Snippet 13: How To Figure Out What To Do With Your Life - Brandon Sanderson
04:55 Share

Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Hey friends, welcome back to the Deep Dive Snippet. This is a little clip from my interview with my favorite author of all time, the best-selling fantasy book author Brandon Sanderson. And in this clip, we are talking about the idea of how do we figure out what to do with our lives. But yeah, I hope you enjoy this clip. So it's as part of this equation of helping us figure out what to do with our lives, in a way, it seems like there's broadly like two strands of it. There's one strand which is a

Find something that you enjoy and do it. And then there's another strand, which is like find enjoyment in the things that you're doing. And it sounds like for you, writing was that thing of you found something you were passionate about and you found that you enjoyed it as well. Do you have any thoughts or advice for people who are in that position where they're like, I'm not really sure what I'm passionate about? Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, it is hard in some ways because I've noticed this in some of my friends, some of my roommates in college and things like this, where I had this all consuming passion and I was going for broke. If I didn't end up selling, my fallback jobs were

We're not the same sort of caliber, right? I end up becoming an insurance salesman or something. I couldn't really have even become a professor because becoming, at least in the States, an English professor requires certain hoops to jump through for PhDs and things that I just was not doing in grad school. I wasn't working on the papers and the journals and all this stuff. And so I was all in.

on this. And I had a roommate who at one point told me, "Brandon, not all of us are like that. I do not have an all-consuming passion. I want to find a job, I want to enjoy it, and then I want to come home and play video games." And that is still how he is. He's in my writing group. And basically, I was myopic early before in my pre-published years because I had this, "Everyone must have this all-consuming passion" sort of thing, which I just

don't think is true. I think there are a lot of very fulfilling jobs out there. And in fact, one of the things that I often say to people is if you are a writer, if you really like writing, programming and writing

feel very similar. In fact, I had to stop taking, I took a programming class in college and after it, I'm like, I can never take another one of these because that semester was the hardest I ever had writing 'cause I would do my homework and then I'd feel like I'd already written for the day when I'd been coding and it would leave me kind of mentally exhausted. And most of my other classes use a different part of my brain.

Coding is basically writing. It's the same sort of thing. When you're writing a novel, you are problem solving how to achieve these things you want to, these results you want to get out. And the output is reader investment in emotion rather than the outputs that you might have for the object you're coding or something like this. But I think that you can...

Humans are, they're things that drive us. One is creativity, being able to make something, but another is serving people. I had a lot of fun working a graveyard shift at a hotel, being able to be the person that at night when somebody needed something at the hotel, I just got it for them. I made them happy. I didn't have to sell a single thing because no one was coming in and buying rooms. I was just there to make their experience better. And I found that wildly fulfilling.

shockingly fulfilling for me. Now, of course, I was writing at the same time. I'm at the front desk typing away, interrupted to go get somebody something they need. And so it was okay. It was a good match of the two things. But I think that we acknowledging what it is that

that human beings generally find fulfilling, finding out what it is you find fulfilling. Is it finding a need and fulfilling it? Is it being able to be creative? Is it problem solving? You can find these general groupings of things that you happen to find satisfying, fulfilling, and you can then find a whole bunch of different careers and things that, that

target in that grouping of yours. And just like writing computer programming, you're very similar. There's a lot of things like that out there. And I often say, try a bunch of different things. The way that we prepare people for the workplace, I wish it involved a lot more variety. I wish there were more opportunities for us to try different things out, try different jobs out, try different majors out, and really find what people find fulfilling in them. Because if I hadn't had

"This teacher get me into reading, who knows what would have happened with me?" And everyone thought I was a reluctant reader, that I didn't like reading, when the truth was, I just had not found the right books yet.