds as a verb. I was running, writing, eating, sleeping, scrolling, thinking, washing, whatever it is. And so for me, the creative process is basam. You need to carve out time to do the verb that you say you want to do.
Let's say it's writing, right? It's not preparing to write. It's not making a cup of tea to write. It's not renting a cabin to write. It's not planning to write. It's not sitting to write. It's not getting the notebook to write. It's writing. And so I set timers. For me, it's a 30-minute timer.
And I do airplane mode. And I set the timer on 30 minutes. And I have a life raft coming in 30 minutes. But for these next 30 minutes, I am in a mess and a muck of creating something, like we said, from thin air.
And if after I write a couple words and after I think I'm going to write and six minutes later I'm stumped and I don't know where I'm going, I have to sit. I have to continue sitting in that mess and not reach for my phone and not reach for the outlet because that's discovery. That's creativity.
I say writing isn't a manifestation of what I discovered. It's a discovery of what I'll manifest. And it's being conscious and cognizant of that and just sitting with the discomfort as much as possible and seeing kind of what comes out the other side. So my relationship with creativity is committing to the verb for a period of time
and amazing things happen on the other side of that.
You did a TEDx talk. Is that the same process that you did for that?
Yeah, it's a great question. So TEDx, you know, I kept getting back to verbs, right? There's this, a lot of people are like, I want to give a TEDx talk. That sounds really simple, but son, there's a verb. Give a TEDx talk. What's the problem? Well, your brain is excited about that. What's your brain excited about?
Your brain is excited about having a talk on YouTube that you can send to people. But to get there, like I say, this notion of a TED talk, giving a TED talk is a Trojan horse in your brain. Oh, this is great. Trojan horse comes into your brain, give a TED talk.
What opens up out of the bottom of that? A whole bunch of other verbs. What's the topic of my talk? What's the length of my talk? What stories am I giving? Editing, culling, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so it starts big, right? I think that kind of process is like, what is the theme?
to do right and that is sometimes a 30 minute session everything goes back to my committing time to like get into this and unearth all this stuff and so you start big You start with an idea, and then you write, and then you get it on paper. And typically, as I'm writing, creating, I try to not judge.
I try to not delete in my first or second creative process, especially the TED Talk. It's an 18-minute talk. So in the beginning, you have to get out of your own way. Just get things out there. Keep your editing side behind you. I did have coaches, and I had to give practice talks.
And so honed, honed, honed, honed, honed. But in the beginning, it was really getting out of my own way to kind of see like, what are the puzzle pieces I'm working with here? How does this thing take shape? So it wasn't, I think when people hear the TED Talk, you know, a lot of times people are like,
that's amazing. I wish I could write like you or talk like you. I'm not trying to brag, but you know, just the feedback. And I'm like, if you knew the hundreds and hundreds of hours, you know, that it took and the amount of practice to have it come off like that, you know,
that's the stuff that people don't see. So it still was a commitment to time, but I had to like, You know, you kind of know the finish line and then you have this big idea and you try to break it down. And so that's kind of how I tackle that as the statement goes, bird by bird.
I don't know if you've heard that book, but piece by piece.
I have this book in my collection from my master's degree at NYU. I want to ask you... about making the time because you mentioned you're a financial advisor and you have a full-time commitment and also you write your blog, you have a newsletter, you're writing books. Where does that time come from?
As I told somebody who asked me that once, when I'm not hanging out with you, Carla, and it's a joke, right? It's a joke when I'm out with folks. It's, you know, we prioritize what we value. And I always said, there's time if you want there to be time.
I used to coach folks and I said, Carla, you know what? People never complain about not having time for Instagram. No one ever is like, man, I just didn't have enough time to scroll through Instagram today. What that means is we prioritize what we value. So for me, Ann Patchett is one of my favorite writers.
She had a quote, something to the effect of, if you can write for 60 minutes a day, you will be unstoppable or something like that. She's like, just see how hard 60 minutes. And so we can all... carve out 60 minutes. And for me, I even cut it back to 30 minutes.
And so I literally try Carla sometimes, or I say, if I can just get 30 uninterrupted minutes, somehow, some way, you know, I've leaned in because if you think about it, 30 minutes, right? Times seven, what's that? That's three and a half hours a week, if you can do that. Three and a half hours of uninterrupted work.
That's a lot. So I think it's, again, we prioritize what we value. There's time if you want there to be time. So sometimes it's waking up 30 minutes earlier. Sometimes it's telling my wife we're watching a show or I say, hey, I need 30 minutes before we start watching.
And so it's putting that discomfort somehow on top of your list. Netflix is way easier than than sitting with an uncomfortable topic for 30 minutes, right? Because it just is. But I have to say, I value that discomfort of discovery more than Netflix at this moment. It's not easy, but that's why the chunk of the time commitment,
instead of, I have to write this blog tonight. That's too heavy. It's too much. Your body can't do it. You're too tired. But can you commit 30 minutes? And you have to convince yourself that those 30 minutes are valuable. If you don't, and you want a Jerry Maguire moment of, I need to create this thing, you know,
my magnum opus in one sitting, and I don't even know what happened. That's rare or I'd say impossible. I just don't believe that creativity comes out like that.
It's interesting because you're talking about real life. You're a dad, you have a full-time job, and you prioritize creativity and putting that into your daily life in these... I want to say what I'm hearing is bite-size chunks. I'm curious about what is your current relationship with creativity?
It's a bit challenging, I'd say. My son turned one yesterday and my wife works full-time. Like you said, I work full-time. And so it is before I had a child, finding those chunks of creativity were way easier, right? And so now it's a bit,
I'd say my relationship with creativity is strategic and I think I'm giving myself grace. I think I have done amazing things as far as things I've wanted to do in my life and been very purposeful. And right now, dad is super high on that list, right? Dad and work and husband. And I'm really okay with that.
So I'm writing less than I used to just write every week. But you know what, Carla? It's okay. It is okay. And I'm not judging myself because right now I'm where I'm supposed to be. And we were chatting earlier, this idea of being where your feet are.
And, you know, right now my feet, like I said, is work. It's building my business as a financial advisor. It's growing that. It's being a good husband and being a good dad. And I will find time for those bits of creativity. But, you know, I'm prioritizing what I value in my life.
And sometimes it's, again, being with my son is above maybe carving out 30 minutes to write something.
Can we talk about feet and being planted and being grounded? Because I sometimes think about this in terms of meditation, which can take some people outside of the body and into the mind. But we talked about this before we hopped on the podcast, like literal feet, feeling feet. Can you expand on that?
Yeah, there was a statement that we were just talking briefly that this idea of like, how do you be mindful? How do you be present? And I heard a statement recently that says, just be where your feet are. And why I found that so powerful is because it is very visceral and real to all of us, right?
Be mindful or be present is hard because you said it's in your mind, right? You're looking up almost. Whereas be where your feet are is don't look in the past. Don't look in the future. Don't look what just happened. Where are you right now?
And yes, feet then kind of pulls up into your breath and your posture and all that kind of stuff. And so it's just this moment to say, where am I, right? And if I'm playing with my son, but I'm thinking about work, and yes, it is a little bit about be where your feet are.
And yes, that means experientially, mentally, everything, right? Be with the things that are in front of your face, the sky, the birds, the earth, your son, like whatever, the meal you're eating, right? Just be there. And it's funny, I didn't think about this before, Carla, but I really love, I've done a lot of trekking and mountain climbing.
And I think the thing I love, a lot of people say hiking is meditative, right? This idea that you're out in nature. But there is this feeling I get of my foot, one after the other, just going up and up and battling gravity, right? And feeling this like I'm literally, hey, gravity,
I'm trying to just hold you back just for a little bit, right? You're trying to pull me down and it's just one foot, one foot. And I think it is this literal pressing off of the earth, right? This kind of mirror, the world kind of holding you back or pushing back up on you.
And it is this, I don't know, it's a humbling moment, right? It is a... I'm on this earth. I'm on this planet. I'm on this rock that's spinning through space. My feet touch this ground. Like, wow. You know, just wow at moments. It's almost enough to say, yeah, work is not that important, you know, right now.
Or whatever email I want to scramble and reply to. It's like, it's okay for a second.
I'm soaking that in for a second. I invite other people who are listening to soak that in too. And perhaps if they are not driving, but anywhere else, feel your feet on the ground. And what is that like? You recently sent out a newsletter about procrastination, my favorite topic.
And I'm curious about how you move through creative blocks.
Yeah, it's, you know, procrastination. I mean, you know, people define it differently. It gets us all. I think the issue is, and I had a line in the post that I think it kind of, it summed it up and it says, you know, we all want to, for instance, write and writing is, oh, why can't I write?
I know how to write. I know subject and verb agreement. Like I just need to write. Well, to write is to have an idea that's easy, but to have written is to share a point of view. And that's hard. And that's, I think, what happens when we procrastinate. We're attached to this finish line, right?
We don't want to climb a mountain. We want to have climbed a mountain. We don't want to write a book. We want to have written a book. Joke, you don't want to write a book. You want to walk on a stage and have people clap. And so motivation is very important when I'm procrastinating or uncomfortable.
I think a lot of times, Carla, I'm able to check myself really quickly and say, hold on. What is it that I'm uncomfortable with? Am I uncomfortable with the topic I'm writing about and I'm sabotaging myself a little bit, right? Am I uncomfortable to share this topic? Do I think I'm not making a really interesting point?
Do I have contradictory points in what I'm doing, right? It's like really trying to dig for that motivation. I've written some screenplays and I've written some pilots for TV shows and they're hard to do. And I think the easiest thing to do is to say, oh, I have an idea for a great TV show.
Okay, everybody does, right? That's not interesting. What's interesting is what's the finished product? And so because my relationship with creativity gets back to my relationship with a verb and time, I feel like I can navigate procrastination really well because I don't have the
white whale of the book on my shoulders that I need to work on my book or whatever in the sitting. It's like, no, I need to commit 30 minutes. Anybody can do that. And so it's taking the pressure off of yourself from like getting to this magical finish line and just saying, can you commit to the verb?
And so I noticed when I struggle or I have a block, a lot of times it's, I'm not admitting, or I haven't realized that I'm either uncomfortable with the topic. It's an old idea that I haven't, right. I haven't changed. There are times to be honest, I'll write a blog post because I feel like I need to.
And I'll write something that I think is lazy. And then my brain will be like, I won't know what's going on, but I'm procrastinating. And it's like, my brain is telling me, Basam, this is a little lazy and I'm afraid to admit it. And so, or I'm obsessed with a sentence that I think is really cool,
but it's actually a contradictory point. And so I think for a lot of us, it's getting down to kind of like that motivation. Why am I doing this thing? And anytime I feel discomfort or I feel like, why am I spitting my tires here? I've set up tripwires for myself to just reflect.
Whereas I think some other folks who maybe haven't dealt with it that much will waste days or weeks or whatever it is. People say, for instance, writing, Basama, I want to write a book. And I say, no, no, no, that's too much pressure. You think you want to write a book. Forget about this 80,000 word book.
That's insane. Can you write 500 words a day for two weeks, right? Try that. And I've had a lot of people try it and they're like, that sucked. I don't like that. And I'm like, great. You don't want to write a book. That is success. You win. Honestly, yay for you because writing a book is really hard.
And it's this idea of an identity goal, right? Before you can write a book, you have to become the kind of person who can write a book. For instance, I'm just using that creative lens. And so I think a lot of times people are procrastinating because the verb they're trying to tackle is too big.
They haven't broken it down, right? They're trying to plan a party or they're trying to do that ultimate thing and say, well, what are the pieces of the party? Who am I inviting? Where do I want it to be? And just kind of like start there. So it's like...
There are many ways to get out of your own way. Break down the verb into a smaller verb or figure out what is it that you're uncomfortable with. So those are two things that helped me.
This is incredible. I love breaking down the verbs and being in the verb. Like you've said this multiple times and also the success of knowing that maybe writing a book is not the thing. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting.
Definitely. And think about that. Think of the joy for someone who's put this pressure on themselves that they want to have a book. Because sure, it's cool. You get to say you did it, blah, blah, blah. But if they have more joy in writing a newsletter or writing a blog every week or sharing that, magnificent.
Share your genius with the world in that way. That's amazing. My big thing is own your verbs. we all have commitments we have to do every day and we can't just own every verb we want and do whatever we want every day. But Hey, there are certain, like I said, 30 minutes, 60 minutes,
90 minutes a day where you get to own that verb of what you want to do, you know, putting boundaries up and all that kind of thing. Commit to the commitment. You know, I think that's, I mean, it works in marriage. It works in creativity. Like just commit to the commitment every day.
I told my wife, like this idea of promising till death do us part. I think it's uncommittedly Commitable to you don't know that you can't promise that but I can commit to today do us part and tomorrow I can re up on that and say till today do us part right
show up every day show up every day till till death do us part is lazy because you're not committing. So I think I kind of just that idea of like. How are you showing up today? How are you making somebody smile today? How are you, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you do. I so appreciate you. How can we find you? How can we support you? How can we work with you?
Oh, thank you. So on that personal side, my website is, it's nice having a unique name. It's just Bassam.com, B-A-S-S-A-M.com. That's the easiest place to find me. I have links to my website for financial advising. If anybody ever wanted to talk about that, Instagram, Twitter is Bassam Tarazi. But most of my writing is just via my blog.
It's where you can find me. And there's not many Bassams out there. So even if you jumbled my name and can't get it right, if you try typing Bassam Tarazi to Google how you hear it, you'll see a bunch of my stuff there.
Thanks so much for tuning in to Nourishing Creativity. You can find me Chef Carla Contreras across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. While you have your phone out, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. This is how others find this show. I really appreciate your support.
Sending you and yours so much love.