One Role at a time

Bryant was born into modest circumstances, raised in a community where money was scarce but resilience was common. Looking back, he describes his childhood as “naïve but happy.” The less he knew about what he lacked, the freer he felt. He recalls running through the backyard at six years old with a towel around his neck, imagining himself as Superman. His mother, usually quick to scold him for dirtying household items, let him play that day. The memory has stayed with him as a symbol: the boy who didn’t know his limits, only the joy of believing he could fly .

By sixteen, Bryant was already working. His first job came through a friend at a hotel kitchen, and by seventeen, he was old enough to join a theme park as a summer worker. These jobs were not glamorous, but they set him on a path of responsibility and grit. For Bryant, work was never an abstract concept—he experienced it early as both necessity and opportunity.

When he joined 7EDU, the company was small. There were teachers and counselors, but no contracts, no payroll system, and little structure. Bryant stepped in where no one else could or would. What began as administrative support soon became human resources, business development, finance, and office management all rolled into one .

“I didn’t plan to get into education,” Bryant says. “For me, it was always business. I saw 7EDU as a business that happened to be in education. So I learned as I went along.” He likens it to swimming: you can read manuals forever, but only in the water do you really learn. For nearly a decade, he has been in the water, learning stroke by stroke.

One of Bryant’s more unusual challenges has been his youthful appearance. With a jawline his dentist once described as unusually small, Bryant looks years younger than his age. At thirty, parents and students often asked if he had even graduated from college. Authority, he found, is not just competence but perception.

Rather than resent this, Bryant reframed it. “When I’m seventy, people might say I look forty,” he jokes. Still, he admits it hasn’t always been easy to be taken seriously. For someone responsible for contracts, hiring, and business decisions, looking perpetually twenty can complicate first impressions.

Over time, Bryant’s work became more than a job. “I don’t consider this a job anymore,” he says. “It’s almost like a part of who I am now. My identity is tied to it.” The shifting, unpredictable nature of his role—new projects, new challenges, no stable flow—has kept him engaged. He sees difficulty not as something to escape but as the ground of growth.

He plans eventually to hand off human resources and finance to others with deeper expertise, but for now, his job is to build systems sturdy enough to be passed on. He envisions himself leading more toward management as the company grows. Retirement, in the conventional sense, is not part of his vocabulary. “If I’m sixty or seventy and I find something fulfilling, why would I stop? Retirement doesn’t make sense if you’re already doing what you enjoy.”

Bryant initially studied architecture before realizing the long hours of drafting weren’t for him. He shifted into business, balancing work and study with little time for the typical college life. “It was just a very busy period where I had to manage every hour of the day,” he recalls. “That’s when I really learned time management and work ethic.”

To future students, his advice is simple: don’t fear hard work. “Hard work never ends. If you think you’re done after high school or college, you’re mistaken. Life just shifts into new kinds of work. So if you can embrace it early, you’ll be better prepared for what comes next.”

Bryant acknowledges that not every path requires college. Some succeed without it, especially if they already know exactly what they want to build. But for most, he believes, college remains valuable—not only for knowledge but for testing different paths, meeting people, and expanding vision.

That theme of perspective runs throughout his reflections. Childhood poverty didn’t feel like poverty because everyone around him lived the same way. Work at sixteen didn’t feel like a burden because it opened doors. Even his youthful looks—at times a frustration—he reframes as an advantage in the long run.

What ties Bryant’s story together is not just persistence but imagination. The boy in the backyard with a towel for a cape never disappeared. He surfaces whenever Bryant confronts a difficult project or uncertain future. “That kid wanted to be Superman,” Bryant says. “So many of the things I do now, I do because of him. He didn’t know what his limits were. And now I know more about what’s possible.”

Bryant still works; his life has become a testament to adaptability. He entered education by accident, built systems from scratch, overcame the challenge of perception, and found identity in work. His story reminds us that a career is rarely a straight line; more often, it is a series of roles we take on until they stitch into who we are.