Tucker Bryant was obsessed with poetry in college. He was so obsessed that he would spend all his time writing it instead of studying. But he didn’t care, because all he wanted to do was write great poems.
And so, he did. With a quick YouTube search of ‘Tucker Bryant’, you can watch some of his spoken word performances from his college years, full of angst and emotion. The videos themselves have now racked up more than a million views (my favorite is this one called ‘Facts About Myself’).
But eventually, college ended, and Tucker saw that all the friends around him had internships at big-name companies like JP Morgan, Facebook, the list goes on. Meanwhile, he had spent all his time “writing flowery words about Jasmine tea and shit” (those were his words exactly). So, with that, he decides to drop the poetry thing, concluding that it won’t get him anywhere. Instead, he throws himself into corporate work. Sure enough, three years later, he’s made his way into perhaps the biggest-name tech company of them all: Google.
But that’s not where Tucker’s story ends. After nearly 4 years of working as a product marketing manager at Google, he decides to quit his job. He makes this decision after feeling like he’s doing unfulfilling work, that an outsized amount of his time was being spent navigating the bureaucracy of a big company instead of doing the actual work, and that the political nature of climbing the corporate ladder was making it hard to be himself.
Instead, he chooses to pivot into something that he’s been attempting to pursue on the side for several months: keynote speaking. He had started keynote speaking somewhat organically as colleagues heard about his poetry background, but at this point, he had only done a couple speaking gigs at company events. It was far from a full-time profession. But in the middle of the pandemic, desperately craving work that gave him a better chance to be himself, he decides to pursue keynote speaking full-time.
Today, Tucker Bryant is a full-time poet and keynote speaker who works with organizations that are under pressure to innovate. He delivers performances that help them see the “connections between poetic thinking and innovation” and “get better in touch with their ability to drive disruptive thinking.” He’s carved his own niche, his own career path, his own unique value, and one that comes from both his years of poetry in college and his years of corporate work at Google. Today, he does work that he loves, that allows him to express himself creatively, all while still earning a healthy income.
I first met Tucker at a panel for a tech organization I’m part of at UC Berkeley, and my first thought was “who the heck is this guy and how did he get here?”. I’ve always found his journey incredibly interesting, and it resonates with me as a Computer Science major at UC Berkeley who has spent years pursuing music professionally. I’ve been fortunate enough to speak to him on many different occasions (I think we’re friends now) and ask him countless questions about what he’s learned from his career path. Here are the things that stood out to me the most from our recent conversation:
Our visions of success are often based on a narrow frame of reference. Tucker talked about how growing up, he had a narrow frame of reference and imagination when it came to the ways to make an impact and make money. He couldn’t have even imagined the kind of work he is doing now.
The environment you’re in can greatly contribute to this narrow frame of reference. Tucker describes the fever pitch of tech and the Silicon Valley environment and how intensely revered it is. When you’re in this kind of environment, it can be easy to forget that working in tech (or whatever it is that your environment is focused on) is not the only reality that’s possible.
It’s not true that the only way to make money is the way that everybody else is making money. Tucker himself is proof that this is possible. There are lots of ways to make money that don’t involve working at a tech company, even if that was hard for him to see when he was working at Google.
There are so many people that are doing things that you can’t imagine being relevant to you until years down the line, hence the importance of meeting people. An example from his own life was Kai Kight, someone he met in 2019 who was doing work as an innovation keynote speaker and violinist. He swears that he wouldn’t be doing the work he was doing now, had it not been for that one conversation with Kai. His advice is to take an interest in what other people are doing, which makes your possibilities – and frame of reference – as wide as possible.
Experience new things because you won’t know their relevance until you look back. One of the biggest examples from his own life is his work at Google. If he had attempted to pursue poetry full-time after grad, he never would have experienced work that gave him valuable skills and experience that he uses in his career today.
He doesn’t think he could have decided to pursue creative work full-time had it not been for his corporate experience. Some people have zero curiosity or desire to experience corporate work and that’s great. But that wasn’t the case for Tucker. In the end, he’s glad that his decision to pursue keynote speaking came from the experience of having gone into tech. He doesn’t think he could have imagined what he would have gotten out of it had he not done it.
Observe connections between different areas. We often see our different interests as disparate and unrelated, which is how Tucker saw things when he decided to stop writing poetry and pursue corporate work. But at some point while he was at Google, he noticed that the high-level visionary thinking that his leaders were trying to do was very similar to how poets have been trying to think for the past thousands of years. Seeing this connection between two seemingly disparate areas eventually led him to the work he does now.
We are often anchored to one idea of what we’re going to be doing for so long that we are unable to see a different reality. Tucker described the way our brains slowly nurture an idea again and again for years of our life. As a result, when opportunities come up – like meeting people doing things we can’t imagine or experiencing something new – we might not even give them a second thought.
Find asymmetric bets (especially if you’re risk-averse). When I asked Tucker his biggest advice for people contemplating corporate vs. creative career paths, this was his advice. He defines asymmetric bets as bets where the cost of things going wrong doesn’t hurt you that badly, but if things go right, the benefit could be astronomic. When he quit his job at Google, he was making an asymmetric bet. He knew that he’d lose money in the short-term, but that he could come back to Silicon Valley if it really didn’t work out. On the other hand, if it worked out, he knew he’d be way happier.
Leaving my conversation with Tucker, I felt excited and energized as I always do. In particular, the pivots and unpredictable nature of his career path made me feel hopeful rather than stressed about my own future and the work I’m pursuing. But more than anything else, what stood out from our conversation was the way all the dots had connected in his career path. His advice speaks to the power of being proactively open-minded and curious, and trusting that through that, it will all work out.