Tim Ferriss and Brandon Sanderson
Learning from one of the best writers in Fantasy
A few weeks ago, Tim Ferriss recorded a podcast with Brandon Sanderson, which was the mashup my nerd self needed. Self-development meets Fantasy books.
For those unfamiliar with Sanderson, he’s currently one of the most popular Fantasy writers and is particularly known for his ability to produce quality books in astounding quantity. The volume he puts out is pretty unfathomable. He’s the opposite of George R.R. Martin in that regard.
The entire 3-hour podcast is worth a listen, but I wanted to share a few clips that resonated with me.
Let’s start with the fact that Sanderson wrote his first five books with no intention of publishing them:
This is borderline insane behavior. And I admire it so much. The patience this requires is tough to put into words and something I can learn from. When I am working on something I am excited about, whether writing content or producing code, I am eager to share it. I am as impatient as Sanderson is patient. It can sometimes cause problems if I am too longing to share and don’t proofread well or communicate to my audience what exactly I am showing them and why.
But Sanderson uses his patience to his advantage. He prioritizes the long game over short-term gain, which reminds me of this post by Jonathan Bales.
Prioritizing the long game requires not only Sanderson's patience but also incredible vision, self-confidence, and a lack of vanity. Sanderson had the long-term vision to understand what he needed to do to become a successful writer and the self-confidence to believe he would accomplish those goals. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine him making that level of commitment to his craft with zero intent of achieving any immediate, direct reward.
Even if I had Sanderson’s patience and vision, I think I would have had too much vanity and not enough self-confidence to keep myself from sharing those unpublished books with others in some capacity. Whether it would be out of a simple desire for my work to be read by someone (a key reason this Substack exists, quite frankly, when it could be my private journal) or a need for my work to be validated externally, I can’t imagine being so self-assured that I’d keep my work all to myself, trusting I’m making the necessary progress and not feeling the urge to have it read by others.
Sanderson (my interpretation) doesn’t have the urge to share that work with others partly because of a focus on intrinsic value and a love of the process. With process as the goal, Sanderson is able to get better at his actual writing as well as his writing routine, which he has now optimized:
He also has developed a willingness to scrap books beyond the initial five books he wrote without intent to publish. This inclination to not have to have everything he writes turn into an end product for a consumer is essential. Writing these scrapped books advances his skills as a writer. Refraining from pursuing a book that’s just not working allows him to cut his losses. From a simple time perspective, he’s not “throwing good money after bad”; reputationally, he’s maintaining a quality standard. This writing is not a waste. All of this indirectly leads to the big hits.
It loosely reminds me of Safi Bahcall's book, Loonshots. In that book, Bahcall discusses revolutionary innovations from people pursuing work that seemed crazy or didn’t have a directly applicable goal. A couple such results include the development of radar and the discovery of statins.
I’m now on a tangent, but it’s so clear how people pursuing passions that utilize their skills in a deeply focused manner is something we should foster as a society. However, there’s increasingly more emphasis on only working on A if it leads to result B and needing to know what result B is ahead of time and how long doing A will take to achieve it.
The truth is we often don’t know what will work ahead of time, but curious, earnest, and dedicated pursuit of a craft/passion/hobby/occupation can lead to unimaginably large returns. If we try to have those mega-impactful successes by having too narrow of a scope, fear of failure, or a need to know the work would be “justified” ahead of time, we’ll ironically never get them. Not to get political here, but that line of thinking is in direct contrast to much of the ideology behind DOGE. It’s good to remove waste and fraud, but you don’t want to ruin gardens before they flourish.
Several revolutionary successes outweigh the costs of hundreds of tiny failures. You can’t, in hindsight, glorify the work that went into the achievements and simultaneously admonish the costs of the failures as unjustified and wasteful.
And I know, like many things in life, that’s easier said than done. I manage a data science team, and it’s a tricky balance between letting people go and play and seeing what they come up with in order to foster these “loonshots” and also making sure we’re not wasting time or building things that don’t move the needle for our company.
Returning to the Sanderson interview, I’ll conclude this post by mentioning that Sanderson espouses two of the most commonly accepted themes in self-development: consistency and habit stacking.
