Life & Work with Will Cady

Today we’d like to introduce you to Will Cady.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I want to understand what moves people. I used to only mean that musically, but now I mean it mystically. The truth is, learning what makes people move and why was always a mystical pursuit for me, but it’s taken me a few decades of living to find the kind of honesty that helps me admit such a thought openly.

In 2018, I pushed open the door to a crystal shop in Silverlake and started taking one-on-one lessons with a psychic. I wanted to know if psychics were bonafide or bullshit.

I had fallen into a fast-growing career in marketing that was going surprisingly well for someone without any education in business. It dawned on me that my success as what marketers call a ‘creative strategist’ had come from what I had learned in my prior life as a professional musician. I had no MBA. No communications or business degree. I was a bassist; graduated from Berklee College of Music, toured regionally with some bands for a minute, and later traveled the world giving clinics at music conferences. I knew how music moves people – and I could tell you the theory behind why. That’s why marketers liked me. They want nothing more than to make people move. Musicians literally know-how.

Music had somehow given me an x-factor that put me into a position to launch the Los Angeles office for Reddit, a large and largely misunderstood online community platform with a rapidly growing business. The creative strategy team I had been asked to manage was a major driving force behind that growing business. The responsibility to lead felt like a high-wire act. I needed some new tricks. So I turned to the psychics.

It’s not that crazy of an idea if you think about it. I had learnt that x-factors come from unexpected backgrounds. Thinking differently. Music had gotten me that far, but what would be next? I had always been intrigued and I didn’t care whether or not psychics were putting on an act. I wanted to know how they did it. How do you come up with these ideas so quickly and seemingly out of nowhere? There must be a system underneath, I thought. Something like a music theory.

Which matters more…what is true? Or what is useful? Well, I found that the mystical arts are both. The practice of what we call ‘psychics’ is true and there is a profoundly useful theory behind it. It’s about understanding what moves people by allowing yourself to be moved by them in return. Empathy. Real f*cking empathy, not the buzzword kind. Beholding someone’s spirit. Beholding someone’s story. There is nothing quite so moving as taking in another person’s soul. Music, mysticism…they’re both about the beauty of listening. That’s the x-factor.

There is much more to who I am, but that’s how I’ve shown up in LA and how LA has shown up for me. The winding labyrinth to my LA story circles around learning how to move and be moved by people; learning how to get out of my head and into my heart. The evolution I’ve gained from this journey is nothing short of profound. My identities as what I call a Maker, a Marketer, and a Mystic used to be embarrassments to each other. Now, they feel integrated. They are all aligned.

As a Maker, I can now call myself an author. I have a book called ‘Which Way Is North: A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics’ coming out via Penguin on October 10th of this year. It’s about all the lessons I’ve picked up on my path. Moving hearts.

As a Marketer, I can now call myself the Global Brand Ambassador for Reddit. It’s my job to meet with business leaders to talk about community, brand strategies, and the long view of where online culture is taking us. Moving minds.

As a Mystic, I can now call myself an Intuitive Guide. I lead meditation sessions in various communities and offering tarot readings at Mystic Journeys in Santa Monica at least once per week. Moving spirits.

I show up for each the same way: with more honesty today than yesterday. All of my people know I am all three of these things – and they embrace them equally. With that, I feel I am blessed to be living out my purpose.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I moved to LA from Boston in 2013. My path wasn’t working. I was about $120K in student loan debt and there wasn’t enough opportunity for creatives in Boston to sustain a musician like me. My father had passed away suddenly and my mother, suffering from the early onset dementia that eventually took her too, needed more care than I knew how to give. My sister, bless her heart, stepped up to take her in after we sold the house.

A lot of my big bets were failing around that time. Some were my fault and some were not. Doesn’t matter. I was still the one sleeping on an air mattress in a friend’s basement. All that to say, the foundations of my life were coming apart at the seams. I was a disaster – and I loved it. I was broken and because of that, I was free.

Two privileges saved my ass when LA came calling. My friend gave me a job and my uncle gave me a thousand dollars. That was quite literally all I had going for me, but it was enough to buy a plane ticket and find a place to land. I couldn’t afford a car so I bought a skateboard and rented a room in Hollywood to shorten my commute to my entry-level gig at SPIN magazine.

I’ll never forget the moment, when skateboarding over the piss stains on the Walk of Fame one warm Hollywood morning on my way to work, that I remembered again how to feel alive. Must have been something in the light. Definitely not the air. Every choice I’ve made since then has been a tribute to sustaining that feeling or finding it again when I miss it. I met my wife at that job. We’ve been dancing together ever since.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I like to be the stranger at the end of the bar that you feel comfortable dropping into conversation with. I don’t care how wretched or ugly you or other people think you are. I will admit I’m at least slightly more interested in people who think themselves great. I want to know your story and talk about it. I want to get in there. I want to behold you. When I was a teenager, my dad told me, “a real man is someone who can share a drink at the bar with the devil and know how to get up and walk away.” I really took that to heart.

What I’ve found, though, is that when you open yourself up to people like that, you meet angels instead. I met my wife that way. After work, at the bar. She told me her story and we clinked glasses in cheers to her grace. I’ve met absolute titans of industry the same way. Great artists. Great thinkers. Also, total idiots and lunatics. I like to talk with them just the same. Everyone is interesting when you’re interested.

That, I believe, is what makes me above all else…a writer. At least I’m trying to be if I haven’t made that painfully obvious already. Regardless, what it means to me to be a writer is the same thing it’s always meant (though it’s only become more emboldened in the age of artificial intelligence): A writer has to live. Creatively. Then not shut up about it.

You’ve got to find the story before you can tell it.

We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
1999. My dad picked me up from a New Year’s Eve party at about 3am and drove me to the beach so we could watch the first sunrise of the millennium together. He was a chef and had just wrapped a banquet dinner for 200 people. I was maybe thirteen years old and covered in the sparkling cider I had poured over my head during the countdown because I guess I thought that’s what fun people do. We were both disheveled and sticky. We sat on a stone wall in the winter wind.

He and my spirits met to move some big energy together. It’s nice we shared that moment. It’s a place outside of time I can still go to find him.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.will-cady.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/willcady/
• Facebook: https://whichwayisnorth.substack.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willcady/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/willcady
• Other: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/731274/which-way-is-north-by-will-cady/

Image Credits
Elyse Frelinger