Will Cady, Reddit Global Brand Ambassador + Author of "Which Way is North"

  Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity. And we always underscore that word world because we like to travel and stamp our passports around the world, talking to creative practitioners, authors, singer songwriters, hospitality professionals, all about how they get inspired, how they organize ideas, and most of all, how they gain the confidence and the connections to launch their creative work.

And it's so good to be traveling to L. A. today. And we're talking with author and creative strategist Will Cady. Will, welcome

to the show. And former hospitality professional for about a decade.

I looked down, I was going to get to that fader, but we're going to jump into it right now. I love to scroll down to the bottom of resumes and find all the barista jobs, all the server jobs.

So tell me about your base of experience in the hospitality

industry. First off again, thank you for having me. This is Of course. It's going to be a pleasure to chat with you. I Okay, I have to give credit where credit is due. I listed out my full work experience because it was something that I saw Alexis Ohanian do.

And it was like going all the way back to his job at, I think it was Pizza Hut. And I was like yes, that is a part of the story of this avatar of ours on LinkedIn, right? And so for me in Massachusetts its work began. I think I was 13 and I'm not sure if that's legal, but I was a dishwasher when I was 13 and and I was, I worked in Jewish delis, Italian restaurants, like upscale coffee shops the kind of.

Stores where people buy graduation gifts. I Was a video store clerk for a while. So it's really cool to now be in Hollywood, right? So i've been working since i'm 13 and why not put all that out there, right?

Now i'm gonna steal that idea i'm gonna go back I think I had paper boy on there once and I took it off But i'm gonna go back and put it all back on.

Yeah, because you were also brave to show the tenure That's the great thing about linkedin. It's okay. I did it for nine months. That's what I did

Yeah, some things I did for a summer. Shortest job I ever had was as a washing cars at a car dealership and the very first car I, there was a ramp I didn't see and I like scuffed the bumper and they fired me on the spot.

I was two hours. I, maybe I should include that, but I don't know if you can put that timeframe on LinkedIn. Yes.

Folks we're five minutes into the podcast. You don't really even know who I'm talking with. This is Will Katie. He is the author of a great new book called which way is north.

And he is a global brand ambassador for Reddit. He was the former head of its creative strategy agency called Karma lab. And he's advised marketers, executives, and engineers and all sorts of creative people. Yes, on creativity in general, but also on modern meditation, techniques that he uses and developed to really unlock our creativity.

We've got a lot to talk about here about creativity. And I'd like to start with this proposition of the book, even that, with AI, it's generating, it's regenerating, it's interpreting. Is there a future? For real human creativity. Absolutely.

One of the things I say in the book is that AI is another mind that still needs a human heart.

And the human heart is the container of our lived experience, basically, right? And I think that we are in a phase right now where there's a lot of fair fear. and frustration about what AI might take, but in the space that creates, I think that we're going to fill it with some remarkable new ways to express ourselves.

There was a time when I think the forefront of creativity was mixing color for paint. ANd then you have these artists that pave new ground in impressionism versus expressionism or how you depict light, how you depict perspective. I think this is one of those moments where the technology that has come to bear is giving us a new palette, a more sophisticated palette.

And what we thought was creativity is gonna evolve. And it's a human insight that's gonna... Decide what comes next, not a robotic one,

and you bring up this sort of history of. Creative renaissance, even when we think about the renaissance, surely somebody was scared that there was a printing press that could disseminate information to the masses.

I've read that the realistic painters were often, marginalized because they didn't paint the way they should have been painting. All of these things, so I guess we go through these waves of questioning our own human creativity and potential.

Yeah, we sure do. And it's difficult to live during times of transformation, but those are the times that we're in.

It's also the most opportunity to do something truly great. And it's twofold. We have the ability to be creative with resources that humanity has never really had before. So it takes a little bit of courage, I think to sit with it in that way. But that's that's the prompt. That's the invitation.

And that's what I'm trying to point towards with this book. Yes.

And the pointing is directly from the subtitle of the book, a creative compass for makers, marketers and mystics. Yeah. We need a compass.

I think so. a Compass is a tool, a technology, for people to take their own journey. And that's where we're going to figure this out.

Is everybody feeling empowered to take their own journey and come back with their story and their message? I don't think people need to be told what to think or what to do right now. I think it's more about how to unfold their own identity, their own journey for themselves.

And certainly you have a unique viewpoint on this as a global brand ambassador for Reddit all your work with creative strategy for the brand, for the platform, I don't often think of Reddit as having a lot of guardrails and a lot of direction.

It's pretty free flowing. Even to sometimes it's detriment or at least it's criticism. But what is the direction of a platform like Reddit where it truly is just an open channel of I guess communication.

I see it differently, actually. So Reddit is remarkably structured and it's remarkably structured into contexts, different communities, basically.

So when you're engaging with information on the social web, on other platforms, you're usually experiencing that content in a feed. And so that content doesn't really have a context other than the algorithm and what it is serving you based upon what optimizes towards your engagement. Whereas when you go to an environment like Reddit, which is community based, these are contextual environments.

So you're, if you're going to the parenting community, you're going to a place where it's only there. You're only there to talk about parents and having kids, and what diapers you need, and how to get through the hard stuff. There's not really room in that space for, conversation about video games, or, telescopes or, bass guitar, which I see behind me. Those might be things that if you do talk about, those things are in the context of I'm trying to support my kid and their hobbies. SiMilarly across the standby, the whole platform over a hundred thousand different communities that are a hundred thousand different contexts, it's really remarkably structured in that way.

And so it's. It's a, it represents a vision of the old internet, which felt more free than what we experienced today. But it's also a vision of the new internet. And we're looking at like the Fediverse and the rise of community and all these other spaces. I think we realized that these non contextual environments are difficult for us to actually navigate between.

And so that has really informed my perspective as a creative as a maker market or a mystic, because. This is an incredible slice of humanity that I've had the privilege to basically get a bird's eye view on Reddit and it would be chaos if it weren't structured in this way. But instead, I'm able to drop into different contexts, different rabbit holes and see how's the water over here and then how's the water over here.

I'm just I'm jumping between all the different hot tubs, basically.

Your context comment is very. Very helpful. So let's move into the book now. Which way is north? This idea of finding true north. So as creatives we're looking for some direction. We're also looking for inspiration. This is one of the key things that we often hear is that I've got so many ideas, but I need to be truly inspired to pursue them.

Cause A lot of our ideas require a lot of work. How does your method help us find the difference between, Hey, that's a nice idea. And that's truly inspiring.

Yeah. First I'll play with the, the notion of the title there, why it says, which way is north and building off of that, context and community conversation that is such a big part of Reddit.

I learned from my experience that everybody has a different true north. And I talk about this a little bit in the book, but even to the literal degree of what do we call our North Star? I learned that every 13, 000 years, our North Star changes. It's Polaris and Ursa Minor, only half of that time.

The other half of that 13, year cycle, it's Vega. Totally different other star in the sky. I, because of work, I went down to Australia, and I was like, they don't see the North Star down here. Also, they have a totally different relationship to the idea of North, because North is warm, whereas South is cold, right?

You're getting closer to those poles. And so there's a deeply ensconced vision of empathy in the question, which way is North? Because It it's a great first question to ask when you come into a new culture, a new community, a new place. What's your North Star? Which way is north, right? So that's the meaning of that title and also I think the first answer to your question of like for creativity, ask that question, right?

Like what is the North Star for me or the people that I'm. Trying to collaborate with, listen from, learn from, speak with. Peeling a little bit deeper, there's a principle that is really laid out in the book of curiosities. So for the Karma Lab team, the creative strategy agency at Reddit, our mission statement when we founded it was to turn curiosity into understanding.

And the idea there is that curiosity isn't just a state of mind, it's also It's a thing. It's an object. It's a curiosity that you can find. And that stems from my mystical background in terms of meditation practices, mindfulness, and the phenomenology of experience, even dream journaling and lucid dreaming.

There's a fundamental... element of noticing something that is a little weird, right? Especially if you're dreaming and there's just something strange that's there pay attention to it, go into it. Or when you're meditating and an emotion arises, or a thought arises, or a memory, or a song just randomly pops into your head, like, why is that here?

s Brown's concert in Zaire in: 1974

And it just whatever captures your attention, whatever makes you curious, pull on that a little bit, and it's going to lead you to something worth exploring that is going to inspire you towards some creative end.

There's very much a theme of paying attention to your ideas rather than just saying boom, there's an idea and then your book description.

It's called being a conscious participant in the creation and I was attracted to that word conscious because it does mean a Paying attention and thinking about what did that dream mean? And what could that be? But also that it's purpose driven, perhaps that there's really something behind it as a conscious creator.

Yeah, there's a, it's a layered statement, conscious participant in creation. And a big part of what that means is there's a whole passage in the book about an experience that I had learning about another people's culture because I was wearing a symbol that I didn't even know that it was a symbol for peoples of the indigenous Americas and a man that was a Sioux man from Standing Rock came up to me and he said, if you're going to wear that symbol, you should understand what it means.

And that led me on a journey of discovery, of listening and learning between, I went to the Hopi Reservation, I went to Oaxaca, I went to Guatemala and all along that journey, in a very synchronistic and magical way, I learned that this symbol, It's complicated, but that largely the symbol is referred to as the Morning Star.

And I learned that the Morning Star, talk about North Stars, right? Seemed, based upon my experiences, to be related to what modern astronomers call the star Sirius in the sky. And In the relationship with the symbol of the morning star and gazing upon the morning star in the sky is a different notion of what the word creation means that creation to the modern mind is something that happened in the past, that there was a big bang or there was a moment of Genesis and it's over now, but in what I found in Learning more about this cultural belief system is that creation is unfolding in the present and to participate in it is what we're supposed to do as humans.

And so for me, I was like, that is. Gorgeous. What a heightening of the role of creativity in our lives. Like, how far away is that from writing copy for an ad? yeS. It's really empowering. And that was a very enriching. thing for me to learn that from a culture that was different from the one that I was raised in.

And I think that it is resoundingly true across all cultures. I think that there is something in there for everybody to look to if you would choose that as your North Star. If you would choose the Morning Star as something to give you purpose.

And the presentness of it brings a little bit new meaning to this line that I see here about creative potential, that you're not just a participant in creating something, even if it's as mundane as writing some ad copy.

But, we always talk about achieving our creative potential. And here we are unfolding.

Yeah. We're in it. We're participating in it. Whether we know it or not. And that's the conscious part is that, you wake up to the fact that you're here, you're in this, what are you going to do about it?

And on the other side of that, I think is the awakening of that potential. Yes.

I was just talking in the past episode to somebody talking about, someday this creative business of mine will take off or someday I'll be able to turn my hobby and my craft into a paying job. That's the kind of, I think, creative potential people think about, but this is much deeper than that, isn't it?

Yeah. We suffer from temporal displacement, don't we? It's, feelings about what happened in the past or feelings about what could happen in the future. But, right now, you can participate in what's going on right now. And I really want to lower the barrier and raise the bar on creativity with this.

That. In the, what you give chapter in this book, talk a lot about the, your very presence in a room is a creative act. So embrace it.

aNd you were talking about Reddit in particular, but social media in general and scrolling through feeds and stuff. How do we, you use the word decode the stories, but how do we make sense of all this media bombardment social and otherwise?

And. Sort it out, deflect the effects that it could have on our creativity or embrace the ideas that comes from it.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, in that story about the Morningstar, I talked a little bit about what I learned from a culture that's different from the one that I was raised in. The culture that I was raised in, my heritage comes from a lot of like mystical Judaism and like Celtic kind of.

Just arts, basically, that what I gained from my background is an archetypal literacy. So I am I'm a tarot reader, as well, as a creative strategist. And that comes from esoteric Judaism and a lot of the kind of gypsy culture in Europe, basically. Each of those different cards holds an archetype that is a container of feelings.

A way that it is to be in the world. And so I bring that up because I think that archetypal literacy is really important for all of us in these times because what I have found in working with myself just in my own unfolding, but also as a creative professional in the media industry and as an intuitive professional in the spiritual industry is that feelings are primary to facts.

And we have a tendency to select our facts based upon our feelings. And when it comes to scrolling through feeds and engaging with media in general, decoding it is about asking first and foremost, what feelings is this information putting into me? And... There are people out there right now, like Brene Brown, that released Atlas of the Heart, that are doing extremely urgent work to help give people a vocabulary for our emotions, for our feelings that we have.

What I want to offer is that archetypal systems are also a part of that as well. That there are stories that you can receive that might make you feel like a hero, might make you feel like a victim, might make you feel like an emperor or a magician, right? These are all tarot archetypes that I'm describing.

I think that people are really attaching to astrology right now because they're hungry for this archetypal language and they're using it to connect with each other. And that's not about it's not science. It's art. It's the humanities. And so that's something that I use to help myself decode my relationship with media is What myth is being told to me right now?

What character am I being told that I am in this myth? And how does that make me feel? And then from that, do I want to feel differently? Do I want to be a different character? Do I want to be in a different myth? We all have that choice. So

good. I think with that background, I'd love to hear a little bit of the book in your own voice.

If you have a section I'm particularly attracted to this idea of the creative journey as a heart centered or heart focused activity. I wonder if you could share some of that with us. Sure.

This is gonna be my first time reading an excerpt from the, isn't it from the book? Yeah. Yes. I'm not, this is, I'm not sure I'm ready to play this character in this story of the the author

from his own book.

Here comes, it comes to Life.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So this is at the this is the very end and it's the beginning of the last chapter about the heart, and it's titled, the Center is Everywhere. We don't yet know whether the universe is infinite or not. All we know is as far as we can see. The observable universe is 46 billion light years wide.

That is already an unimaginably large expanse, beyond which is an even larger expanse we might call eternity. Let's suppose, then, that living in the universe is like sailing upon an infinite sea. The horizon's edge in the far off distance of every direction moves you, no matter how far or how fast you reach.

The center is everywhere. If the universe is infinite, its center is in you. You are the center of the universe, and I am too. The creative journey is born from that realization, and the question of what to do with it. It's easy to get lost when you can't see any shore. In such times, the only way out is in...

Open the doorway into your heart and take the journey into your center, THE center of everything, and retrieve the story it keeps for you. This book is a compass designed to help you get comfortable getting lost on the creative journey within. Which way is north? The directions are always changing, but the compass's arrow will always, in the end, point toward the center within your heart.

You are your own north star. The story in your heart is the vision that lights the way. You write it as you read it. How well can you speak its language?

That was Will

Cady reading an excerpt of his new book, Which Way is North? A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics. Thanks for sharing that passage. As I think about the creative reader and the listeners of these podcasts, the essays, meditations, almost memoir, sharing your experiences and stories.

How would you imagine the reader applying this? They put the book down and say, that was fantastic. They have a good feeling. But now, what

should we do? Yeah I hope that's the feeling that they have. I I. I hope that this book becomes a companion for people. It's I understand that the way that I've written it is probably pretty different.

And there's a few levels to that. I think that the prose, it, I was a songwriter before. I am still a songwriter. There's a lyricism to the way that a lot of the words are chosen and the sentence structure. There's a lot of fragment sentences because that makes it more. Lyrical and there's a sound to it.

So I would imagine that for a lot of people's first read, they're not going to absorb everything. But also in lyric writing, you create new contexts for the words that you're using. And for example, I talk a lot about stars. We spoke about that in this conversation. There is one particular chapter where I go into detail about our relationship with the stars, but stars are a theme in every other chapter.

So the second time you read it through, you will now have a new context for what it means to look at a star. And so that's where I hope it becomes a companion is to read it through the first time, let it be whatever experience it is, and then go back to it. As an oracle if you want to just flip to a page like a magic eight ball and see what it has to say or read a chapter from one of the directions if that's calling to you Or just read it again.

It's something it took me four years to write. So Reading it in one weekend is great But I you know, there's a lot of a lot of spirit put into it and a lot of spirit to get out

Very good. I'm glad you brought up sort of the craftsmanship and the process of writing the book. I wanted to ask you about this and here it's just been released by the Matt Holt imprint of Ben Bella books.

And I was fascinated to not only what you said about how long it took, but all the people that get involved in writing a book and that sort of creative process that you're writing a book about the creative process and going through. The creative process. Yeah. Yeah. There must have been a little bit of a dual parallel universe going for you there.

Yeah.

Created itself as it was being written. For example the symbols that are really dominant throughout it, the eye motif that is the first thing that you see when you open its pages that then became the substructure and all of the chapters that didn't exist until the last draft because the editors.

They really challenged me and some, I need to hear some things from them. I was You know, I was claiming people's stories that weren't mine to tell. I was not clear about the character that I wanted to portray myself as. There's a lot of stuff for me to integrate, and I just, after I got their notes the second time around in that phase I just sat back in my chair and I was like, what do I do?

I was overwhelmed and then I just leaned forward and it was like my hand was like moving the mouse on its own and I opened up I actually created those symbols and Google Slides if you would believe it. And I just started creating with those. With the eye, and I noticed that they were symbolically, archetypally revealing a point, a vision, a star, a journey etc, a compass, and it just reflected back at me.

It was almost like I blacked out for 30 minutes and then I saw what was on my screen. It's oh, here's your new structure for each chapter. This is how you're going to organize what they've just told you. Pretty unclear. How amazing is that? I don't know where that came from. That's great.

Yeah.

And yet you didn't respond to them with this kind of ego. Don't, you know who I am? What I wrote is fine. I remember interviewing a professor at NYU business school. It's I wrote this book. I'm a professor at NYU business school. These are my thoughts. But rather to embrace the comments, embrace the professional feedback and make it even

better.

That's what they're there for, and I as a creative professional, I have found that my ego has always been the obstacle and humility has always been the way. And we were working together to create the best product that we could and they're giving their time to help with this thing, right?

And they're being courageous to challenge me. They don't know how I'm gonna react. I could be a jerk. And, there's gotta be some graciousness there as well. I I went through I went through great lengths to, in the memoirs in this. Book what they helped me do too is not choose stories where I'm like trying to convince people how great I think I am But most of those stories like the one where I was set on a journey to learn about another people's culture We're because I made some kind of mistake and I had something to learn and somebody was there to correct me or teach me and that is Absolutely central to the creative process.

Yeah. Some humility. Yeah. Yeah. If you've got it all figured out, then you don't have to say anything.

I think we'll I'd like to close with this idea that there was anxiety, about the work and how to transform that anxiety into creativity so that we can get the work out.

Great segue because that's actually the missing piece to the, everything I was just sharing is that I think what helped me really get excited when somebody gave me criticism was like, Oh, you're giving me a new anxiety.

And so clearly it's the opening statement of this book. Anxiety is creativity ready to be transmuted. That is my philosophy for creativity. And so when an anxiety comes into my system, it presents me with a story that I can tell. Or action that I can take to resolve that feeling. That comes from very much the meditation background that I was raised in.

And there is, especially in a lot of the Zen modalities and mindfulness, practices, there is an emotion. You have fear, but you don't have fear. There is fear. Fear has arisen. And behind that fear is... Pure energy, and what I believe is part of our modern malaise is that we have a lot of energy being put into us, a lot of it through media, and it just sits in our system and it stagnates.

But energy wants to be put into motion. Energy in motion is emotion, and it's creativity that Puts it into motion to the degree that it creates a cathartic release and you have this emotional experience And that's what we want from our art is we want somebody that helps us make sense of the emotions that are part of being alive to know that somebody else has experienced something that we are experiencing today or somebody that has penetrated into a new frontier of human experience that we can maybe learn from and look to and that is how we put new stars in the sky that we can point to.

So anxiety, going back to your, also your very first question, anxiety is the things that robots don't have. So it's the very source of our special sauce for creativity.

I like how we went full circle on that. Thank you. Listeners, my guest has been Will. Katie is the author of a terrific book, Which Way is North?

A Creative Compass for Makers, Marketers, and Mystics, just out from Bembella Books. And I want to thank the folks at Bembella Books for helping make this connection. Will is also a global ambassador for Reddit, and he's the former head of their creative strategy agency, Karma Labs. And it's just terrific the way you have leveraged all this knowledge.

And your own experiences into the book. So congratulations on that. Thank you very much. Yeah. And that's not an ego based statement. That's just a fact. Great talking with you, Will. I've enjoyed it a lot. Likewise. Listeners, come back again next time. We'll continue our around the world journeys stamping our creative passports all over the world, talking to creative practitioners about how we get inspired.

We've talked about that today, how we organize ideas into practical, publishable, printable, releasable work, and most of all, the confidence and the connections to Transform our anxieties into our creativity to flourish in our pursuits. And we thank Will for his comments, suggestions, and encouragement on that.

So come back again next time. We'll continue to unlock your world of creativity. I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll see you next time.