Will Fan — Dragon #09

Will very much turns everything he does into something… more. He’s an evangelist like that.

A lot of people have tons of good ideas. Not a lot of people are able to execute on one of these ideas well, let alone a few. But that’s Will for you. When he’s not busy building the business school of the future, he illustrates NFTs on the blockchain and exercises religiously every lunchtime. Will’s mind is one of a kind. When I’m looking for perspective, I ask myself: what would he do?

What’s an unusual fact or story about yourself that not a lot of people know?

Moving into my place a few years ago and then being stuck in it with the pandemic, I realized I am incredibly OCD with precision cleaning. Having grown out my hair and with my workstation meticulously set up, I need to vacuum twice a day, wipe the tables once a day, make sure every speck is gone, and so on. It even distracts me from my work. I’d be on a call, see a few strands of hair, turn off the video, clean up and then put it back on.

Is there one thing about your morning routine that you can’t live without?

Towards the end of 2020, my lifestyle was quite toxic. As for a lot of entrepreneurs, it was a turbulent year for their team and their company. I ended up doing late nights that rolled over into early mornings in a rinse and repeat system.

In 2021, I decided to make a very big change in my life — and that’s being persistent with exercise and mental health. I’m now an F45 fanatic. If you don’t know, F45 is a gym boot camp. I go six days a week during lunchtime. It’s become my religion. But I’ve also implemented yoga into my routine on Friday evenings, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Even though I’m exercising eight days a week, it doesn’t feel like overkill. It’s just my way to cut through the day. And even if I have a late-night, or boozy evening, it allows me to mentally and physically reset in order to prepare myself for the week.

What books have influenced your professional life the most and why?

At the beginning of the year, I started pushing through one business book every three weeks. When I got to the fourth, it kind of just dropped off and I realized that trying to incorporating reading into my habits didn’t work.

Books haven’t been influential to my life because the best way for me to learn is actually through conversations. I meet 10, sometimes 15 new people every day. With social media and building content with interesting business leaders, entrepreneurs, and creatives… I just really enjoy these moments where we can genuinely talk, where I can understand their lives, their cultures, their perspectives.

What quality do you look for when hiring someone for your team?

One thing I don’t really share is that I used to dabble into art a lot and used to draw a lot of digital art as a child. I’ve recently gotten back into it thanks to the whole NFT space and I realized how this is kind of the Yang to my Yin, which is obviously building my business, NewCampus.

That’s actually something I really look out for when hiring someone — someone who has a Yang to their Yin. At the end of the day, you are spending 14, 15, 16 hours every day with that person. You want to make they’re not only someone you get along with, but someone you can admire and learn from — and it doesn’t have to be the expertise in the business. It could be their passion, something they’re proud of. We recently hired a new learning experience designer. Although her career is in education, she’s a ceramist by night. She obsesses about cups, about how the ink drips on their surface and so on.

That inspires me as a professional but also allows me to really focus on someone’s strengths so that they can grow within the NewCampus ecosystem and within the business that I’m building.

What’s the worst advice someone’s ever given you?

I stopped taking career advice when I moved into the entrepreneur world, six or seven years ago. The reason being is even though there are playbooks and success stories you could mimic, at the end of the day it’s your own solo journey. I often go to mentors and coaches to help me think about my own strategies, my own demons, my own ways of tackling problems.

But before that, when I was in the corporate world, one piece of advice I got was “stay in your lane”. It came when I was looking at creating a startup. I was told, “stay in your lane, just keep doing this for the next few years and you’ll get that 10% pay bump”. I don’t think it’s bad advice, but it wasn’t the right advice for me.

Especially now with a pandemic, it’s incredibly important for people to not only look at the other lane but constantly push themselves to experiment and try new lanes. The last thing you want is someone else to steer the direction of your life, your career, your personal path.

Is there anything that has improved your life since the very first lockdown? It could be an investment of money or time, or a new habit, a gadget.

I think COVID allowed us to really understand how humans are. What I’m trying to do a lot more than is allowing people to be themselves, whether it’s with fireside chats or ad hoc conversations, and embrace people for who they are. That’s been a big improvement.

What do you do when you feel stressed and overwhelmed at work?

Recently, I have been diving into the whole NFT space. It’s been incredibly exciting and it’s drawn out a lot of my younger tendencies of being a collector and going through a journey as a hero. I’ve connected into a completely new world on Twitter, on Instagram, on Discord. Understanding how another generation thinks and how they architect their lives is fascinating.

I’m into it not to make money but to learn. I started dabbling back into drawing, learning how to amplify my art on Twitter and hacking the platform, but also embracing my creative side again.

If you can take that mentality of transforming everything that you do into a positive learning experience, you’re winning. If something is not benefiting your mental or physical health, you should cut it out of your life. That helps me at work where I’m always stressed and always overwhelmed. But I love what I do and I enjoy pushing myself to that limit.

I do believe it’s healthy to have a certain level of stress so you’re constantly pushing yourself to be better. But with that said, I do focus on fitness and good sleep in order to have a clear mind to think and execute well.

If you were a marketing tagline, what would it be and why?

Find your why to become the best version of you.

The challenge of our generation is to balance professional and personal lives. We’re always stretched between both. It becomes even more prominent when you start having kids and suddenly you have to look after another human being as well. But if you’re able to bridge and marry up everything that you do into that one focus at one North Star, it can become an accelerant on doing well.

That concept of doing well can be up to your own definition — but at least you don’t lose sleep over being pulled in different directions anymore.

Where can people find you?

Everywhere.

On LinkedIn where I’m receptive to talk about the future of work, virtual learning, collaborating on this new business school we’re building.

On Instagram where I’m not as active but try to engage friends and people that I’d love to have a beer or coffee or a workout session with.

On Twitter where I’m just going ham with analytics on the Lazy Lion Community, the World of Women community and recently the Hearts community, decentralizing the creative studio industry.