Meet Raj Will

We were lucky to catch up with Raj Will recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Raj, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My work ethic stems from a few different places in life that we’re pivotal at the start of my career in the industry. At the forefront is the discipline I learned from being in marching band, specifically the drum line, all four years in high school. That was the start of my passion for music of all genres and styles. During that time, I was laser focused on drums, producing and song writing, being able to go from not reading music to finishing as a senior in the drum caption role receiving awards for musical excellence. After high school, I got a job at Stater Bros. grocery store during college before my first internship. Surprisingly, I realized later in life that working there taught me the importance of hard work. The store manager Marcus was the most passionate and hard working grocery store manager I’ve ever seen in my life. He would always stress the importance of customer service, consistency and efficiency in the work that we did to maintain the store. These two moments in life prepared me for my first internship with Ne-Yo’s studio and record label. I was able to attribute the skills I learned in drum line and working at the grocery store to add fuel to my work ethic which ultimately was the reason I was able to become the first intern hired by the company as audio engineer, assistant producer and eventually studio manager.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Currently I wear many hats that has allowed me to travel as a live sound engineer while continuing to build with my artists and our independent production company. We’ve been creating a lot of new music that will be released over the next couple months under our Beyond Average Sound imprint. Additionally, I’m heavily in education teaching Audio Production and working as the Arts, Media & Entertainment Program Coordinator at Dominguez High School in Compton, CA. This opportunity has allowed me to work with the Save The Music Foundation, Intuit For Education and the California Board of Education to create new innovative ways to teach high students about audio and music production through career technical education. With the culmination of everything that I am doing I am also working on a book set to be released later this year.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three qualities I believe that are most impact is perseverance, consistency and discipline.

The best advice I can give is to go beyond and never stop going. A lot of times we get discouraged because the road gets tough along the journey. In those moments is when we are supposed to dig deep in our back and kick into over drive to overcome the obstacles trying to hold us back. Nothing in this life comes easy. It’s a long journey to achieving our goals but it’s all purposeful to make us into the person we were destined to become in this world. Break bad habits and dedicate your. day, time and energy to the vision the is within you. Persevere when you feel like you’re on empty, stay consistent in the effort you put towards your goals and remain discipline in your actions ensuring you choose a path of success and not destruction.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

In the past 12 months I’ve most improved in the areas of self-care and mental health. Upon grinding over the past 10+ years in the industry I developed an infectious desire to work non stop. Throughout that process, I exhausted myself and pushed my body to it’s limits with lack of sleep, poor diet and no form of exercising. As I’ve gotten older I realized the toll it’s taken on my body and my ability to perform at a high level. Recently within the past year, I have taken the time to intentionally focus on my mental health by simply taking a break from the chaos of chasing goals and spending more time doing things that genuinely make me happy outside of my career. Additionally, changing habits like food, substances and working out has helped me to grow in the areas I want to improve most as well.

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