We recently connected with Salman Ansari and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Salman, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I do a variety of things—writing, programming, drawing, etc. But I’d like to focus on my learning process for drawing, as I think there’s some valuable lessons for creative mindset:

I hit a bit of a wall after being burned out from founding a startup, and took an extended sabbatical. I started to draw during this time. Of course, based on my past habits and approach to work, I wanted to be *good* at drawing, as fast as possible. So I bought all the textbooks and started digging in. I tried to learn portrait drawing, gesture drawing, light and shadow, perspective, etc. all at once. I wasn’t having any fun, and I disliked most of the things I drew.

A friend advised me to stop drawing for realism, and instead to just play more. He suggested I draw some made-up animals. I wasn’t sure about this advice, but I tried it. Eventually I drew a ton of these random, colorful creatures. I was having a lot of fun, and creativity was flowing. Later, I would use these very animals as inspiration for my fables, but I could never know that at the time. And in fact, it’s very important I didn’t know that.

I believe we need to allow ourselves space to play, to do things without a specific purpose (of getting good) or set outcome. Only then do we find these sides of ourselves we never knew, opening new doors.

Salman, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My background is in software engineering, and I’ve spent most of my career as an engineer and startup founder. But after a bout with burnout, I started to explore creative projects like writing and drawing.

For the past few years, I’ve been juggling working part-time at a tech startup alongside my creative projects. I write a newsletter called Quick Brown Fox in which I share creative advice, fables, comics, and inspiring art. Fables have become a greater focus for me of late, and I just published a book of fables called Wandering Spirits, which I also illustrated and narrated. I believe fables are a wonderful vehicle for both kids and adults to learn the lessons of life. I’m most inspired by the book The Little Prince, which I think everyone of all ages should read.

I try to approach my work with a mindset of playfulness, especially given the journey I’ve taken from a very “serious” startup life to a more balanced approach to work and creativity. My hope is that my work, and my own example serve as a guide for folks who are stuck in the treadmill of work to be able to break free and find their inner child again.

We all deserve to hear what the little kids in us want to say, and we deserve to let them play.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

There is an interview with Ethan Hawke on TED, and one thing he says always sticks with me: ““Do you think human creativity matters? Well, most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re really not that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anyone’s poems—until, their father dies; they go to a funeral; you lose a child; someone breaks your heart.

And all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life. ‘Has anybody felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?’ Or the inverse—something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes—you love them so much you can’t even see straight. You’re dizzy. ‘Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?’

And that’s when art’s not a luxury—it’s actually sustenance. We need it.”

What this quote tells me is that we, as a society, do not properly value art. It is just the reality. So in my view, it is problematic to ask artists to always find a way to make their own living by selling their work directly to people. I think we have to understand that most people will not pay for art, especially because they won’t see its value until they use it or consume it, and by that point the artist may be long dead.

So we need other systems that allow for creativity, not just because the world needs our creativity, but because we need to be creative. It is an outlet for our soul that can help us feel human, and feel alive.

My personal view, which is biased given how I live my own life, is that you don’t necessarily need to quit your job and make art full-time, but you do need mechanisms to be able to work *less* at least. You need the funding, the grants, the institutions that allow artists to explore a project, an idea, an expression. We are seeing those be compressed at the same time as we are seeing pressure for artists to go online and become entrepreneurs for their art.

What we need is more of the rich to be come patrons, not rely on the average working person (who is increasingly struggling to make ends meet) to fund every artist through Patreon. (Patreon is great though, it’s just not sufficient.)

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I really like Derek Sivers approach to his creativity and work. Specifically, he shares his ideas through blog posts, newsletters etc. and gets real feedback, then channels that feedback into his books.

I think this is a difficult process nowadays because it’s challenging to get visibility and feedback on your work. But overall, I’m a big fan of sharing your work online rather than holding it back and trying to submit it to literary magazines or future book queries, etc.

The internet is pretty powerful, and your energy+time is limited. Share ideas while they are active within you, while they have some fire, and try to make something of it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://salman.io
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/salmanscribbles
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/sransari
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/salmanscribbles
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@salmanscribbles
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/daretodj