On this episode of Out of the Clouds, Anne interviews generalist (or jack of all trades) Salman Ansari, also known as the Quick Brown Fox. The talented writer enjoys wearing many different hats — he is a startup founder, a CTO, a web & iOS engineer, a teacher, an illustrator and DJ, among other things.
The two of them start off by talking about Salman’s early career, his love for coding and animation and how he ended up leaving Canada to relocate to California to become a startup co-founder, and the importance of meaningful relationships when making bold career moves.
Salman explains how a couple of courses, and the popular success among his friends of his blog in college, called Dare to Rant, set him up to start writing online. Salman shares that he discovered that writing essays helped him synthesise the knowledge he was acquiring.
Anne then leads him to talk about one particular piece, ‘The Polymath Playbook’, which went viral after being tweeted by Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify. Salman reflects on how his personal story (which he almost deleted) had resonated with his readers more than the mental models he’d written about.
The two of them geek out about why stories are so fundamental to us as humans, what it means for our inner and outer communication and how to best package ideas so they are easier for readers to consume.
Salman is currently working on a book of fables, which he is illustrating as well, so he spends a bit of time telling Anne how that project came about and the importance of having a community who gets to ask ‘what happens next’ supporting us when things are getting hard. On that note, he also discusses how to figure out when procrastination is at play or whether we just need to continue to work on a piece.
A few years ago, Salman suffered a burnout and he shares how he created a space for himself with meditation. Then they discuss at length how mindfulness combined with journaling and walking were complementary resources that, in his words, made it impossible for him to gaslight himself, thereby enabling him to make the hard choice to walk away from a job he no longer loved doing.
A wide-ranging, inspiring and profound interview, happy listening!
Selected links from episode
You can find Salman at https://salman.io/
On twitter @daretorant
On Instagram @salmanscribbles
On Youtube @salmanansari
Salman’s blog is available at salman.io/blog
and you can read the Polymath Playbook here
Write of Passage, the online writing course
Writing in Community, the Akimbo course
Will Storr’s book, The Science of Storytelling
Robert McKee’s book, Story
Amishi Jha’s book, Peak Mind
The Little Prince, book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic
The talk with Elizabeth Gilbert Anne and Salman bring up.
The course ‘Psychology for Writers’
Rest, the book by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
The song by Eric Prydz – Pjanoo
The Spotify playlist, collection of the podcast guests answers to the question ‘What song best represents you?’
Full episode transcript
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Hi, hello, bonjour and namaste. This is Out Of The Clouds, a podcast at the crossroads between business and mindfulness. And I’m your host Anne Muhlethaler. Today, my guest is Salman Ansari, aka the Quick Brown Fox. Salman is a self-confessed polymath. As a startup founder, a CTO, a web and iOS engineer, who has now turned into a teacher, a writer, an illustrator, and he’s also moonlighting occasionally as a DJ. And these are just a few of the things that occupy him. I came across him when he was spotlighted in someone else’s email newsletter and having read a piece that went, I would say viral, although this is not my favorite word nowadays, called The Polymath Playbook, I subscribed to his newsletter in order to discover more about his writing. And perhaps three or four newsletters in, I thought, ”Damn. I really need to talk to that guy. He sounds fantastic.”
Anne V Muhlethaler:
And so fast forward to a few chats later, here we are. And I can’t tell you how much pleasure I had to go and also dig in and discover more, in order to prepare this interview. So in our conversation, we explore of course Salman’s journey and the multiple things that make his life so rich. We talk about what it’s like to write and publish every day or every week. Salman at the moment is developing a book, so we talk a lot about this and his passion for The Little Prince. And we talk about writing in community and also the power of journaling meditation, and how to foster creativity working towards big, great projects. And what it’s like when fear or procrastination become obstacles on the way to things that are important to us. This is probably one of my favorite interviews and it’s hard to say this, because I love all of my interviews very genuinely. So without further ado, I’m going to stop talking and give you this wonderful lengthy and fantastic interview with Salman Ansari. Salman, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to Out Of The Clouds.
Salman Ansari:
Thanks for having me, I’m excited.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Me too. So I would love to start by asking you, how are you doing today? How are things with you?
Salman Ansari:
Pretty good, pretty good. It’s morning where I’m at and usually in the mornings, I do some reading outside. I’ve been enjoying that a lot recently, just sitting with some trees and reading books. Even if it’s 15 minutes, it’s been a really fun part of my day that settles me, but yeah, overall I’m good.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
So I really like to ask my guests to start the interviews by telling our listeners who they are and where they’re from. And I guess it’s one of the ways to enter in conversation instead of talking about what we do, to talk about who we are. So Salman, who are you?
Salman Ansari:
That’s a tricky question. There’s a lot of answers to that. Yeah, I can start with a high level I guess, some of the background. I have grown up in lots of different places. I’m Indian, South Asian, by ethnicity, but I was born and raised in the Middle East. And then I went to high school and university in Canada, studied computer science and then moved over to The States and really worked in startup world, building tech startups for a long time. And had some bumps and some successes there and broke out a little bit, after a little bit of a burnout experience. I shouldn’t say a little bit, you can’t really have a little bit of it.
Salman Ansari:
But it was pretty intense, and that period really forced me to reevaluate my whole life. And so I’ve been on this journey ever since then, of trying to figure out this mix of creative projects and more fulfilling work and figuring out what’s the balance that really works well for me, because there’s so many different things that I’m interested in, but at the same time, I do want to work on things to fruition too. So I would say I’m still, and probably always will be, in this figuring out mode, just trying to enjoy things, but also trying to build towards something bigger.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Thank you. Now, you’re making me wonder, what did you want to be when you were a kid?
Salman Ansari:
I sometimes wish I had a great memory of someone asking me that and having a really good answer to that. But I think that growing up actually didn’t really have a very strong sense of this. And I think that that’s one of the things that I try to keep in mind. I was a very good student. I would just really study hard and get good grades. And I remember at one point, even by the time I reached high school, I realized I had been doing fairly well in these different subjects, but I had no real strong affinity for one over the other. And I wasn’t like, ”Oh yeah, I really love this.”.
Salman Ansari:
And it actually terrified me, because around grade nine, at least in Canada, I think they probably do this in The States and other countries too, but they start to ask you stuff like, ”What program are you going to be in? If you know that now you should start planning for that.” And I was like, ”I have no idea.” I really had no idea. As a child of an Indian parents, my dad was a doctor, my mom was a gynecologist, and so there was a lot of expectation of… My brother had PhD in congress psychology, my sister is a dentist, so there’s a lot of expectation around going into some kind of career like that. And I ended up taking a slightly different path, but as a kid, the only thing I knew to do was just to study and I didn’t really have that much of an ambition around where I wanted to go. So I think that’s a little telling, but yeah.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
A dream somehow, somewhere, something that felt almost unattainable? I’m just wondering.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah. I think unattainable might be a good word because one of the things that’s interesting is I do a lot of drawing now, and a lot of it I’ve been doing for fun and now it’s kind of transitioning into being part of my work. But I’ve been doing it for fun and sometimes I imagine that I just started learning how to draw a few years ago. But then I remember I actually did take some art classes early in my school days and I used to draw these really cool pieces actually, that would be quite difficult to do right now. I think the amount of effort and dedication that I put into those… But I don’t even remember thinking for a second, that that could actually be something I would do. It wasn’t even an option. It was just like, ”Here’s this thing that I’m doing and it’s nice, but real work is going to be, I’m either going to be a doctor or something like that.”
Salman Ansari:
I think that probably one thing that I did have, that did end up becoming an option of almost of sorts, because I ended up studying computer science, but early I always really enjoyed video games and especially… And also watching animated films. And I’d always wonder how they’re made. I always felt like they were really magical. I really was into computers, early on, and so that’s how I got this inkling to take this. It was called an IT course, but it was basically about writing software and I took this in grade 10, actually. And then it taught you a little bit about programming. They show, this I remember, there was a point where he shows you something called recursion, which is this programming technique. And I was just blown away. I thought it was literal magic. I was like, ”This is wizard stuff. This is so cool.”
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh, that’s amazing.
Salman Ansari:
”That’s what I want to do.” And then everything shifted around that. I took it again in 11 and 12, applied to computer science. And actually what I thought I was going to do was build games. Even in university, I took graphics, which is one of the difficult courses. There’s just so many layers to building computer games. And I remember building this… You basically have this final project where you have to put together a really complex project over a month and then somehow have it to completion. And I had decided, instead of building what a lot of my friends were doing, which was like a Space Invaders clone, or something straightforward like that, I decided to create a realistic simulation of a motorboat in the sea.
Salman Ansari:
And this is particularly complicated, because a boat has to respect the laws of water and recreating water. It ended up using these Perlin noise functions and all these complicated things. And I remember it was like 3:00 AM or something and I finally got it to actually run without my input. And so I just saw this boat floating like this and I was like, ”I have created life. This is amazing.” And I was convinced that this was the thing I wanted to do and ended up applying to all these positions to just work anywhere where they make games. And I somehow got this internship in California, where I worked for this company that was related to games, but I didn’t really realize exactly how. I was just like, ”Whatever. I don’t care. I want to go to California. I’m going to work on games and stuff.” And the job that I worked on was inserting ads into games, so I didn’t…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh no.
Salman Ansari:
… Really realize that this was what the company was doing, but that was a core part of what the company was doing. And it turned out, it wasn’t really a company that made games, it was a company that distributed them and it inserted these things into them. And it was just a very, very negative experience. And I felt really alienated and disillusioned from that. And then I started to research more and learned… Yeah, actually working at these BA and it’s not actually very fun or really… It’s a very difficult place to work. And coincidentally, there was two different people I met at this internship, this quote unquote dreadful internship, and one of them was a very, very, very cool business-minded product guy. And another was a technology leadership veteran. And both of them became friends of mine and I introduced them to each other and they ended up actually leaving that company and starting a new company.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
No way.
Salman Ansari:
And hired me as the first employee when I graduated. It was obviously a difficult choice because, again, parents and expectations and things like that, that I’m going to go and work for some big tech company or something like that. So yeah, I ended up joining them and they were working on something completely different, had nothing to do with games, it had to do with… It was a marketing-based platform, social media marketing platform, which I didn’t understand really at the time, I just trusted them. And I was like, ”They’re my friends. And they’re really smart. And I think they know what they’re doing, so I’m going to follow them.” And grew in that role from founding engineer to engineering manager, running the San Francisco office. We spent five years and then we were acquired in Oracle. That became a really big formative part of my life. That’s the way it works sometimes.
Salman Ansari:
And then lo and behold, five or eight years have gone by and I can’t even remember the original reason why I actually flew out to California, has to do with games. I don’t regret it at all. I think it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but it is funny how that happens sometimes, or even these tiny subconscious threads, or what was it that made me really interested to begin with versus what made me want to keep going, because I really do, as much as I don’t do as much of it now, I really do like building things and software in particular. So I’m glad I had that experience.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
So grateful that you told me all about that. First of all, I need to tell you, I relate to you quite a bit to your story. My family, most people were doctors or psychiatrists or gynecologists or professors. And I was the contrarian as my… I discovered this word from my coach, Martha Beck, who says that some people are contrarians, because everything told me that I shouldn’t try to pursue becoming a singer. And I went, ”Eh.” And went anyway. But then I landed in a different career and years later I’m like, ”What am I doing here? Did I ever want to work in fashion?” Anyways.
Salman Ansari:
I don’t know if this is your experience, but I feel like there’s… I haven’t always thought of it with that word, but there are times where if I’m doing something, then I want to do it slightly differently. You know what I mean? Even if it’s something that you’re doing that lots of people are doing, and you like that thing, you still want to do something that makes it unique. And half of me thinks, ”Yeah, that’s pretty universal. Most people want to be unique.” And things like that. But I do sense that there’s an element where you take it a little further and you’re like, ”No, it’s not even interesting unless it’s differentiated in some way.”
Salman Ansari:
I also feel like there’s something there… I don’t know if it’s as much about contrarian, but it’s about, ”Hey, I have this open question, about what would it be like if I were able to do this thing and I want to experiment, I want to know the answer to that, and I’m willing to pay the costs of, for example, being new and crappy at something.” A lot of people just aren’t willing to do that, especially if they’ve already proven themselves in another arena. So I think that that’s an interesting trait. I don’t know if it’s exactly the same trait, but I feel like there’s an exploratory vibe that some people have where it’s just like, ”I don’t care. Worst case, I do it and I don’t like it, and then that’s great because now I know.” Do you ever have that feeling where like… Sometimes I get really relieved to discover that I actually don’t have interest in something, because then it’s one less thing I have to worry about.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yes, yes.
Salman Ansari:
You know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, yeah. I’d love to know, what gave you the courage to actually not follow what was expected of you?
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question, because it’s something that I’ve had to really hone, especially nowadays, especially in my days now, where I’m breaking a lot of expectations, both of my own and others, but early in my career, especially during that period, I was hesitating. I was like, ”I want to do the right thing.” I had done all the right things basically, I studied hard. Except for… Even the program I chose, yeah I was the only one who did computer science, but it’s not like I was quitting school and going to start a rock band or something. It was still a very… Like, ”Yeah. He’s working hard and going to a good school and all this stuff’s things.”.
Salman Ansari:
And so, I don’t think I could have done it entirely on my own. I think that these two friends of mine, what I loved about them, they’re still good friends of mine and I continue to work with one of them, as recently as a few months ago through part-time work, but they would talk to me in a way where they understood my goals, but also shared and invited me to work with them. And I think, for example, if it had been a very hard sell, which I’ve had other people later in my life do, then you understand that, ”You know what? That person really is just here to benefit from me, working for them.” And the minute that you realize that, then you can’t really trust their guidance to be fair and unbiased around your career.
Salman Ansari:
And I remember the conversations that they had with me, where they said, ”Look, you can always work for the big companies later, but we’re doing this thing now. And these things don’t come along all the time.” And knowing that I would have their friendship, and their mentorship and guidance, made me feel a lot more safe. That said, it wasn’t enough to explain it in a way that others would feel safe about this move. And to be honest, it was still a scary thing, because I didn’t even apply to American universities, because I was uncomfortable with the idea of leaving Canada at that time, in general, I was like, ”Why would I leave Canada? This is where I live.”
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I hear it’s lovely. Yeah, exactly.
Salman Ansari:
It’s nice. No, it wasn’t even like I had huge Canadian pride. I was just like, ”Why? It seems like a big, scary thing to do. There’s good universities here.” So similarly, there were companies I could work for in Canada. And so moving to the US was also a big decision. I think California drew me a little bit and gave me some courage. People, especially back then, it’s the early 2000s, you read about California and Silicon Valley. And I was like, ”I think, given the path that I’ve chosen, this sort of technology career, it’s probably a good place to go.” Initially. I used those as pillars to help me make the decision and was like, ”Let’s wait and see what happens.”.
Salman Ansari:
But I will say that that decision of investing in people is one that just kept coming back and coming back, because as you know, with startups, you come and then it sounds nice and then you get into it. And then it’s like, ”Well, I don’t know if we’re going to have enough money for this round. Well, I don’t think the angels are going to come and we’re going to have to raise money. We can’t raise money because we have…” and all those types of things start to happen. And you have difficulties, you have personnel difficulties, you have all these conflicts and stuff like that.
Salman Ansari:
And it’s important to know in moments like that, what are the things that would make you want to walk away versus keep the path? And it’s an important question to reflect, what made me actually stay there for five years to see that through, because many companies don’t get that far, many companies die along the way. And a lot of people usually leave before that happens, but I just kept going back to… I really liked working with my friends and I really trusted them. And they always made decisions that demonstrated a lot of leadership, a lot of consideration for their team as well as for the good of the company.
Salman Ansari:
And I think that always made me feel like, ”Okay, this is the closest thing to a family I have here.” And I use that word very carefully, because I think it gets misused and abused a lot in startups, where people will be like, ”Hey, you’re like family, come in and you should really give everything to this.” And certainly, I know I was young, I’m sure I did work a lot. And these days we might say, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I was young and that’s what I wanted to do and that’s where I wanted to be. I wanted to be around these friends, building this stuff and enjoying that experience. Courage, I think has to be refilled. So there might have been something that got me to go over there, but there had to be a regular supply to keep me there. And in the end, it’s the people that can do that, or won’t.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much. It’s a very thoughtful way of explaining it and I like the word you used, investing in people. So, you’ve been, and let me read this from my screen, a startup founder, CTO, web and iOS engineer, a teacher, you’re now a writer, an illustrator and a DJ. And then you put in on your website, to name a few, so there’s more. Of course. So this brings me straight to how I came across you. And I think that you were spotlighted in David Perell’s newsletter once, who is a writer who runs a chorus called Write of Passage. I’d heard about it through Andrew Barry, who was also a guest on the show a few months ago.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
And then I read your blog post and I was like, ”Oh my God, this guy gets it and he’s describing me-ish.” Because a friend of mine, who’s also a podcaster called Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, had nicknamed me Renaissance Woman. And the word for me makes no sense, because I know renaissance and French and I don’t understand the English meaning behind the time. That’s how I’d landed on Polymath and polymath really was not something that I was equally familiar with. I maybe fluent in English, but French is my first language. And so I read you and I read a couple of other posts and I thought, ”Damn. I like that guy.”
Salman Ansari:
Thank you.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
And I didn’t reach out to you straight away. I just thought, ”Come on, get a grip, wait a bit.” And I registered to get your newsletter and I really, really enjoyed it. So I know that this particular blog post was a big thing for you. Could you perhaps start by telling us about the polymath advantage?
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, well thank you for sharing that, and I’m so glad you did reach out later on and we got to chat, because it’s just been a pleasure getting to know you as a friend, outside of everything else, I just want to start with that.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Absolute same. Thank you.
Salman Ansari:
And you mentioned David Perell and it’s important I think, and relevant here, because I took Write of Passage three, the third edition, which was in 2019, end of 2019 I think. And that really… I was still working full-time at a big tech company then and launched this writing phase of my life. And to be completely honest, it’s almost strange now for me to imagine, not constantly writing about and reflecting upon how I live my life and how I used to live my life. Right?
Anne V Muhlethaler:
That’s amazing right.
Salman Ansari:
Right. But there was a period of time where I think one of the driving forces I had for enrolling in that course was I had this realization that I was doing all this stuff and learning all these things, but I never synthesized them. And no one outside of the office ever had any clue really of what I was doing or what I was learning. And I didn’t really know why that didn’t feel right, but it just didn’t feel right. So when I saw David Perell’s course, I was like, ”Yeah, that seems kind of interesting. I don’t know, writing online. Yeah, I used to blog for fun before. I guess I could look into it.” Suffice to say that cohort really is when I kicked off my newsletter, that’s when I started publishing essays. And that July was when I wrote this essay.
Salman Ansari:
Now interestingly, I will say a couple of things about this, when an essay goes as big as this one did… So what ended up happening was I published it in my newsletter with actually a different title and a slightly different structure, but I linked to my blog and then a bunch of people read it, some people tweeted it. And what I ended up doing was just editing it and then clarifying the… I had renamed it, it used to be called The Polymath Within. And I just liked the word play a little bit more, so I renamed it to Polymath Playbook. And while I was writing it, I was just trying to express this feeling that I had, that I had started to see here and there. There’s this book I found called The Polymath, where it talks about a bunch of polymaths, but I felt like there was something missing in this conversation.
Salman Ansari:
And it was that when people talk about polymaths or renaissance men or things like that, they’re always just talking about Leonardo DaVinci and other very sort of… I find them a little bit unapproachable, they’re so… Okay, so basically this is a path for absolute genius, just unfettered, incredible genius. And it just didn’t feel that inspiring to me and I just wanted to say, ”Hey, I’ve been working on one thing most of my life, but I keep doing these things on the side and I think there’s something there.” And that’s basically all I was trying to express really. And when I did a little bit of research, I found, okay, so there was some method to my madness. There was a little bit of, this actually makes some sense.
Salman Ansari:
And so I started to reflect and notice I had been a CTO co-founder of this healthcare startup and I realized that I had used some principles from my previous startup days, from one industry into this industry. And when I was DJing, I realized that was similar to product-market fit. So DJing as product-market fit, I should probably write that post separately, but this is the thing I’ve learned, is you’re basically testing. You have to pay close attention to the signal and then you adjust the product to meet the vibe demand. For example, contrast that to a DJ that just shows up and delivers the product that they want to deliver. And they’re like, ”Oh, they’re not vibing, I’ll turn up the volume.” And doesn’t work and then they’re confused. It’s all the same. And so I started to realize that, ”Oh wait a sec, there’s a lot of these.” But the only reason that I saw it that way was because I had done this other thing. And so I was like, ”Oh, that’s interesting.”
Salman Ansari:
So I started writing about those ideas and I wrote about mental models. And then as I was writing it, this part came up and I was like, ”Well, yeah this all sounds like it’s really nice, doing all these things, but I think there’s some parts of it that are really difficult.” And one part I talk about is the sheer loneliness that can happen a lot. Where, the example I gave was, I would be in these… Like you mentioned, there’s lots of different career paths that I switched over into and each of these were years of work. And so I remember I was in an iOS developer’s meetup. So during one phase I was very dedicated to iOS development. I really liked the iOS platform and animation and the care, that craft, that goes into apps on that platform.
Salman Ansari:
And I was in this conference and I was in one of those circles where you’re talking with a bunch of people and each person, with pride, would share how long they’ve been working on Apple products. And if they’re not young graduates, that’s mostly what they’ve been working on for their career. And so they would say things like 10 years, nine years, 12 years. And I would be like, ”Two. But I’m a senior, very senior, member of the tech community. I’ve been a leader at MBA, senior engineer, but I’ve only been in this in two.” And I realize, ”I don’t really relate to this group at all. I guess I kind of relate in that we’re interested in iOS.”
Salman Ansari:
But the way that we think about life, the way that we’ve approached our career, the experiences that we’ve had, I just felt really alone and isolated in that space. And I realized that this happens. And then I also realized… Well, not only that, but even once I… Let’s say I start to actually get comfortable in that space, then that makes me uncomfortable, and I get bored and I want to switch, try something new. So I wrote all the stuff in there. And then as I was editing the essay, I was like, ”Well, I have the really nice ideas at the top and then I have this personal story. Who cares about my personal story? I’m going to delete it.” So I literally almost deleted the whole thing. And I was like, ”It’s still a good essay.” It’s just about polymaths, the Jack of all trades quote, the Jack of all trades. There’s an extended version, et cetera, et cetera,
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Would you give us that? Because I think that was quite a big thing.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, so the quote that most people know is ”Jack of all trades, master of none.” Which basically tells you, you’re a master of nothing, you’re effectively useless. But there’s an extended version, which is ”Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. ”Right?
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Hah! Fancy.
Salman Ansari:
Exactly. So obviously there’s always, ”Oh well, actually this quote isn’t really the full… It’s actually that, the original was that blah, blah, blah.” But it doesn’t actually matter what the origins are, the important thing is this, only one of them became well known. So it’s important to analyze that. Well, why was it that short one that says Jack of all trades is a master of none? It’s be-
Salman Ansari:
That says, “Jack of all trades is a master of none.” It’s because the roots of specialization in our society that started from the industrial era where we basically determined that hey, we basically need to scale humans and we are going to build these factories and the humans are going to play a role in it. And honestly, a human that can play multiple roles is not that useful. We don’t really care about that. We really want you to get so good that you can really do that one station extremely well. So our industrial capabilities in our economies are optimized around being super hyper-specialized. And that’s why I think quotes like that version, the short version are what became prevalent doesn’t even really matter what the origin is. So that was an important idea and then the other idea I had talked about how, hey, it doesn’t have to be like that.
Salman Ansari:
You can actually go and move forward in these multiple areas. There’s an important clarification that I put in there, which is that it’s not just about doing a bunch of random things all the time because you actually will really struggle then. It’s more about, okay, I’ve chosen this foundational career path, now I’m going to explore this one, maybe do some tests before I feel good in it and explore that one as well. Now I can leverage the skills, learnings, perspectives in each of these to improve them each other or create new unique combinations that no one else could do. So I talk about all of those and I expected people to because people like ideas and they like frameworks and they like intelligent sounding solutions. I was like, okay, they’re going to like that and they’re not going to care about, no one knows who I am.
Salman Ansari:
No one’s going to care about this part of the story. So the essay goes out, it starts to get shared a little bit on Twitter. Someone tells me, they’re like, “Yeah…” Oh yeah. So I submitted it to Hacker News because I was told you should do that. So I submitted it and nothing happened. It’s dead. It was two upvotes die. I was like, “Oh well.” And I went on with my life, went on to write the next essay. This was just one essay, just like all the others because I was publishing weekly, which is another thing we can talk about later but really did change my life. So I was already writing the next one. I was just like, “Yeah, whatever.” I just wrote this thing. Oh well, it didn’t work. Fine. Then I got this notification.
Salman Ansari:
I didn’t really know Hacker News does this, but sometimes it will automatically resubmit something that didn’t do well. I don’t know what signal it has or where it makes a decision because it’s never, ever done this again for me. But it resubmitted it and went to the top basically. So people were messaging me. They’re like, “You’re on Hacker News Journal.” I’m like, “What?” Now interestingly, it being on Hacker News got me a lot of, I could see the views coming in, and then there was all the Hacker News comments, which were expectedly Hacker News comments. It would be people being like technically the term polymath is reserved for people who achieve, I think the phrase was Grammy level or above excellence in three or more different field. You can’t just talk about polymaths and blah blah blah or it would be a bunch of quotes like that.
Salman Ansari:
And actually, even they would out them. So they’d be like, I agree with everything in this essay, except he shouldn’t have used the word polymath. He should have used some and then it’s like all right, well did the ideas at least… It’s like, no. So again, second experience of mine was like, wow, this isn’t really resonating or this is Hacker News. I don’t know but then somehow started to get a little traction on Twitter and I noticed Toby Lutke the Shopify CEO tweeted it and he didn’t just tweet it. He was like, “Range is undervalued in our society.” And then tweeted it linked to it. It was a very advocate tweet. And so that one went viral. So then it was just like, I think I had 700 new newsletter subscribers that day and it was like 20,000 views and stuff like that.
Salman Ansari:
But that’s kind of interesting. Having a post get lots of views is kind of cool. It’s cool to happen, but it’s like, what does it actually mean? What I think was really cool about it was seeing all the tweets and what people were actually saying about what this piece meant to them. And almost all of them, I actually wrote a follow-up piece talking a little bit about it, but almost all of them were people saying, “Oh, I thought there was something wrong with me that I didn’t know how to socialize and I kept feeling lonely and I thought it was my fault,” or, “I thought there was something wrong with me that I want to do these other careers and I should be just focusing and being a better worker.” So they kept talking about my personal story and I remember thinking, “Man.” I was this close to deleting it thinking no one cares about personal story, but in reality, the personal story is what makes it resonate with people.
Salman Ansari:
Even if they don’t know who I am, they’re like, I relate and understand the way that you share with this person. Then they’re more open to the ideas and that completely changed how I think about all of my writing. So literally you could see a market shift where at first I would hesitantly and sometimes share personal anecdotes. Then after that I was telling my personal story and being as authentic and vulnerable as I can and then having ideas that I extract out of those is the way that I’m going forward and it’s just been doubling down on that since then.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, so I think it’s an interesting example. People like ideas. They want ideas, but they want to know that they are relevant and relatable to them. I think if someone read a book about DaVinci, it’s different than reading a post by someone that’s like, “Hey, I also literally do, and here’s photographic evidence of these other things that I do. Not all of them I’m doing today. You can do that also.” So yeah, so it was definitely an interesting experience and it has been continues to be a post that I still see people every week or something, I’ll get something about it. So I’m really glad I wrote it, but it was very much just like, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about this. Let me just get it out and we’ll see what happens. I’ll feel like a lot of the posts that I write end up being like that because you never really know what’s going to resonate in what way. You can’t really predict that. So there wasn’t much, I hadn’t really planned much around it.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Have you heard of the teacher and also Robert McKee? Does that a ring bell?
Salman Ansari:
Yes.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I went to a seminar of his in London earlier this year and I furiously took notes for the three days I was there. He was so brilliant but he said something that felt so right. He said, “Stories are how we learn without explanations.”
Salman Ansari:
I love that.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
And of course, then I was like, oh, because I remember that’s also Yuval Noah Harari when he wrote Sapiens was saying, “Story is how we learn and how we communicate.” But I loved understanding that thing about explanation. We don’t always want to things to be explained. We want to get it another way, that’s the dichotomy of our human behavior and perhaps our ego or it speaks to how distracted we can be when we just hear facts. We want to connect emotionally maybe that’s part of what it is.
Salman Ansari:
I think you’re totally right. I’m so glad you shared that. There’s two things that come to mind around that. The first one is, I read this book called The Science of Storytelling by Will’s Storr. I had originally read it to just learn more techniques about storytelling and things like that. But the first chapter of this book, I think it’s worth a read just for that first chapter. So he ends up talking a lot about perception and it’s hard to summarize what he’s saying, but the high level is this, is that so we don’t actually perceive reality. It’s basically it’s too much. There’s too many things to see and there’s too many things to hear and there’s too many things all basically their sensory inputs are too much. So our brain basically has to make decisions about which of those to filter out.
Salman Ansari:
We don’t really realize or pay attention to this fact, but our brain it’s the simple term would be an algorithm that’s choosing what to tell us. But the format with which it tells us is stories. It’s literally telling us a story that, “Oh, you just saw that. Oh, that’s what just happened over there.” Which is crazy. I mean to me it’s fascinating because then it’s like, well why are stories so fundamental? It’s because literally the mechanism and model that our brain uses to perceive reality is a format of a story. So if you package it in that way, then your brain’s like, “Hmm, this is very convenient. It’s already in the way that I wanted it.”
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I love it. It’s packaged the right way. That’s how I wanted it.
Salman Ansari:
It literally tastes better to the brain I feel like and so that’s how I feel are hungry for stories they always want. That’s how we understand things. That’s how we remember things. I think that your second point about not being explained is very relevant and interesting to me personally because I’ve been for the past couple of years, engaging in this practice of writing fables, which are stories with lessons in them, but they’re not explained. You have to do a little bit of work to understand and there’s levels of how clear versus ambiguous it is. But what I think is interesting about these packages and why people really enjoy them is at first, I thought it was people like puzzles and they like figuring stuff out and there’s some element of that. If you watch a movie and you figure something out that took a little bit of putting two and two together, it feels good. It feels like a rewarding thing. So you like that.
Salman Ansari:
But what I like about fables and stories that are what I call them abstract vehicles. So if I tell you a story and it’s so specifically about me that you could never imagine yourself in it, basically that’s like a fact. It’s just some information about something else that isn’t you. But if I tell you a story and maybe it’s about a fox or maybe it’s about a cat, then you might be able to imagine yourself as that. This happens a lot in stories where it doesn’t have to be abstracted literally into an animal. It can also be a friend of mine once wrote this story about their own experience and struggles with depression and things like that. It was a very heartfelt piece and one of his friends texted him after reading it and was like, “Oh, I’m so glad you wrote about this and this.”
Salman Ansari:
Then my friend kind of replied, “I didn’t write that. That was all you, man.” I always remember that because people, this is your brain at work it’s like, “Hey, this story is about this and this.” And if you give people a vehicle that’s abstract, it allows them to extract what they need to see from it. Now, of course, this can go the wrong way where people just see what they want to see and ignore what you’re trying to say and they’re not trying to empathize what you’re trying to say. So we have to be aware of both sides of it where the brain will actually do this, it will be like, “Oh, that’s blue.” And it’s because my brain labels as blue your brain labels us green. When you really go down this path it’s a little bit disconcerting because we don’t actually have a shared understanding. It’s we’re all just hoping that our interpretations are close enough generally.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Absolutely. I mean, no wonder communication is such a minefield between human beings. Like you said, quoting from that book by Will Storr, we don’t have the same perceived reality because I don’t know how you are relating or telling a story about the moment that we’re in right now, for example. It’s a minefield.
Salman Ansari:
That’s the thing that I think about a lot is you and I could be right now sitting next to each other, we could both be staring at the same thing, the exact same thing, and be “seeing different things”. So it’s important for us to keep that in mind and how that’s just part of the nature of our society is that we’re all going to have slightly different interpretations. But what is the shared element that we want to connect on? And how can we make sure that that part is what’s communicated? The key essence, the intent or the direction or the action that’s warranted. So with storytelling, one of the things that I think about a lot is what’s the message you’re trying to get people to take away from this when you’re workshopping a story? And sometimes people will be like, “Well, this is what I saw.”
Salman Ansari:
And it’s like, well, that’s nice, but what do you think most people who see this are going to see? That’s your job is figuring out you are kind of responsible for that. If you’re trying to be somebody who, literally anyone who participates in a society, then you need to know what is it that you’re actually saying. This is where all that the science comes in of I’m going to do a really bad job of quoting the exact numbers on this, but there’s some studies that have been done around if you and I have a conversation and what percentage of the signals that we exchange are derived from the words versus the tone and body gestures and facial expression. And effectively it’s a lot more of the facial expressions and the tone than it is the words. So that should tell us that the package is more than just the words. The package includes all these different facets and we need to keep that in mind when we’re communicating.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Absolutely. I wanted to grab a book, but it’s actually on the table over there, so I can’t I think you’ll really enjoy it. It’s called Peak Mind by a lady called Amishi Jha. She’s based in Miami University and her research is on attention. And she says, “Yeah, roughly about 60% of what we’re reading or what we are listening to when we exchange with someone, we’re not going to remember.”
Salman Ansari:
Yeah.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
So let’s say roughly about 50% of the experience that we’re actually putting our attention upon is going to not be part of our awareness and then she did say as well that it’s about 50% of your immediate brain’s attention goes into the visual field. Literally like 50% of your brain’s energy is to try and understand what happens that comes in through sight. So you realize that for the rest of the brain’s power, there’s a lot of negotiations.
Salman Ansari:
That’s a good way to put it. Yeah.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Who’s getting the information at this point in time? But now let me ask you something else. First, how did you get into writing?
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, I mean, I think writing, actually, when I was in university, I used to blog. I had this blog called daretorant.com, and I would wake up at 2:00 AM and basically be annoyed about something.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh my gosh.
Salman Ansari:
And I would go and write these really long rants and they’re actually, I still think they’re some of my best work. They’re pretty hilarious.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh, I’m going to look this up.
Salman Ansari:
I think I had one that was titled, it was something like Booking Flights is Like Eating Cereal Where the Special Marshmallows are Razor Blades or something like that. It was just unhinged, just, I’m going to complain about this and I complain about how… And I was like, American is not a measurement system. It was just like this. It was just stuff like that and so it was just pure fun and silliness. But I did actually have, my friends would read it and they would be quite entertained by the stupidity of this, but they would really want to read more. So that was my first experience of writing and having some kind of audience that was like, why haven’t you written another one? But I stopped doing that at the end of university. Then it was probably, I actually had… When I started teaching, I started teaching at coding boot camps.
Salman Ansari:
I taught in South Africa once, launching a coding boot camp there, which was really fun as well as in New York at General Assembly. So I had a lot of these students that wanted to continue learning from me and so I would write this newsletter. I basically launched this newsletter called Laugh and Learn. So I would include some silly memes and things like that, and then also some useful learning materials. But I put in so much effort into the layout and all these little things that it was just so much work just to get one out. So I only had three additions and then I couldn’t do anymore and ever since then, I actually was afraid to start a newsletter because I thought I would just quit again. And I felt kind of bad and really guilty and I just didn’t want to really even approach it.
Salman Ansari:
So it was only through Write of Passage that I was like, “Okay, you know what? I think I could do this.” And one of the things about Write of Passage is you write, it’s six weeks and you write six and publish six essays. It really gets you into this cadence. And I launched my newsletter, Quick Brown Fox. And it was funny, actually, the three additions went by and I was like, “Oh, oh no, this is the one that’s going to die.” And it was weird. It was like, there’s really no rational thing here. Why would this matter? But it does. It just does and sometimes it doesn’t matter, rational, no rational. Hey, you’re human and you’re going to be affected by things and you have to be aware of that. So my fourth edition, I sort of cheated and I was just like, “Hey, I once launched this newsletter and it was scary and it died after three, so I’ve been scared for number four. So here’s number four.”
Salman Ansari:
I published that and people related and it was great. I went on and kept going. So I will say I have switched to a two-week cadence while I’ve been writing the book, but writing and publishing weekly is a serious, serious game changer. I would recommend anyone who’s struggling with writing, just give yourself some kind of cadence like that. I started by feeling like what am I going to write? What can you even say every week? God, I just wrote a week ago. You want me to do it again? You know what I mean? Then it gets to this point where it’s like, “My God, it’s just always something to say.” There’s always more to say. There’s things that are piling up. Ideas are piling up. I think that’s a really interesting thing about creativity.
Salman Ansari:
I feel like the more I create, the more I have. It’s the complete opposite. The metaphor of a bottle doesn’t work. It’s more like, I don’t know what the metaphor. We don’t have things like this. It would be a battery the more I use it, the more energy it has in it. I mean kinda I guess that could work. But the point was I really did kick it off and I started to have lots of things to write, but I was only writing all nonfiction newsletters and essays and things like that. So to your other question, well, where do fables come in? So it’s just kind of interesting and I use this as an example of you shouldn’t try and plan everything. So I definitely didn’t plan this and I think it’s a good example of that. So at some point in this journey of writing, I started to include other silly experiments, like little animation loops that I was making.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I saw some of them. They’re so cute.
Salman Ansari:
Thanks. I would just put them in and I loved doing it because I would provide absolutely no explanation. I would talk about self-awareness. You can build self-awareness using the following blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’ve done also, here’s these two worms going in a circle. It was just completely… But people would be like, “I love that. I love seeing what weird random things.” And I was like, “This is cool. This is cool.” So I was like, “Okay, I want to get more into drawing.” So here’s a funny circle that happened. Okay. So as I mentioned earlier, I like animation. So I’ve been playing with these animation loops. Now, the thing about animation is it’s incredibly time-consuming, especially the kind that I went into which is hand-drawn animation. So I would just make these short loops.
Salman Ansari:
The reason that I wanted to make these animations sort of try and make them was I was hoping it would help me make a longer film, but it’s still so much square to make something bigger. What I learned is, well, if you want to get better at that, you should learn how to draw well. When you learn how to draw well, then it’ll be easier to do animation. So I started going back to learning. I mean, I started learning how to draw so that I could eventually make animation someday. At least that was my reasoning then. So I bought all these books, of course, all these art books, none of which I’ve actually finished or read in any way. I’m completely honest, I find so many of them really uninspiring. They’ll be like, lesson one, draw 1000 circles. And it’s like, yes, no, I understand.
Salman Ansari:
If I did do that, that would be good but do you realize that that is literally the least amount of fun I could ever have in my life? This is so boring. Make me do something fun. But I tried. So I started learning and learning to draw you can go into all these different branches. So I was learning gesture drawing, figure drawing, trying to draw realistic people and characters and humans and things like that. I was complaining to my buddy and I was like, “Eh, they’re not great yet.” And he’s like, “Okay, well…”
Salman Ansari:
And I’m like, “Well, that’s not even it. I’m not even having fun.” It’s just so much work to learn this and I don’t really know why I’m doing it and he was like, “One thing that’s interesting about drawing humans is that you know exactly what a human looks like.” You have very strong preference about that. So when you try to draw a human, you basically look at it and you’re like, “Well that’s wrong and it’s bad.” And he’s like, “You know what you should do? You should make up animals and then draw those because then they can’t be wrong. No matter what you draw. It’s not wrong.” And I was like-
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh my God. That’s such a great advice.
Salman Ansari:
So that’s why friend Dave Gorham, I got to give him shoutouts. But I was like, That’s a wild idea. I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Just make it up any animal.” And I was like, “Okay.” And I started drawing random animals. So the elephant, the fox, the rat, all these ones that you saw, they all came just for me, not even really knowing how to draw, “just imagining some wild, strange, colorful animal” and just making it and just trying to draw it and just obviously do it a few times.
Salman Ansari:
But I was able to use color and things like that I wasn’t able to play with before and it was really fun. So I started sharing those. Again, no goal, no purpose, but I started making tiny little comics about them and things like that. One day I was looking at one of the characters and I was like, “Wonder what their story is. What’s their story here?” And I didn’t know what to do with that because I had never written any kind of stories or fiction or anything like that. But there was this bird that I had drawn a few times and suddenly this story came into my head of this bird that doesn’t know how to fly and everybody else does. And that’s kind of the premise of the first story I wrote. I remember we had in through Write of Passage you can meet people.
Salman Ansari:
Then you get together and you have these groups where you review essays. So one day, instead of an essay, I brought this story and they read it and they were like, “Oh, there’s a lesson in here,” And “Oh, this is kind of interesting. This is really cool. You should really do these.” And I was like, “Really?” Because I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I had never written anything like that. I didn’t even know what writing a story was. I think that so many of the things we do, we have to know what we’re doing and figure the thing out and be qualified or study it or what have you. In some cases, if the thing wants to come through you it will. You just have to let it just be playful and just let it show up and it only showed up because I didn’t have all these big plans for it.
Salman Ansari:
It just wants to come to play. It’s not here for me to yet to make something big out of it. So then that’s where that first story came and then I didn’t really know what to do with it. So I didn’t really do anything with it for a while and then fast forward to, I was kind of going along in my creative journey and I was happy with my newsletter and my essays and all these different things I was doing, but I had this hunger to take my writing and make something bigger out of it. Something like a book, for example, is one idea I had. So I saw this ad, I don’t know if it was an ad or it was through Seth Godin’s blog post is actually how I found it for this program that he helped launch called Writing in Community.
Salman Ansari:
And the premise of this program was super fascinating. It was like, okay, you go into this program and there’s a forum effectively, and every day you post a little bit of your writing and you tag some people and they’ll just be like, “Nice, keep going,” or whatever. You just do this for six months and then at the end you publish a book to Kindle. And I was like, “Woo. Wow, writing a book that’s so intimidating. This sounds almost too good to be true or I don’t really believe it.” But there’s a lot of people on there that were like, “Yep, yep, that’s what happened.” Then so I was like, “Wow, all right, well I don’t know if I’m going to publish it in Kindle, but at a very minimum, maybe I could compile some stuff.” So my idea was I’ll take some of the ideas around polymath stuff and I’ll compile them into a book.
Salman Ansari:
So I signed up for this program and it started two months later or a month and a half later. So I’m like, “Yeah, it’ll be something about Polymaths. I don’t really know. I mean, I have written some stuff around it. It seems like something I could write a book about.” Then on your first day, you’re supposed to write that first post, which is what is this book? What do you want to write about? So I sat down to write this post about what I just said and I was like, “Yeah, I guess I could write this book about these polymath ideas. Yeah, I guess that’s pretty exciting.”
Salman Ansari:
Then suddenly I remembered that I had written that story and I was like, it would be kind of cool is if I wrote more of those stories. It was literally very much just an idea that popped in and was like, you know you could do it. Because this is as low stakes. No one knows. I hadn’t talked about it. I didn’t tell anyone I was in this program. It was my secret little place where I could theoretically write this book. The book that I talk about endlessly, my favorite book, The Little Prince was just-
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I was going to bring it up.
Salman Ansari:
It was just sitting in front of me at that time. I think I had just reread it and ordered another copy of it, something. I was like, yeah, that was kind of like a fable. Is that why I really like that? Do I like fables? Is that kind of what… Because that story I wrote was basically a fable, but I just didn’t realize these things and I really want to call that out now because a lot of times when people see someone’s path, they’re like, “Oh, he decided to write fables and then he started writing fable…” And it’s like, no, I didn’t even really know what I was writing until it already was written the first one. And I was like, what if I wrote more? If I had given myself a really scary goal like I need to write a book about full of-
Salman Ansari:
I need to write a book full of these stories. I actually don’t know if I would’ve been able to do it.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
No, I was going to say, sure. Because it suddenly it just feels really impressive. Too much almost.
Salman Ansari:
It’s too much. I mean, especially if you haven’t done it before. I had not done anything like that before. I’ve never even written fiction in my whole life. The only thing I had was that story. So technically I have no real evidence that I can do this effectively. But this program was saying, it’s fine. Just show up and post a paragraph or something and just keep going. So, a lot of times when people write stories they have an outlined for a story, they have some kind of idea, something. But there were people here that did not have that. They would just show up and write whatever showed up that day. And I was like, this is interesting. I like plans. I like to plan stuff even if I’m not going to work on it, I like having my plan.
Salman Ansari:
So it was very confusing, but I was like, okay, fine. I’ll try it. I’ll try it. And the results were nothing short of spectacular in every measure that I can have. It would literally felt like I would show up to write, but also as an audience of my story to figure out what happened next. And I would just let the story go wherever and people would be there commenting like, “Oh wow, I wonder what happens next?” And I was like, this is amazing. I’m reading their stories.
Salman Ansari:
Actually, I just want to say one thing. I think when we talk about feedback and community, we often talk about having good critical feedback that helps you improve your craft. We don’t talk about just the immense value of just like, yep, keep going. That’s it. Sometimes I would come in and I would be like what am I even doing here? And then they would be like, “What happens next?” That’s it. That’s all. And that’s enough for me to keep going for another week, honestly. And I just didn’t appreciate this.
Salman Ansari:
But before I knew it, there was a story about a fox with many tails, a story about a cat and turtle, they’re on a ship and there’s another and there’s another, another. And six months went by and had drafted six fables, six full, 3,000 word-ish, long short story-ish fables. And that was one of the most fun experience that I’ve had in my life.
Salman Ansari:
Now, I didn’t choose to just publish them straight to Kindle because I wanted to really work on them and really grow them to be the best stories they could be. That’s a choice. I didn’t have to do that, but that was kind of the approach I wanted to take.
Salman Ansari:
I did a second writing community where I basically would take the stories I had drafted and then I had an editor that I found and I would workshop them and then share the edited versions. But here’s one really cool thing about this way of writing stories, there’s lots, but one that is worth calling out for anyone listening is like if you share a small section of your story to somebody, one thing that happens is you realize they’re going to read that section from start to finish. Naturally you’ll make it a little bit interesting and have a little bit of suspense at the end. There’ll be a little bit of tension to a suspense at the end. And so then when you put these together, your story has good tension, build up and suspense throughout.
Salman Ansari:
Whereas if you had just rid the whole thing, you’re just thinking the start of the story and the end of the story, you’re not thinking about the middle. And that’s what people talk about, they talk about all the middle is super boring or whatever it is. But when you share in these little pieces, I kind of call it writing in scenes, if a scene is that section, there’s this free benefit that you’re like, well, I don’t want them to be bored when they read this, so I’m going to make that interesting and then your whole story ends up being that way.
Salman Ansari:
Now the drafting was fun, but revising has been a lot of work. To actually turn it into a great story that has a good narrative arc and then the characters have good motivations, there’s depth. I’ve had to learn a lot through this process, but it’s my first time doing it and I think it’ll go a little bit better the second time. But then again, I think that’s kind of the cost of having more of a free range draft as you do a little bit more work on the editing side. But yeah, that’s where I’m at now. Almost done with the revisions on that.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Tell me about why the Little Prince is such an inspiration to you.
Salman Ansari:
Happily. Happily. So it’s interesting, I’ve been obsessed with this book. By the way there’s also a film adaptation on Netflix. I mean, I would just say, given how much this book meant to me, I thought the film would be a disappointment because most adaptations don’t quite live up to the book, but I really liked it. So for anyone listening don’t necessarily want to read the book, even though it’s a nice short book, you can check out the film too. It’s really good.
Salman Ansari:
I always feel a little hesitant sharing lessons and things about The Little Prince because I just feel like the book is so beautiful and so well written that I would just want people to read it. I actually keep a stack of copies there that you can see. Anytime people come over, I’ll just give them one. But to take a stab at it, here’s a few things I would say.
Salman Ansari:
Firstly, one of the big themes in the book is that there is this little prince who understands things a little bit differently than all the adults that he keeps running into. And these adults think that they understand, he runs into these different planets. And in one planet there’s an adult who is just counting the stars. And he’s kind of like, well, why are you counting the stars? Is like, well, because I own them and so I want to keep count. And then he is like, well, how does that help you? And then he’s like, I don’t have time for this. You obviously don’t understand anything. I own all the stars, so I’m going to count them and I need to be really good at counting them so go away. And he’s like, okay, adults are weird.
Salman Ansari:
And then he goes to another planet and there’s a king and the king’s like I rule over the whole planet. And he is like, there’s no one else on this planet. He’s like, I rule over the whole planet and my rule is very important. And then he’s like, okay, anyways. So he keeps running into these situations. They’re little fables within this story. And then he has this pilot that he represents the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who similarly doesn’t quite understand what’s really important in life and this little prince really does. Through this story it helps us question these things that happen to us when we grow from being children into adults where we think being serious and making money and prestige and these types of things are really important. But, when you look at a child, it sounds like they’re just worrying about childlike things, but usually they actually understand things that are important in really deep profound ways that it’s easy to forget and lose that. I think that that was a powerful lesson.
Salman Ansari:
My journey and my creative work is to become more and more connected with that sort of little Selma, that sort of childlike side of me that I hope to keep growing and allowing to play it and manifest, and similarly giving people permission to do that in their lives. I think I also really appreciate the way that this book is written where it’s kind of like a children’s book. Some people call it a children’s book, I don’t. I would say it is a book that children can read and it is a book that adults should read, is how I would describe it.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I would agree with you there. I mean, I haven’t read it for a long time, so I’m thinking to myself, I should get myself a copy.
Salman Ansari:
Most people are in that situation, most people I talk to are like-
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, I read it as a kid, but now I’m making a different link. You loved animations and games, you love Little Price. You are writing a book of fables, you are illustrating the book of fables. Do you see where I’m going with this? Is there going to be a film? Are you already imagining that this could be animated or am I going too far for you too fast?
Salman Ansari:
I mean, I try to be careful not to get too attached to, you want a dream, but don’t get attached kind of thing. And so is there a world in which this book that I’m writing, which this is a struggle that I’ve been having, is that I wrote the fables as just a set of them and then I wrote this other story appeared where there is, I won’t spoil it, but there’s a little boy who goes through a certain experiences and it actually provides a framework for the other fables to fit into that world. And I really liked that technique. Little Prince obviously is an example of this where there’s a story and then there’s sub stories within that. And I just really like that package. I feel like it’s a really magical way to do it. However, it’s a very difficult thing to do well. And so I’ve been going through a lot of revisions on that.
Salman Ansari:
Do I see a world where there’s an animated version of these book and the stories? Yeah, I mean that would be amazing. But it seems like realistically the first goal is to write a book, which I’m almost done. The second goal is to publish the book. The third goal would be to get visibility on the book and see if it resonates. So the way that I would describe it is, if these stories really do resonate with people then there will be some demand for people to hear these stories in other formats. And that would be an interesting one for someone to explore. I don’t necessarily know that I would want to do that myself mostly because animation is the most amount of work you could do for any given thing. It’s kind of tough these days. The animation industry is going through some stuff. It’s a tough time for that industry.
Salman Ansari:
I feel like a more palatable or approachable version of that is the following. So, I’ve been writing these longer stories for the book, but I also have very short fables, 500 word or less or flash fables that I’ve sort of been calling them. And I have a lot of these, they just really keep coming in. And so far I’ve been submitting them to literary magazines and things like that. But I kind of have a dream of just having a separate publication just for those where I would illustrate those. And it’s much more straightforward to say, here’s a 30 second animation where I tell a story and then draw some pictures for it and you get to watch it. It may take me months to do one, but I could at least do one. So that’s an idea.
Salman Ansari:
I think animation has a very special power to really delight us. And even when I was building software animation was one of my obsessions. And the ways that I used to really differentiate myself was I would add all these really subtle animations that most people wouldn’t notice, but some people would. And I just think the way that I always would explain it to people would be, it’s not the animation, it’s someone experiencing something and then realizing someone put effort in just for me. They did all this extra work to improve this experience. And so they relate to the heart, they relate to the energy that is now coming in from someone who cares. It’s like a chocolate on your pillow. It’s not what flavor is the chocolate? No, no, no. It doesn’t matter. They just want to know that someone frankly gives a shit.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, it’s thoughtful.
Salman Ansari:
It’s thoughtful. So I think you can apply that in so many things. I think I remember we even talked about it a little bit, but consideration for details like that really matter. I’m curious if you run into this too, because sometimes you hear a lot of the narrative around perfectionism is a trap and it’ll get you stuck and blocked and you should just be pragmatic and put stuff out and it’s fine. I feel like I both totally agree with that and also totally agree that you should be able to go the extra mile even to unreasonable extents to do those little things so that when people see that and notice that and experience that, they’re like, oh my God. Look at the level of details here.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, I was watching this interview of Elizabeth Gilbert because of a post of yours that I read yesterday. She was talking about perfectionism as fear. She had this really great analogy. It was like she was like, it’s fear in high heels and a mink fur coat. It’s like it’s all dressed up. So you don’t understand but really it’s fear.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I think her distinction is interesting. I think the motivation behind what you add and the length that you go through and your thoughtfulness is, are you scared of putting it out or is it just not ready yet? Because if you are very connected to your intention and the experience you want the other person to have on the other end, and that in the stage that it’s at, you’re not going to be delivering on your intention, then you kind of have to either go back and renegotiate with yourselves, whoever you are, however you want to get there, or you just embrace the thoughtfulness and let it lead you.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah. I so appreciate you saying that. I think it’s so true, even to the point where there would be times where I would be like, why am I going to this extra effort and stressing about this and worrying about this? And it’s like, it’s because you care. It’s good to care. I’m lucky my wife reminds me of that something. She’s like, What is the reason? It’s because you care. It’s okay, don’t feel bad that you care. That’s okay. You can now make choices about how to apply that feeling and channel it and things like that.
Salman Ansari:
I think the thing I’m really resonating with what you said is you have to be the arbiter to determine what is good enough versus there’s more to be done. The fear that probably shows up there is you’re too afraid to trust yourself. And so you want to rely on maybe somebody else’s validation, somebody else’s permission. And this can get you into trouble because a lot of times, a simple example would be even in this writing in community thing there’s a lot of people that are like, if you’re not publishing it to Kindle after the first six months, you’re getting stuck and you’re just pushing it too long. I think I heard a phrase which I didn’t resonate with, which was like, your first book should be clearing your throat before you start speaking. I’ve come to understand now that things people say are meant for certain people and if they’re not meant for you, it’s okay to completely ignore them and just continue because they’re still other people…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Absolutely.
Salman Ansari:
That really do need to hear that. They really do. They’re really stuck and feeling overwhelmed and they just need to get something out to move forward. But that doesn’t mean that you are that person. Even if there’s similar external traits, you’re both still working on something. Sometimes I get into this where I’ll talk to different people on the internet and they’ll give me their opinions about things. I had someone do that where they’re like, well, I think you’re spending a lot of time on it. Maybe you just need to get it out. And I’m like, No. The whole reason I’m doing it is so that I can make sure the stories are compelling, that the illustrations are in there, that the paper is good. These things will happen. And I know that I’m making progress every day, that’s all I can really do.
Salman Ansari:
But I think you’re totally right that, as we’re doing the work, we have to develop our sense about the work, our senses and our taste of when it’s ready. That’s almost just as important. Right?
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah. Well, a few weeks ago, I think I’d been digesting a passage from Seth Godin’s last book, The Practice. It sort of came up in the middle of writing a blog post about how the work itself has expectations from us. If the work is putting out a newsletter every week, then it’s not the same thing as what it is when you are writing a book. And if the book is going to be in print, and it’s not going to be the same thing as writing it or delivering it for Kindle because Kindle you can update it and suddenly, boom, yesterday’s version is no longer a new post of it. So I think the work has expectations. You even said, and I know that you read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I loved as well. And sometimes the idea, the creativity, the story, the work, whatever you want to call, it’s meant to have a certain form and you kind of have to wait until that form is staring at you in the face.
Salman Ansari:
That’s right. Yeah. I think these are tough things to balance because we have to know the difference between are we actually procrastinating here or are we fulfilling how this thing wants to show up? I always kind of think of it as, I just want to do the stories justice. The characters and these stories, I want to do them justice. I want to write them the way that they want to be written. And it’s really funny how these things happen. Sometimes there’s a character that I didn’t have or introduced in the original one, removed and then they came back in a different way to solve a problem I had in the narrative. I mean it sounds silly, but it really does feel like they’re real characters that are like, okay, can you make sure that it’s described this wrong or tell this tale wrong. This is the tale we want to tell.
Salman Ansari:
I think you’re right though, it does start to feel that way. And I actually went through this really cool course the other day… Not the other day, last month, called Psychology for Writers. And it basically helps you use psychology principles to learn about character development. And I use this to focus on that overarching tale that I was struggling on and it really helped me rethink that character and gave me a whole new lens of it. And it felt that way a little bit at the end. I was like, oh yeah, okay, this is how it’s, okay, cool. I could finally move forward.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Honestly, I’m so happy we’re having this conversation because it comes from the intention of what it is that you want to put out in the world. And then that thing gets formed, and that thing has its own sort of a life. And that thing is going to interact with the world and it could exist beyond your lifetime and connect with other people. And that in itself is completely magic.
Salman Ansari:
It is.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
The fact that we are connecting from a continent and a half away, just about, because of that first post that you did. That in itself also is kind of magic.
Salman Ansari:
It really is. I feel like there’s all these metaphors that people use sometimes where it’s like, oh, you only got 100 views on that video. Can you imagine if you were in a room doing something and there were 100 people-
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh my God.
Salman Ansari:
Just happily watching you do it. Can you imagine how that would feel? And I always try to remember that of, God, even one person that really resonates with what you’re doing. Actually, since you used the word magic, I wanted to share.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh sure.
Salman Ansari:
There’s kind of two books really that inspired me. So one of them is Little Prince, the other one is this very unknown book. It’s so funny. It’s literally called Six Animal Plays. And it’s a very sort of strange obscure book. It’s not really fables, they’re just literally plays that children can enact in schools. And each of them is a different animal. The illustrations are really cool. They look like this.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh my God, they’re beautiful.
Salman Ansari:
They’re absolutely gorgeous. So I later learned that the illustrator for this, or the author is Frank Carpenter, but the illustrator is Ronald Searle, who’s style was very inspirational. This book was published 1953, and you can’t really buy this book. I don’t even remember how I found it. I think I saw someone tweet an illustration about it and I just found it in a used bookstore. It’s not in print anymore. But I read it and it really gave me a bunch of energy. These pictures and these little stories about animals. And it made me think, okay, this book, this person, this author has passed away. Meanwhile, this little book that they wrote is sitting here giving me the energy to write my book, and that’s insane to me.
Salman Ansari:
So I think about that and it’s like when people talk about books, they’re talking about how many thousands of copies and what else happened afterward. It’s like, well, what if it ended up being a book that someone kept in their room and looked at sometimes and it helped them really do the thing they really wanted to do? That’s magic. It really is. So sometimes I just think about this, of this person did not make millions. No one knows what this book is. That’s fine. I do. And it’s helping me, and that’s a lot.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome. I completely agree with you. I’m like you in the sense that there are a couple of books that I always give more copies of and know I like the author so much that once I read her book, I buy three or four and I just keep a stash somewhere. Have you heard of Elif Shafak?
Salman Ansari:
No.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
She’s Turkish writer based in the UK. She writes in Turkish and English, and one of her seminal books is called The 40 Rules of Love, and it’s the story of Rumi and his friendships with Shams-e-Tabrizi And it’s just, oh my God.
Salman Ansari:
That sounds wonderful.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
So I even read it in Italian when I was learning the language because I figured I’ve read it four or five times in English, it’s bound to help me to learn.
Salman Ansari:
That’s awesome.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, I wanted to come back to something else though because what I’m piecing together when I’m connecting what you did with your essays, with your favorite book and your fables, you were talking about synthesizing, integrating what you’ve learned. And obviously because you’ve got such a breadth of experiences and different kind of knowledge that generalist or polymath knowledge, forgive me listener if you don’t agree with me using the term. I was wondering, I know that you started meditating, journaling and taking long walks around the same time. I’d love to hear from you how much do you think that had an impact on both these different kinds of writing?
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, huge, huge impact. So I would say a couple of things. Each of those I could talk about for hours, but meditation, journaling and walks I think at each are worthy of just talking about. So I’m really glad you brought them up.
Salman Ansari:
So first of all, when I first started getting into meditation it was during my period of burnout and kind of going through a sabbatical. And so I started to learn meditation and I was really getting quite immersed into books to understand that directional goals and how to kind of use it, how is it helpful and things like that. I actually started meditating for an hour every day. And I did this for almost two months. During that period of time, something happened where I would wake up and be excited and very happy because I knew I could go and meditate. That’s not really my experience today. But that was the experience then because I had created this space for myself, which it just felt like I was like this is awesome. I was just sitting in my apartment, but my apartment felt like paradise, actually, honestly speaking.
Salman Ansari:
I think that some people ask like, oh, do I have to meditate it for an hour every day? And it’s like, well, for me, I feel like some people talk about going on week long meditation retreats, like Vipassana and 10 day retreats, things like that. I think what I have learned is that sometimes you need to do things to get a reference point. So it gave me a feeling, a felt sense of what it is like to experience in that way. And after that, I didn’t necessarily have to meditate for an hour, but I noticed you can kind of look for that felt sense in lots of places.
Salman Ansari:
So you can meditate, you can sit down and meditate in the way that it is sort of taught and practiced. You can also sort of stare at a tree and just kind of really look at it and then maybe you’ll see a bird. And one of the things that happens sometimes is I notice I’m not looking at the birds. It’s like that’s a bird, I’m looking at that specific one. And you can get completely immersed in its story and its world and it feels similar. It feels like you’re like, yeah, this is kind of enough. This is a really beautiful thing and it’s happening all the time. And then you sort of zoom back out into your world where you’re not paying attention to the trees, you’re not seeing the birds, you’re not seeing any of those things and you’re just zooming through your life.
Salman Ansari:
So what I realized is like, oh, those little windows they’re just everywhere all the time. And so the practice is, remembering that they exist throughout the day and taking a look every so often. And I think that that was kind of a pretty big game changer for me, where it was less about for one hour or for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, I’m going to be nice and meditate-y and present and all that. And then the rest of the day I’ll just do what I normally do. Instead, I started to try and apply that sort of mindset, mindfulness. Now again, this is a challenge. I always revert and struggle with it like anybody else, but it really does change how you look at most things.
Salman Ansari:
So the other thing that meditation gave me was you’re asked to sit down and sort of pay attention to your thoughts. You kind of watch them like clouds, right? You’re the experts so you know this. But you kind of watch them like cloud, you go by. And a lot of times I would look at them and I would find interesting things. For one thing, I think that sometimes we think we’re worried about one thing and then you meditate and a lot of these thoughts show up and you’re like, what’s up with that? I think that’s interesting. Just looking at it as a log and Naval Ravikant, he talks about it. He’s like living in debug mode, which means you’re kind of always looking at the log where thoughts appear and then you’re like, that’s interesting, what’s up with that.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Then you can notice, is this useful? Do I need to pay attention to this? Or is this not useful and can I let it go?
Salman Ansari:
That’s right. And so a lot of people will ask about the writing and they’ll say like, oh, I noticed that you are self aware in this part of this writing. How do you do that? And it’s like, well, you don’t sit down and be self aware in the writing. You have to live in that-
Salman Ansari:
In the writing, you have to live in that way where you’re noticing those things. Then we go into journaling, which is your opportunity to capture a bunch of things you might have noticed, give yourself prompts to discover these. I usually have one thing I’m grateful for, what gave me energy and what drained my energy? And one self learning, so usually the self learning one is, “What was surprising?”. So for example, “I did this thing and I expected to feel this way, but it actually made me feel that way, I wonder why”. And then you explore that and you’ll learn something about yourself, and if you do this often enough, it’s like you’re constantly in this analysis or at least perspective mode where you’re not necessarily just letting it happen and you’re also not trying to analyze everything, it’s a fine balance.
Salman Ansari:
But I would say, to put all that in perspective, a lot of what I’ve just said is a very proactive set of steps. It’s basically do this and do that, and then these things will happen, if you think about it, these are actions we can take. But I read this book called Rest by Alex Pang, and he just talks about rest and its importance in a bunch of different ways. And one of the things he talks about is creativity, he talks a lot about what are the things that allow us to be creative, and somewhere in there he just talks about going for walks, and he says the following. He basically is like, “You should know that there is your conscious brain and its ability to think things and do work and stuff, and then there’s your subconscious and it does a whole totally different set of tasks”.
Salman Ansari:
And we’ll talk about that, so one of the things you mentioned is… If you start thinking about a problem, and you’re not sure exactly how you feel about it, and then you just stop and you go for a walk. If you, for example, listen to a podcast, try and do other work, the subconscious part of you that wanted to still work on that problem, they can’t, because now you’re thinking and you’re activating and you’re exploring and you’re absorbing more information. But if you just walk, which to me was crazy at the time, just go for a walk, no phone, no podcasts, no nothing, just walk. And then actually immerse yourself in the physicality of literally taking steps, noticing the trees, et cetera, et cetera. One thing it does, it’s relaxing and good for you, and certainly that’s true.
Salman Ansari:
Another thing it does is when your physical body is engaged in an activity, actually washing dishes is an example of this, most physical labor that’s intensive is an example of this. It’s so engaged in that, that you can’t really do much else, and then you’re self conscious is like, “Okay, cool, I’m going to go do some built up processing”.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Totally agree.
Salman Ansari:
I think we all have these things and we can start to figure out what they are. But yeah, it’s like there’s somewhat of a backlog because someone… You literally are just reading and watching and talking and reading and watching and it’s like, “That’s a lot, man”, and so I need to process that. If we want to actually do anything, we need to stop for a minute, and then I’m like, “I’ll give you one walk”, but that actually can be sufficient in some cases. If I’m working on a problem and I go for a walk, literally, honestly, I feel like I’m going to sound like someone who’s trying to just exaggerate, but I don’t think I can exaggerate… It’s something like seven times out of 10 an idea for a story, the thing I’m trying to say with the essay, it just appears on the walk, and if I don’t go for the walk, it won’t appear, it’s that simple.
Salman Ansari:
If I can’t go for a walk, I’m going to have an issue with writing. I mean, I’m sure there’s other activities that are similar, there’s probably other examples that people can think of. But yeah, all of these really integrate into the process of then sitting down and actually expressing some unique perspective that you have arrived on, because you gave yourself the space to figure out how you even feel about anything. Because I remember I saw a tweet from, I think it was Andy Tusk, he’s a researcher, he was a programmer before, and he’s famous for publishing Andy’s Notes, which was the first digital garden notes. Anyway, he just tweeted offhand, he’s like, “Sometimes I feel like I can’t even hear myself thinking and I don’t even know what I think about things”.
Salman Ansari:
And I was like, “This seems like a very casual tweet, but this is one of the most profound things I’ve read in a long time”. It’s basically like if you asked yourself for the things that you consume, information that you consume, do you give yourself the space to even process… Forget process it, decide how you even feel about it. You go so quickly, the TikTok or the Twitter or whatever it is, from one thing to another, you don’t have the space to know how you feel about it, your personal feelings about anything. So the only thing you can do is consume other people’s perspective on something, and then maybe you can share that and be like, “I read this thing which was cool about this person that said that thing”.
Salman Ansari:
And it’s like, “Yeah, that curation is an important part of it”, we all share, I just regurgitate Gilbert quotes all the time, but it’s because I had to take the time to actually figure out why and how they apply to me. When you shared references, it’s in context, so you need the lens to be able to see those things about yourself. And then you need to practice so that you can capture on a regular basis privately, journaling. The fact that it’s private I think is important because then I can really put what I really actually think, and then separately I can write and it comes from fruition. I don’t, by the way take any of my journals and then turn them into posts. I just…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Absolutely.
Salman Ansari:
It’s just get that stuff out and become used to that process, and then your brain starts to understand. It’s like, “Okay, so I’m going to have some time to process this, I will do that, and then we’re going to think about how we feel about this, we will do that, and then later we’re going to try and work on the problem, which is to make sense of or synthesize it in some way so you can relate and share with others”. Because that’s often the hard part too, it’s with conversations like this, what’s the cause, thinking about this and you’re trying to say it, but going back to the first thing we talked about, you can’t just say, “Hey, I thought about it and that blue thing, I think that they’re really important”, and then you’re like, “What blue thing?”.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah.
Salman Ansari:
You’re like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. Secretly you’re saying, “Does he mean green”, because again, you’ve got to go back to that… If you took everything in your own language and your own models, on your terms, it’s very difficult to just explain it to someone, so that’s the process of balancing the solitude with the society. You have to keep going back and forth in between the two to stay relevant. Another thing, that’s what Gilbert talks about, she’s like, “If you’re just by yourself in your little hole thinking about things, reflecting about things and writing about them”, then it’s like she draws a little path… Or not she, but somebody else who was commenting about it, it’s like a path to delusion, that’s what delusion actually is. You’re completely disconnected from all reality of society’s perception, you’re just on your own.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
So that’s why I think mindfulness as the first step with the meditation is so interesting, because in mindfulness you basically have to be or become used to facing reality. It’s away from denial and into reality, and I think that’s why it’s so hard to do.
Salman Ansari:
Very hard.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Whether it’s the external circumstances, our reaction to them or our inner narrative around our lives can be really difficult to bear. But if you start from that point and you are constantly in movement and having experiences… What I heard you say as well that I thought was so interesting and so important, is that you discovered the felt sense of a specific connection with reality, which connects back again to that quote from that passage from Will Storr’s book, which I’m totally going to buy by the way. Because it’s from that felt sense that you are able to reconnect over and over again. But I’m so grateful that I pulled out that thread, but it was important in that post of yours, I can’t remember what it was called, but you explained how all these three things combined made it impossible for you to ignore the external reality when you no longer wanted to be in a job that was draining you of your energy. And you even said you were gas lighting yourself, but by the time the evidence was piled up in your journals, it was staring back right at you.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
That was powerful.
Salman Ansari:
Thanks, I’m glad that… I mean, it’s good to be reminded of that. I think that’s what can happen is that if you are never paying attention and noticing these things, then it’s easy to just keep consuming more and more and more, because then you don’t have to face them. When you have these practices, honestly, it’s like… I’m so sick of quote unquote, “Talking about this”, with myself. “We don’t like this, what are we going to do about it, nothing, okay”. Next day, “We really don’t like this, what are we going to do about it? Nothing”. It’s like, “This is exhausting”.
Salman Ansari:
At the end of the day, you are just like, “Why do we do this? Why are we doing this to ourselves? Don’t we deserve better?”, those types of questions start to come up. And like you said, they’re hard to ignore when you have those practices, and so it’s sad, but you have really two outcomes. One is you are like, “Okay, all right, I think we need to do something about this”, and the other is, “I’m tired of this, mute”. And you just disconnect from it, and both of those are mechanisms to deal with that discomfort. Just one of them is longterm restorative or progressive in that way, and the other is more short term.
Salman Ansari:
And honestly you actually need both at different times. I read something the other day, it’s like, “You are not a self-care project that constantly has to be improving yourself and bettering yourself and doing all the meditating and the journaling and the reading and the shadow work”. It’s okay to take a break and just relax and not be moving forward, just stay alive for a little while. Because you can get caught up on the other extreme as well, you can be like, “I have to work on myself, I have to do this, I’m not good enough”, and then it becomes negative self talk, which makes you feel worse and so on and so forth, so it’s always a balance.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
It’s always a balance, but it’s also remembering that we’re here to live a life. So I think if it’s not in service of making you feel better, then…
Salman Ansari:
That’s right.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Again, Liz Gilbert was joking, sometimes she just wants to have a sandwich.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
It’s just about having a… And she just repeated it three or four times and I was like, “Yeah, I get you, enough self-awareness for today, thank you. Let’s move on to something else”.
Salman Ansari:
Exactly, exactly.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I’ve had you on the line for almost two hours…
Salman Ansari:
Wow.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I know, and I could keep talking to you for probably another two hours, so we may have to do this again another time so I can access more of the questions I had prepared for you. But I’d like to ask you a few closing questions for today, if that’s all right?
Salman Ansari:
Sure.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Before we do that, is there anything else that you’d like to share?
Salman Ansari:
No, I think I’d love if folks who resonate with some of what we talked about and some of the stuff I shared, subscribe to my newsletter, Quick Brown Fox, that’s my center, my home, and you’ll see updates about the book and other projects I’m working on there. Yeah, that’s it.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
So here are some of my favorite questions, don’t think too hard, just to go with the flow. The first one being, what is your favorite word, but a word that you could tattoo on yourself at least for a while, live with.
Salman Ansari:
Floof, I like the sound of the word floof, and right now I have one big floof that’s been very well behaved over there and there’s another…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Aw, floof.
Salman Ansari:
Floofs are… Anytime I’m really upset, I just look at the floof and it’s like, “Yeah, you know what, everything’s fine”. Just look to the floof for all contentment, their entire lifestyle is a perfect example. They’re like, “Oh, life’s difficult, I’m asleep”. They forgive quickly, they don’t stress about… They’re a perfect example, so…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
They literally dust themselves off and they shake it off.
Salman Ansari:
Immediately, it’s actually, I won’t say it brought me to tears, but there was something, I moved or mistakenly kicked as I was walking and the cat was like, “Aa”, and immediately it was already just playing with me, like that. I was like, “My God”, imagine if I could just be like, “Yeah, that happened, anyways, I’ve got food to eat and floof thing to do”, so they’re very inspirational, so floof.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, thank you, I needed that today. What does connection mean to you?
Salman Ansari:
I think of energy, energy exchange. I often seek out connection because that’s really when I get my most energy. At the same time, there’s some people that are very… So they fill me with energy and there’s others that I can feel like there was a lot of energy that I put in, and then I just feel drained at the end and I’ve really started to pay close attention to what connections I have in my life, and I’m lucky that writing online connects me with people like you that are very generous and energy giving. Because I think that’s what we need. That’s what we’re here for, we’re here to be around other people and yeah, that’s what comes to mind.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Thanks, what song best represents you?
Salman Ansari:
Oh, that’s a tough one, there’s too many. No, this is hard, this is a really hard, I mean, I guess what I would say is there’s a track called Pjanoo, by, his name is Eric Prydz, but he goes by Pryda, and I just love it. I love all his music, but it was such an energetic yet also it has this piano, artistic almost Beethoveney style to it, and I just love how he meshes these two worlds of beauty, but also just pure raw energy to fill people up with joy and laughter.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
It sounds amazing.
Salman Ansari:
It’s a song that almost has been overplayed, as in he plays it every time and still somehow I will go nuts to that song every time, and it’s one of my favorites to mix, I’ll send it to you.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh please, yeah.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
It sounds amazing.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, I love that track, it’s spelled strangely too, so I’ll have to send it to you.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I’ll put it in the show notes as well. Oh, and I’ve compiled a Spotify playlist for every time that someone answered that question, which is not every time.
Salman Ansari:
That’s super cool.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Yeah, I know, I’ll send that to you.
Salman Ansari:
I’m going to have a good edition…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
It’s very eclectic and it’s really lovely. What is the sweetest thing that’s ever happened to you?
Salman Ansari:
Oh, that’s tough. I don’t know if I can think of my whole life, but I will say the arrival of my cats into my wife and I’s life, is definitely… There was a moment where we brought them home, and there’s two of them and what they told us was they’ll be hesitant and very scared and they’ll stay in their cages mostly for the entire first few days, so just be very careful with them and all that. And we brought them home and I opened it up, and Mango, she just walks straight out and sat on my lap. Immediately, first time she ever met me, and then the other one came and did the same. And I was just sitting there on the floor in a bathroom, sitting cross legged, with two new cats on my lap. And I was just like, “This is going to be beginning of something really wonderful”. And it’s literally been just like, I will never stop talking about these cats, they’re just pure sources of joy.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I totally get you, I have to tell you, a couple of days ago I was doing sun salutations, which is a morning routine. Lala, the female kitten, was next to me, and twice she went on her back paws and she made herself big and she made herself big and…
Salman Ansari:
Oh my god.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
She was imitating me, I was like, “Oh my God, that’s incredible”.
Salman Ansari:
They really seem to resonate with yoga, whenever my wife’s doing yoga, Mango likes to go under the bridge poses and then imitate the child’s pose sometimes, they really like that.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Fascinating, we’ve talked about a lot of your experiences and gifts, but what is a secret superpower that you have?
Salman Ansari:
A secret superpower? I don’t know, I feel like at this time I’ve exposed most of them. Yeah, I will say that I am a pretty… I won’t say phenomenal, but I would say at my peak I was one of the best Panga dancers that I knew. It’s a style of Indian dancing, so I would do it a lot at clubs, at parties, and this became extended into performances that we would do at weddings, and my brother and I would start MC-ing and so we would do skits and it got to this point where we would do this for family weddings, people would come up to us afterward and they would ask me for my card because they thought I was a paid…
Anne V Muhlethaler:
No way.
Salman Ansari:
Person who shows up and does productions for the wedding.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Wow.
Salman Ansari:
Because we would do accents and anything like that, so my secret superpower is doing funny accents and skits and dances that would be fun to do again someday. But it’s been a while, one of the videos is out there that has actually gotten a lot of views, but I’m not going to say, so.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Oh, can you send it to me? Just to me. I won’t share it.
Salman Ansari:
I’ll send it just to you and any listener who’s very, very, very keen. You can see my very strange, very funny performances.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
That’s awesome, and that will bring us to my last question, what brings you happiness?
Salman Ansari:
I mean I feel like there’s a lot of things that bring me happiness right now, but probably the biggest one is the thing… I think I quickly mentioned it in the morning, but we recently moved in the middle of the pandemic to a different place where we actually have a backyard now. And I haven’t had a backyard as an adult person, I think when I was a kid we did, but I didn’t really use it. But there’s a tree, a big tree and it has a lot of birds and different animals in it. So what I’ve been doing these mornings is I just go and sit and listen to the leaves rustling and watch the birds for a bit, and I’ll read one of the many old books of folklore and fables and things like that, that I’ve been getting. And I find that when I read these stories in that place, I feel like I believe them, and the world and the feeling of them becomes more real than if I was inside reading in a Kindle or something like that.
Salman Ansari:
And so occasionally I’ll read it and I get so excited about them that sometimes… There might be one I’ll tell you after this, because I know we’ve gone long, but I get so excited, I just want to tell people about these stories because there’s really old stories that I just think… It’s like society telling us all these things, and they’re available in all these books and we’re forgetting them or not being able to hear them. But there’s moments where I’m reading them and I just put the book down, and I’ll just be looking out and smiling, and it’s a very nice, happy moment and it helps me feel balanced for no matter what happens the rest of the day.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
That sounds really wonderful, and now I want to give you other books.
Salman Ansari:
Great.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Because I want to feed that moment that you’re having every day.
Salman Ansari:
Perfect.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
That’s just wonderful.
Salman Ansari:
I mean I feel really lucky and privileged to have ability to do that and I feel like there’s just so many great books… And what I really love to do honestly is some of these collections they’ll have 30 or 50 stories, and most of them are like, “Eh”. And then there’ll be one story that’s just like, “This is one of the greatest stories I’ve ever heard and I just want to tell everyone about it”. There’s definitely a few that I would love to share and this is something that I want to do with that Fables newsletter I mentioned. I would love to not just write my own but bring some of the ones that have been forgotten, these really old stories, and bring them into the world. So I like that practice because it feeds what, like you said, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to live and be, “Oh, I can be part of this, I can participate in this thing that’s happening where stories are being told and have been told, and I’m playing some part in that maybe”.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Beautiful. Simon, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.
Salman Ansari:
Thank you.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
It’s such a pleasure to talk to you and to hear about all of the things you do and to discover more about who you are, and every time I read anything or watch your videos as well, which are really lovely…
Salman Ansari:
Oh thanks.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I feel very connected and thankful for having discovered you and for the work that you put out into the world. For anybody who wants to connect, where can they find you?
Salman Ansari:
You can go to my website salman.io, that’s a good overall… Has all my stuff there. I’m on Twitter, @Daretoranch, and my newsletter is just letter.salman.io. Yeah, check out my newsletter, that’s the best way to stay apprised with everything Salman, and I just wanted to say thank you. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness and the dedication to even thinking about what questions you wanted to add. It’s clear how much you care and it shows up in every interaction I have with you and grateful that I’ve been able to participate here today and chat with you and have the fun we’ve had.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Thank you so much, the kitten almost came out. I was about to grab her and she went, “No, I’m going back in”. So she’s actually sleeping behind you right now.
Salman Ansari:
Yeah, Mango is fast asleep there. I have to give her kudos, she did very well, there was no disservice. He’s now in what I call shrimp mode, you know what I’m talking about?
Anne V Muhlethaler:
I love shrimp mode, it’s the best.
Salman Ansari:
Their head is upside down, it doesn’t make any sense atomically but they’re cats, so no rules, it’s fine.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Awesome, have a wonderful weekend and I’m looking forward to connecting with you again really soon.
Salman Ansari:
Likewise, thanks Anne.
Anne V Muhlethaler:
Take care. Thanks again to Salmon for being my guest on the show today. As always, you can find the relevant links of what we talked about in the show notes. So friends and listeners, thanks again for joining me. If you’d like to hear more, you can subscribe to the show on the platform of your choice. And if you want to connect, you can get in touch with me at @AnneV on Twitter or Ann Muhlethaler on LinkedIn, and @_outoftheclouds on Instagram, where I also share daily musings about mindfulness. You can find all episodes of the podcast and more on annevmuhlethaler.com, and to get regular news in your inbox, I also invite you to sign up to my monthly newsletter. So that’s it for this episode, thank you so much for listening to Out Of The Clouds, I hope you’ll join me again next time. Until then, be well, be safe, and take care.