Life. Life is never stable. Every moment of our existence is unique: our bodies, our emotions, the people and world around us are in a conjunction that will never occur again. For me, personal growth means staying in touch with the moment and responding to it. We only get one shot at this, with no promise of tomorrow. If we don’t make the most of it — grow and contribute — what is the point?
Growth is an essential part of life, both personally and professionally. Every day presents an opportunity to learn, evolve, and become better versions of ourselves. But how do we seize these opportunities? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bob Gossom.
Bob Gossom is a poet, playwright, and former film industry professional whose eclectic life has spanned filmmaking, tech entrepreneurship, and decades of quiet literary creation. After years of working behind the scenes, Gossom brought The Human Equation, a poetry collection adapted into a stage performance and performance-capture film, into public view. His work, shaped by influences such as Whitman, Diane Wakoski, and the Beats, blends raw introspection with a crafted voice, often performed in layered, mixed-voice readings that bring the written word to life.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
My dad was a dentist and a career Navy officer. Our house was mostly scientific, with an underlay of military influence. As a Navy brat, I largely grew up on Navy and Marine bases around the country. Most people have a childhood home; I had childhood furniture. Once our living room couch was placed, we were home. If my folks had a religion, it was family. My older brother, younger sister, and I follow in their footsteps. We’re close, and we still vacation together with our extended families.
I became an addicted reader at a young age. I consumed novels. I got in trouble in the 8th grade for doing a book report on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. My Mom read the teacher’s note, smiled, and said, “This won’t be a problem.” It wasn’t.
I had some incredible teachers at Annapolis Senior High School. A junior year American Literature teacher gave me poetry when he spent about six weeks on Walt Whitman and another three to four weeks on the Beat poets of the 1950s. There was a smattering of Dickinson, W.C. Williams, and Wallace Stevens. I’ve been writing poetry ever since. In a senior-year literary class, we went through Crime and Punishment page by page and did table reads of Ionesco and Albee. I’m fascinated by theatre to this day.
I went to college in California in 1970. My college professors seemed more intent on sucking the life from books than teaching them. We didn’t get along. I left college, lived dangerously, returned to college, and started my adult life.
Can you tell us a bit about what you do professionally and what brought you to this specific career path?
Wow! I feel like I’ve lived three or four different lives. However, since you ask, after a somewhat wayward youth, I returned to college and earned a BA in American Studies from American University in Washington, DC. I headed to Los Angeles to break into the film business. After several years, I was working as an assistant director and line producer, primarily on feature films. I pursued an MBA to facilitate a move to producing my own shows, but lost a marriage and found myself a single dad. I segued into business consulting, where I had control of my schedule and could still be a hands-on father. This shifted into programming to solve problems for clients that had no other available solutions.
For most of my life, if you’d asked me at a party, “What do you do?” my answer would be what you expect: “Yada, yada, films, blah, blah, blah, software.” If you engaged me and asked what I cared about, I’d have said I write poetry. If you pursued further and asked what I was working on, I’d have pulled a poem out of my left back pocket and either read it to you or, generally, have walked away while you read it yourself. There are few more awkward moments in life than watching someone read your poem. Americans are entirely obsessed with linking how people put food on the table with who they are. Today, if I tell people I’m a poet, the general response is “But how do you make money?” Well, in today’s world, that’s a reasonable question to ask a poet, but few people understand how meaningless and boring that question is to a poet.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Personal Growth. To make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does “Personal Growth” mean to you?
Life.
This answer seems clear to me. Life is never stable. Every moment of our existence is unique: our bodies, our emotions, the people and world around us are in a conjunction that will never occur again. For me, personal growth means staying in touch with the moment and responding to it. We only get one shot at this, with no promise of tomorrow. If we don’t make the most of it — grow and contribute — what is the point?
Why do you believe that it’s important to commit to growing every day?
The question for me, at any given moment, isn’t, “how am I growing?” But “How am I living?” Perhaps today isn’t really about my growth, but about making my wife smile because I cleaned out the garage or brought her home flowers after doing the shopping. It isn’t always about me or you. This doesn’t negate the obligation also to prioritize yourself, to follow your own dreams and visions. But for me, life is about paying attention to the moment; sometimes it’s me and my growth. Sometimes it isn’t. Or is that simply a different way to grow?
What are the key upsides for those who mindfully engage in a journey of personal evolution?
Excitement.
I think the answer to this question is revealed when you flip it around. What is the downside of not engaging mindfully in your journey through life? Answer: A boring life. But a “boring life” shouldn’t be construed as a requirement that we must have continual thrills and adventures to live deeply.
Paramahansa Yogananda, the yogi and spiritual teacher, often referred to the spiritual depth of “householders.” He was referring to those who find spirituality in providing for a family, a household, a community. This was deeply reassuring to me in my younger days, as I found myself leaving one career behind, committing deeply to providing a household for my daughter, while also realizing that I wasn’t going to be acclaimed as the next Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A deep and meaningful life comes from within, and paying attention to the wonders that are presented to you. The excitement from a murmuration of thousands of birds folding over a field can exceed a rollercoaster ride, if you look up and notice it.
When we stop evolving in intentional ways, what do you think are the biggest downsides?
Drift.
The danger isn’t dramatic failure. It’s that you wake up one day to find yourself in a life, a situation, you never intended for yourself. This isn’t about achieving great things, as discussed above, but about not handling the details of your life “greatly.” We can never achieve perfection: The perfect marriage, the perfect parent/child relationship, the perfect friendship. But we can, if we apply ourselves, do better.
What specific practices, if any, do you have in place to ensure that you don’t become stagnant in life?
Everything is creative.
I’ve never separated quantitative from creative thought. I’ve spent much of my life dealing with hard practicalities — as we all do. Whether wrangling a film set, crunching sales numbers for a client, or paying for groceries while starting a new business as a single dad, there has never been a moment when creativity hasn’t enhanced my ability to solve a problem. My practice for staying creative is to pay attention to the details. If you do, life itself gives you every opportunity to stay engaged.
Is there any particular area of your life where you are most committed to growth (e.g., spiritually, professionally, socially, internally, relationally)?
Family.
I see my personal growth reflected in my relationships with my wife, my daughters, my grandchildren, brother, sister, nieces, nephews, friends. This is where my measure of success lies. I neglected to mention above a couple of business and creative failures, but my first marriage ending in my 30s was the largest blow to my self-esteem that I ever received; it was much worse than any professional failure. My path forward was to commit fully to being the best father I could be to my five-year-old daughter; to embrace my changed life and priorities to the fullest.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. If you could offer five tips to readers on how to stimulate and perpetuate self-growth, what would they be? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1 . Stay curious. Pay attention to facts and the reality that surrounds you.
It may seem counterintuitive to propose following the facts to spur creativity, but the world and people around us are filled with more fantastic and surprising creations than any of us can imagine. Both observation and study of the world as it exists can lead to endless creative insights.
On a lazy afternoon in my twenties, I was quietly enjoying a Tequila Sunrise, a drink made from orange juice, tequila, and grenadine. You pour the grenadine in last, and it’s heavier, so it falls to the bottom, creating a visually beautiful concoction: Bright red at the bottom, gradually fading upwards to the orange of the juice. As I was contemplating the drink and the afternoon, I realized I had no idea what grenadine was. This was before the Internet, but I had the popular Columbia Encyclopedia. At 6 inches tall, it wasn’t bound, but bolted together so that new inserts could be added. I looked up grenadine and discovered it wasn’t one thing; it could be made from either pomegranates or currants. So I looked up pomegranates, and learned about their “acidic fruit pulp.” I also came across a fleeting reference to the ancient Greeks’ Eleusinian religious rites. I looked them up, of course, but was left with a mystery: The rites had been important in Greek spiritualism for thousands of years, but the details have been lost to time.
It took me just a moment to realize I had all of the elements of a poem. A casual inquiry, “What the heck is grenadine?” became the stepping stones to one of my favorite verses.
ELUSIVE MYSTERIES
I thought today of pomegranates
lying on the ground
Tranquil, immutable
or pouring, pouring down
The grenadine tracks its way
to the bottom, just to rise.
It can be made from many things, they say
I admit the pomegranate’s mine
But I’ll take my grenadine any way,
so long as I get the rise
Pomegranates have an acidic fruit pulp
and cast the devil to despair,
throwing his lady away from him
to dance in the open air.
You see, she ate one once
during a timely state of affairs.
The pomegranate makes grenadine
and lets you dance in the open air
Come float with me and my tequila today
as the grenadine helps the rise
An infamous drink if ever, they say
come share my tequila sunrise
Grenadine is heavier, so it falls
to the bottom of orange juice, tequila, and ice
But stir, sip, pleasure, and sway
to know the rising and dancing and drinking today
“Elusive” in the title is not the intent,
but pomegranates have a nature
which helps man invent
The Greeks had a world, to make things clear,
and, as their many mysteries unfold:
the elusive Eleusinian rites
have never been known;
always sought for, never told
It’s a town, 13 miles away
from Athens, of the great classical sway.
The pomegranate’s their symbol — don’t ask why –
but it reappears in the mysterious Tequila Sunrise
It frees the devil’s lady
It falls in the glass
We sing
we rise
we dance
2. Pay attention to what you think about, particularly what keeps recurring.
As thoughts revolve through my mind, I’ve always found it productive to notice what keeps coming back. “Wow, I’ve been thinking a lot about erosion lately? What’s up with that?”
A number of years ago, my Father died suddenly on Christmas Eve. He was 89 and had been declining, but it was unexpected and instant. He’d lived a wonderful life, so the grief was tempered by contemplation. He and my Mom lived in Santa Barbara, a couple of hours from my home in Los Angeles. The next day, as I drove up to be with her, thoughts and emotions were, of course, swirling through my mind and body. But I kept thinking about a story my brother, Burk, had told me 15 years before. He lives on a lake and had seen an eagle confused by a catfish frozen in the lake, thinking it was live prey. As I thought about my father, my mom, our family, my mind just kept coming back to this story. I got annoyed at its intrusiveness, but then stopped and paid attention. Why was this story pushing itself to the front of my mind? It took just a moment to realize why.
I watch the eagle
slam into the lake
Stunned, and then scrambling
across the slippery ice
She struggles and climbs
bleeding into the air
She steadies, circles, perches, and an hour later
slams down hard again
Testing in front of me
I make my way out
To a see a catfish frozen
into the ice
I spend a long time there
still, with the fish
Back on shore I go to the shed and
take the small pick
On the ice again
I chop at the surface
It cracks a little but
I mar the hard ice
I don’t stop until the dead catfish
can not be seen
Freeing the eagle
from its confusion
Between what is alive and
what is gone
I return to the house
and sit by the window
Watching the lake for
a few more hours
My wife asks
am I OK?
I say yes, and then
I say no
She understands because last night
my father died
3. Surround yourself with creative people.
We all have our limits and blinders. We’re good at some things, and not others. In 2024, a stage production based on my work was directed by Sonny Lira. Letting Sonny bring my poems to life was a revelation. He took my verses to places I never imagined visiting. Places that, at first, seemed crazy. I have a poem about a young person being fitted for a suit and feeling like a fraud. Person is in italics because, of course, in my mind, this was a quintessential male experience. It was based on a visit to a high-end tailor in Hong Kong, where I felt entirely out of place. Sonny cast a young woman, Jeannette Scrinivasan, for the part, and she killed it. It never would have occurred to me to cast a woman in that role.
4. Keep your history. Archive your failures.
Later, you’ll discover that your lesser work is actually brainstorming. When I was 18, I wrote a poem about a dog caught up in a dog catcher’s net. The poem was OK, which, for me, doesn’t cut it. But I always liked the first two lines: “Trotting freely down the road/A speckled dog knows no fear.” Years later, I was working on a series of poems exploring the concept of frontiers. I used those opening lines for a much better poem, one with a much more seasoned perspective.
5. Wait for it.
Deadlines and desperation can force creativity, but I’ve had the best results from letting go. My most creative thoughts happen when I allow them to come to me. This is a corollary of #2 above — paying attention to what you think about. Let your mind go. Wait for the ideas to come. Pay attention when they do.
6. Follow your own rules [You asked for five, but I have one more]
Creativity by its very nature is unique. We find our own voice and make our unique contributions by following what moves us. Before Mark Rothko, if someone had said, “I’m going to change the art world by painting huge red canvases,” they’d have received a very cold shoulder.
In a similar way, I’ve found my own rules for poetry. I don’t hear words as syllables. I get entirely turned around by trying to write or scan a poem by syllables. I hear sounds and tongue/lip articulation. “Task” to me is three sounds, not one syllable. (The “t,” the vowel, and the back of the tongue “k”) When I write, I pay meticulous attention to creating rhythm, but I match words by how they sound and fit together, not by how many syllables they are. My work is properly described as free verse, but I’ve never felt that any word or line was free; they are all bound tightly together by sound, articulation, meaning, and nuance.
What advice would you give to someone who feels stuck and unsure of how to start their personal growth journey?
It feels presumptuous of me to advise someone else on their personal journey. That said, the best thing I can think of is to say “yes.” You may feel stuck, but life is offering you opportunities every moment. If you feel stuck, throw out your rules and preconceptions about what you can and can’t do, what you are good at — even what you like and don’t like. Commit yourself to saying “yes” the next time someone asks you for a favor, or an “impossible” idea rolls through your mind.
Are there any books, podcasts, or other resources that have significantly contributed to your personal growth?
I came of age before podcasts, or the modern explosion of media, so for me it was books, and occasionally films. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is what blew my mind open. I remember sitting in an English class in high school. The teacher had given us free time, so I pulled out Whitman and began reading “I Sing the Body Electric.” It’s one of his famous “cataloging” poems, where he lists things, wonderful things. Here, he was exalting the physicality of the human body. I was a teenager with little to no interpersonal experiences and was reading with openness and yearning. Then I hit the lines:
“There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well. All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
To me, a sonic boom rolled through the room, rumbling my chest. I looked around in wonder at the kids sitting at their desks, looking down at their books. How could they be doing that? Hadn’t the moment burst through me to everyone around? Had I cried out? It seemed I had, but no one was reacting. I was so full, I don’t know how I made it through the rest of the class. I tried to read more, but could only breathe and stay inconspicuous — not shout at them, “Don’t you know? You have to read this!”
Yes, I have strained several friendships and lost acquaintances by putting a page of poetry in front of them unexpectedly. I’ve learned to restrain myself…generally.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
My first thought on reading this prompt was a parable told by Jiddu Krishnamurti.
“You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, ‘What did that man pick up?’ ‘He picked up a piece of Truth,’ said the devil. ‘That is a very bad business for you, then,’ said his friend. ‘Oh, not at all,’ the devil replied, ‘I am going to help him organize it.’”
Krishnamurti told this parable in the speech where he disbanded The Order of the Star in the East, a movement formed around him to improve the world.
Movements can have immensely positive effects on the world, but the attitude that I, or anyone, is in a position to direct people on how to improve their lives is one of the biggest problems of all. In the end, there is too much telling and not enough improving.
I try to implement this in my work. I’ve always veered away from what I call the “Poet’s Fallacy.” This is the idea that a poet feels more deeply than other people, or has something to teach people. Yes, I may have some unusual responses to words and sounds, but that doesn’t mean I love my mother any more than you do, or know more about life. It simply means I have an affinity for words and an ability to use them effectively.
My work is focused on capturing common, everyday moments and describing them in a way that sparks recognition in the reader. Where we feel, for a moment, connected. My dream is that this connection allows us to see each other as fellow travelers in this life. Perhaps we’ll be a bit kinder the next time someone doesn’t see us when they change lanes on the freeway?
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Website: https://bobgossom.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bobgossom/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VersesBG/
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Growing Every Day: Bob Gossom On What We Can Do To Grow Every Day was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.