My name is Sal Ziauddin and I live in Toronto, Canada.

I’m an equal mix of artist, IT engineer, and business development professional.

As an artist, I’ve been drawing and scribbling since I was a little baby. My parents’ apartment in Los Angeles in the early 1980s is where I absolutely went to town on their walls, insisting that they behold my visual masterpieces before defacing them with erasers, detergent, and white paint. I was in Grade One when the Orange County Art Gallery appropriated my black & white chalk rendering of a female classmate, for display in their halls.

Growing up, I had an inexorable fascination with technology and how things worked under the hood. Whether it was the car, the family refrigerator, or the 286DX DOS based computer, I was ripping things apart without much thought as to how it was going to be put back together again. At the same time, the artist in me found a completely new creative medium : making monochrome digital masterpieces in QBasic; a far cry from what I would be doing later on in 3DStudioMAX or Adobe Creative Cloud.

My fascination with the DOS and Windows based PCs found me working in the MIS dept. of an Anaheim-based clothing manufacturer in 1999 while also handling the visual design and production of their catalog. I guess I couldn’t stay away from imparting my own flavor of visual appeal to company collateral.

In college for network engineering back in Toronto, the opportunity to work for Bell Canada as a co-op student came up, so I took it, optimistic that I would get a chance to eventually work on helping build and maintain their telecom infrastructure.

Nope.

I was dumped into Bell GlobeMedia’s boiler-room of a call-center selling newspaper subscriptions to uninterested Bay Street brokers who used to take a sadistic delight in delivering soul-crushing rejections to my pitch.

And yet despite that experience, I fought back, and have been in business development now for the past 17 years and counting.

Throughout all of these experiences, one desire has singularly led me towards the same destination – making my thoughts and insights available for others, to help them better inform their activities and decisions in business and life:

“Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Anna Isabella Thackeray Ritchie