We got Bryant's title wrong.
If you’ve been reading the daily stories I’ve been sharing and noticing the personal relationships Olatunde Sobomehin and I have with the folks featured in Creative Hustle, by this point you might be asking, “Did these guys just write a book featuring all their friends?!?” The answer is: No, we have way more than nine friends :).
The more serious answer is that one of the main things that motivated us to create the Creative Hustle course and write the book was that it felt unfair to us that we had access to such brilliant people. Like I took a walk around Oakland yesterday with one of the people featured in the book. I left with a full heart and mind, with fresh inspiration and ideas, with new moves to add to my creative hustle playbook. So Olatunde and I could be greedy and keep all these gems to ourselves, but we’d rather find ways to share them.
To that end, I wanna tell yall a bit more about the person I took a walk with yesterday, bryant terry . Bryant has been low-key coaching me on my creative hustle for over a decade. When I was first gearing up to write Hip Hop Genius I had no idea how to write a book or even a book proposal. Bryant generously shared recommendations for how to carve out time to write and how to put together a book proposal, and he shared a particularly cool idea that has stuck with me ever since (you’ll have to pick up Creative Hustle to catch that one!).
But what I wanna tell you about in this article is what I realized we got wrong in the chapter we wrote about him. Bryant is not really a cookbook author or chef or publisher as we proclaimed in the subtitle of the chapter. I mean, he is all of those things, but a more accurate and holistic description of his role in the world would have been to say: He is an artist.
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He has long worked in multimedia multi-sensory ways. His books not only offer recipes and essays, they include musical selections and beautiful photography. For his last book, Black Food, he commissioned braided hair to accompany a dish and 3D-printed crockery to display a dessert. The whole thing is popping—conceptually and aesthetically.
This year, Bryant is an Artist Fellow/Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley as a member of the second cohort of Abolition Democracy Fellows, where he is bringing the same level of intention, craft, and creativity that he brings to his books to the creation of full scale gallery installations.
I can't wait to see the installations. And I can't wait for you to read Bryant's story and take away actionable ideas for how to engage others in co-designing your next moves.
I'm curious if you relate to the idea of being known for one thing that might really be a part of who you are, but not the whole picture... How has your role in the world been misunderstood? If you could take an eraser and a marker to your title right now, what would you change it to say?
Founder & CEO at Purple Haus | Speaker | Author | Producer
2 年First things first: What a great way to honor the friends and teachers who have inspired and informed your own creative journey, sam! Can't wait to get my copy of the book. To answer your question, I've been thinking a lot about identity after sunsetting my brand, She Thinks Purple. Over the past few years, many people have come to know me as an entrepreneur, storyteller, author, social impact leader etc, and I think it's because those have been paths most aligned to my true essence, as a creator and builder, that would also pay the bills. I like making things that make life better for others, and I believe people like me who need to make a living end up with many different hustles and titles along the way.