The Poet’s Keys With Tucker Bryant

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

There are things businessmen and women, innovators, and professionals can learn from poets. They need to understand the poet’s keys. These are things like staying curious, questioning tradition, or it’s okay to be imperfect. These keys can help the everyday person do what they love with even more passion. Join John Livesay as he talks to poet and keynote speaker, Tucker Bryant. Learn more about the Poet’s Keys and how it can help you push your craft forward. Discover life through the lens of a poet and start living it with curiosity.

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The Poet’s Keys With Tucker Bryant

In this episode, our guest is Tucker Bryant, who’s known as The Poet’s Key. We talk about those keys so that you can find your inner poet. He said that when you stay curious, there are a lot of things leaders and poets have in common. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Tucker Bryant, who learned during a decade spent between Stanford and Google something that surprised him that even people on the cutting edge of innovation often struggle to take a risk. The truth is we all want to step out of our comfort zones but we have comfort so deep-seated that we aren’t aware they even exist.

Our instinct to protect that unconscious comfort suffocates our creativity, disengages us from our work and stunts our ability to lead. As a nationally renowned poet and storyteller, Tucker’s experience in Silicon Valley has driven him to pursue and answer one question. How can we tear down the comfort zones that keep businesses from writing their best poetry?

Tucker delivers keynote performances that reveal how the poet’s keys enable leaders to overcome our universal barriers to change and unlock the doors to innovation in the area of our business that needs it most. His work, which has garnered millions of views online, has been featured at TEDx, New York Times and other organizations around the globe. He’s had the privilege of sharing a stage graced by Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, Magic Johnson, as well as many other Fortune 500 companies. Tucker, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, John. It’s a pleasure to be here and I appreciate the warm introduction.

You’ve had quite the journey. Before we get into that, let’s start at the beginning of the journey of your story. We can take us back to high school before Stanford, wherever you want to start and start talking about where you discovered that you have the skill to be a poet.

I’m still figuring out whether or not I do have the skill but I’ll pretend that I know it already. I grew up in England in a small town South of London for my upbringing from the age of 4 to 18. I was one of those kids that considered himself a highly rational person in high school. I don’t know if you have kids but anybody who’s reading who does have kids will know that phrase in the mouth of an eighteen-year-old boy roughly translates to an insufferable jerk in the making. I spent pretty much my entire high school career chasing all the grades, achievements and things that I thought would build me up like body armor if you looked at me on paper.

[bctt tweet=”Get out of your comfort zone by staying curious. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

When I left England to go to California for college, I had this moment on the flight realizing that I felt emotionally and personally unprepared to make this transition. The reason I felt that way is because I’ve been chasing this checklist of wins but I hadn’t been pursuing any of the deeper questions about what person I wanted to grow into, the questions that were messier and more ambiguous, personal and difficult.

I started freaking out. I thought about my older sister, who was an incredible artist and musician and who finds so much fulfillment and actualization in her art. On a whim, I was like, “I wonder what this could do for me.” I whipped out my notebook and start scribbling some words that, in retrospect, probably were barely legible, let alone poetic.

It was the first step in me seeing this other way of looking at the world that we often navigate without taking a lot of time to stop and investigate. That snowballed into this obsession that developed in college, where I was studying a lot less than I should have and writing a lot more than I needed to. It has become a pretty key part of my life and how I have integrated what I see as my identity now.

You’re coming from England to decide to come to California and get into Stanford. What is your major?

I study International Relations. Funnily enough, speaking about this old checklist of wins thing, I love to frame it as though that plane ride was like a turning point on which I never looked back and I was like, “I’m going to be my most authentic self.” We were talking about Alison Levine’s famous line about backing up doesn’t mean backing down.

I cannot put into perspective the fact that even though in the long-term sense, discovering poetry at that time was a transition towards exploring life in a way that felt more authentic to myself, it hasn’t been and continues to not be a straight path. This is a long way of saying I chose International Relations as a major because while I think I might have enjoyed creative writing a little bit more, I felt insecure about this thing that I had while all my classmates were going off and getting internships at JPMorgan and Facebook. Studying International Relations made me feel more like a suit, even though I wear sweats every day.

Cut to you’re working at Google, which is hard to get into, I imagine like Stanford too. You’re also known for numbers and analyzing everything under the sun. Creative writing and poetry are not exactly something that is easily measured, I would imagine. How did the Google experience happen? What were you doing there?

This insecurity of I want to prove myself in the corporate world came to a head at the end of my college career. When I was looking at my history, I saw that I hadn’t had these stunning internships at places like JPMorgan and Facebook. I’ve been writing flowery words about jasmine tea for the last few years and all my friends were going out to do other things. I felt this need to prove myself in that sense.

 

Mostly to myself and maybe also a little bit to the rest of the world. Motivated by that, I almost divorced myself from creative writing for a little bit. I went all in on learning as much about the tech industry as I could, learning as much about Google as I could, applying myself to that application process and then eventually getting hired as a Product Marketing Manager.

For those people who don’t know what that means, can you paint that picture a little bit? What product was it? Was it the maps?

Yes. A Product Marketing Manager is a marketer in a technology context. We deal in either brand marketing, which is writing the narrative of how products appear in places where they’re being sold or we do product marketing, which is what the messaging of the product looks like in the product. I floated around all three of those areas at various times during my Google career. I worked between the Google Assistant Team and then later the Privacy Team. I went from one end of the spectrum.

Did your poetry help you with that when you’re trying to figure out the right words to connect with people and get their break through the clutter of marketing?

Yeah. The funny thing is that I thought that I was starting that work to get away from the shameful passion of time-wasting and exploration that I had. It started to come back in opportunities related to how we do explore language to connect with our users and what the story of this product looks like on a scale that’s broader than an event or another event. That started to come up in ways that were subtle at first but then over time, there were a couple of people and managers who I guess had been exposed to my poetry at some point when finding out more about me. Opportunities to perform started to come up.

How did you become a speaker? Was it while you were working at Google? Did they ask you to give a talk?

Yes. It first happened when we had these team meetings for the Google Assistant that were team-wide and people would be brought up to do a show-and-tell type thing. I wanted to talk a little bit about my art but in doing that, I realized I wanted to explore poetry from a perspective that people in the audience might relate to in thinking about the things that a poet has to do to push their craft forward and keep themselves on a path evolution. I noticed that there were a few habits and behaviors that leaders and innovators strive to incorporate into their work as well. It’s things like remaining curious and questioning tradition.

By exploring some of these things that poets do every time they pick up their pen from the lens of how these behaviors might be relevant to a person who’s trying to drive sales or become a greater leader and support their teams in more effective ways, it unlocked this world of these two worlds that seem super disparate are super related and they can learn a lot from one another. That opened Pandora’s box and since then, I’ve been following down this rabbit hole of what can a leader or an innovator learn from a poet that can help them do what they love better.

[bctt tweet=”Let go of perfectionism. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

You have what you call the poet’s keys. There are five of them. Let’s briefly touch on each one. The first one is staying curious. A poet wants to come up with something no one else has ever said or say in a way that no one’s ever said before. The same thing to a leader. You can’t keep saying the same thing to your team and expect them to hear it as something fresh. Staying curious. One of the things I’ve seen is that this is what keeps people young.

My friends of mine that are older have endless curiosity about life. They may not need to understand everything about an NFT and blockchain but they’re curious enough to know what the heck it is, as opposed to, “I’m not going to learn anything anymore.” Even if you’re working at a high-tech company, whatever skills you come in with, you still have to keep learning. That concept of, “When I got out of school, I’m not going have to learn anything or be curious,” that’s the opposite, correct?

You’ve hit the nail on the head. There are two ways that I think about the role that curiosity plays, both of which are related to what you said. The first is that we sometimes find comfort in our tunnel vision. When we get set in our routines, whether that’s at work or with our hobbies at home, we’re not pushed to investigate parts of our world that might have something new for us to explore.

Being willing to violate that is important in this regard. Separately, there’s this woman named Julia Cameron who wrote this seminal book called The Artist’s Way that’s intended to get books. You’re familiar with this book. For the readers, her goal is to rehabilitate people who are in touch with their artistry or creativity or don’t think they deserve the label of an artist.

If you can’t paint a portrait, forget it. You can’t be an artist. Anyone can be an artist. For me, when I took photojournalism and the professor said, “Photography is painting with light,” I went, “I’m in. I can’t paint a picture but I can take pictures with changing lighting and make that,” so I understand that concept. Let’s jump into the second one, which is tied to tradition. Describe what that is.

This is the idea of figurative thinking, which is a little bit easier.

I’ve not heard that word very much. I’ve heard creativity but not figurativity.

You might not hear it that much more because it’s hard to say, considering you stick to figurative thinking. The way that I framed this key is through the question of what can a leader, an innovator or a professional learn from a metaphor. The way I’d answer that question is by sharing that poets and writers use metaphors that often combine two things that seemingly don’t go together like poetry and innovation.

Unless we’re willing to challenge our conceptions and assumptions about what’s possible, we’re never going to be able to unlock the full range of possibilities that we could be in touch with. In the context of business, being willing to engage in this moonshot thinking where we ask ourselves not why the things that we want to do are unlikely to work.

What if they did that? We can end up finding our way towards either positive principles that are associated with our wild dreams or ways to get somewhere that might not be quite as far as the moon but still unlock something new and fresh. Being willing to question the traditions that tell us that there’s a certain way things are done and straying from those realms isn’t to be done, we can unlock a whole range of possibilities in the work that we do.

I can feel the readers saying, “Why haven’t you asked him to give a little sample of one of his poems already?” Is there a little sample? When I heard you speak in that form, I was blown away. Is there anything that comes to mind from one of your talks? Can you give us a little excerpt to whet our appetite of tying in curiosity and getting out of this tunnel vision?

I will share with you a poem that I wrote about mice, strangely enough. It’s about three minutes long, if that works for you.

That works.

“The African spiny mouse is a peculiar animal. After spending thousands of years at the butt end of every joke about the food chain, these creatures adopted a rather strange survival strategy. They became tougher by developing thinner skin. With flesh that could rip like soft tissue paper, these mice knew they could scurry into any situation, knowing that if they found themselves on the wrong side of a predator’s smile, they could jettison out of its jaws and grow the skin back in no time.”

“Now, this is not the only such miracle of adaptation. Tigers sharpen the black blades into their bodies to blend into the deep thicket of jungle. Salamanders reverse-engineered the blueprint to their own limbs so they could lose and grow them back. Giraffes committed to looking like giraffes because acacia leaves are apparently really good. These animals folded themselves into the shape of survival because they understood that the alternative to transforming was seizing to exist at all.”

“Now remind me again why we’d ever want to hide behind a shield of this is the way we’ve always done it. Why do we treat habit as a home whose doors are bolted from the outside? Why we’d let the distance from our pride to the ground scare us into standing still forever just so our knees never have to kiss the pavement? Fear is a bully. One that’s so as scarce as our ideas might come out crooked, that instead, we let them rot under our tongues. An imagination can only sit in the attic for so long before it becomes unrecognizable under all that dust.”

[bctt tweet=””Figurativity” is the ability to learn from a metaphor.” username=”John_Livesay”]

“Routine is a window between ourselves and a world waiting to be unraveled if we’re only willing to shatter what keeps us safe but instead, we treat our days like a run-on sentence. If we’re pausing to punctuate them, even though it’s often our questions that stand to leave the greatest marks. We all wish we could freeze time but change spills through us like a flood. Even the tightest fists can’t hold onto water.”

“I know you’re not mice but there is something we all might learn from an animal so willing to tangle with what scares it that we need thinner skin, not brains that protect us from ever getting hurt but bodies that know they can heal. The next time curiosity tugs at your sleeve, like a toddler with spring fever, take them out for ice cream. Go heavy on the sprinkles. When you hear an idea too large to fit in your head, stretch your imagination around it. Call it yoga for the mind.”

“If you don’t believe in magic, walk towards your doubts and watch them vanish from head to toe. Drag fear to the poker table and call it every bluff. Today is a slab of marble waiting for you to sculpt the future if you’re only willing to let what is crumble so nose dive into the unknown because the unknown is waiting. Its arms are wide, warm and ready to blanket you in the treasures of this world that are hidden but hoping to be dug up by no other hands on this earth but yours.”

Tucker, that’s incredible.

Thank you.

I can’t wait to read that again and soak it up. You have such artistry in your words and the choices that you make when you’re talking about this thin-skinned mouse, using that negative perception to its advantage. Instead of it being the obvious choice of being trapped in the predator’s mouth, it’s the predator’s smile.

Habit is a home that’s the door is bolted from the outside. We see, hear and feel it. The days that are like a run-on sentence, for anybody who loves English and words, we know we want to avoid that feeling and yet we’ve all had that Groundhogs Day experience of all my days goes run. I feel like I’m on this treadmill. You framed it in a new way and then you tie it into telling me again why we have to keep doing things the old way and we’re not curious anymore. Let’s be curious like a kid tugging at the sleeve and have all this brought up. I was transported. The fact that you can write that and deliver that in such a powerful way is such a gift.

I feel like you learned my poem better than I know it. I’m amazed by your listening skills.

That’s something I’ve honed in on myself because that’s one of the best gifts we can ever give someone. We all want to feel seen, heard and appreciated. The best way to do that is fully present and listen. That was the treat everybody was waiting for. Let’s get to the other three because I’m sure they’re curious to know what that is. One is tied to perfectionism and it has to do with our senses. Tell me how those two things tie together.

The subtitle for sensing, which is the third key, is imperfectionism. It’s this idea that especially as we are so inundated with the opportunity to optimize all of our choices, we know that we get more stressed out by having more opportunities to make decisions. We’re less productive when we have a lot to choose between. This filters into the way that we treat our work. When we have a grand vision for change, we often get stuck committing to a first step because the blank page threatens us with fears of what might happen if things go wrong and things of this nature.

If perfectionism is what causes that first draft fear, poets overcome it by embracing imperfection or thinking with our senses. Reaching the first thing that they can and committing to messing up in the process, recognizing that those screw-ups are an essential part of their journey from a rough draft to a finished piece as the things they stumble upon that they love. The hope is that by embracing imperfectionism, we end up exploring an abundance. By doing that, we maximize our opportunity to stumble upon something that is worth nurturing, even if all the rest of what we end up drafting is a crock.

I certainly have succumbed to the stress of perfectionism. It prevents so many people from doing anything. When I first launched this show years ago, the first episode is not as good as this one is. If you feel like you have to be perfect on the first draft, I’ve come up with a term called replacing perfectionism with progressionism where we all say, “I’m going to be someone who celebrates my progress.” We’re wired for that.

Fitbit, video games, everything’s about you’re on to the next level. If we let go of everything having to be perfect and say, “Am I better today than I was yesterday in any way, shape or form, fitness wise song-wise, speaking-wise, selling-wise, then that’s where I’m celebrating? It doesn’t have to hit the home run for me to be happy. I’m celebrating the progress and I work with teams on opening up their meetings that way.” Many meetings open up with the negative stuff. Let’s celebrate what the wins are and what the progress is we’ve made before we start solving problems. We get into musicality. I know that you also play guitar. Talk a little bit about that and how that unlocks a key.

Musicality is a fun one. It starts to deal with the notion that when we make changes, they can cause other people to be uncomfortable sometimes. If we’re leading them into new territory, that can be a scary thing. What I relate this to is we’ve all suffered through that one English class where we had to read that poem where the poet was doing something so esoteric and new with language that we get to the end of it. We’re like, “I don’t even want to try to decode this. This is wild to me. It’s so far out of my comfort zone that I want to curl back into my bed and listen to a Homer Simpson speech or something like that.”

 

What I found is that the poets who try to try to attack this unfamiliar territory don’t lose their readers, which is not always their goal but for the sake of us as leaders and innovative professionals, it should be. They’re folks who incorporate elements of music that they know the listener intuitively understands and can feel encouraged and reassured by.

Things like repetition, rhyme, rhythm and alliteration too apparently are things that can help the reader when walking down an unfamiliar stretch of territory feel like, “I’m not there with this change that we’re making. I don’t understand what’s going on with it yet but I am getting these signals that there is a hand being outstretched that I can hold and find some sense of home.”

The question that I would relate to folks who are considering how musicality is playing into their work is when is the last time in pushing for change they made sure to reassure the folks whom they’re bringing along with them and ensure that those folks feel encouraged while entering this new territory that might not have asked for even if it’s beneficial for them?

That reminds me of the lyrics. “Make your own music even if nobody else sings along.” The final one is performance. I’m in the Austin Gay Men’s Chorus and I had somebody in one of the rehearsals say to me, “I prefer the rehearsals to the performance.” I thought, “The whole goal is that we’re working so hard to make this where we can bring joy to other people but his performance anxiety is so high that he doesn’t enjoy it. That’s a fascinating way.” There are a lot of leaders that don’t enjoy speaking. It’s their least favorite part of their job. What is the key that you have to help people who might not feel so comfortable with this final step?

It relates to this concept that I’m sure that this person you were speaking to and a lot of leaders who don’t enjoy speaking end up deferring to in their fear of performing, which is we end up leading from a place of confidence. We end up trying to lean into the thing that makes us feel as strong as possible because that social validation is real. It’s a pressure that we all experience when we’re interacting with folks and we’re all on stage in some way or another.

[bctt tweet=”Lead from a place of confidence. Lean into the thing that makes you feel as strong as possible.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What I encourage folks to do is to ask themselves in that pressure to be confident or strong what are the “poems” that implicit pressure is causing us to avoid writing? How can we start incorporating small pieces of the authentic and vulnerable pieces of ourselves that we might have the instinct to walk away from? Whether those things are fears that we have or flaws that we bring to the stage, allow them to start to get incorporated into the interaction we have with other people in literal performance aspects.

What we are offering to the people who rely on us or who are benefiting from us is the most real version of ourselves that reassures the audience that it’s okay to have these vulnerable aspects of ourselves emerge. Also, to ensure that they’re getting more of you than you they would if you were only allowing them to interact with you through this perfected aperture on a screen or a state. That is something that I’m still working through, to be honest.

It goes full circle to what we were saying. What if you become a great performer? How would that impact your career? How would that impact the team? You have a topic on the poet’s keys that we’ve unlocked some of them. You also do a whole thing on Storycraft mastering. Is this helping them with their brand stories mostly?

This is more related to if you want to share a story orally with slides or go straight off the cuff. I already love workshopping folks’ oral rhetoric. That’s what the Storycraft mastering focuses on.

The best way to find you is your website, TuckerBryantSpeaks.com. Any last thoughts or quotes you want to leave us with?

I’m going to leave you with a line from one of my poets, Jericho Brown and I’ll let folks think about what it means to them instead of providing my interpretation. This poem is called Duplex. He writes, “A poem’s a gesture towards home. It makes dark demands that I call my home.”

Tucker, thanks for sharing your artistry and inspiring us all to find the poet within.

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m enjoying getting to speak to you.

 

Important Links

• Tucker Bryant
• The Artist’s Way
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Figurative Thinking, Imperfectionism, Musicality, Poetry, Staying Curious, The Poet's Keys