Doing hard things: three practical tips from Brandon Sanderson

Executive overview

Most advice about ambitious goals tells people to follow their dreams. Fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson argues this is too vague to be useful. The more realistic claim: you can do hard things, and doing them has intrinsic value regardless of outcome.

Sanderson offers three concrete tips — make better goals, learn how you work, and break it down — each of which Cal Newport extends with his own frameworks. The episode also covers listener questions on planning anxiety, student scheduling, and the relationship between a deep life and background anxiety.

The goal is not to eliminate the hard parts — it is to keep going despite them.

Three tips for doing hard things

1. Make better goals. Outcome goals ("become a successful novelist") are too vague and give you nothing to do tomorrow. Sanderson wrote 13 manuscripts before selling one; his real goal was producing successively more ambitious drafts.
2. Focus on lead indicators, not lag indicators. "15 hours of deep work per week on this paper" is trackable and actionable; "publish in a top journal" is not.
3. Learn how you work. Even Sanderson, a prolific professional, says he loves writing but struggles to sit down and do it. Finding what gets you to do the work is itself hard work.
4. Cognitively demanding effort is unnatural — the brain cannot immediately map it to food, safety, or mates. Tricking yourself into doing it requires deliberate design.
5. Scheduling philosophy removes the daily decision about when to work. Treat deep work blocks the same as meetings: they appear on the calendar and are not skipped.
6. Over-the-top rituals work because they build a strong association between environment and the act of working — Maya Angelou wrote in hotel rooms with everything stripped from the walls.
7. What amateurs call writer's block is simply what writing feels like. That stuck, uninspired feeling is the start of writing, not an obstacle to it.
8. Break it down. A 400,000-word novel cannot be a daily goal. The useful goal is the next chapter cycle, the next scene, the next clear unit of work.
9. Don't ask experts for advice — ask for their story. "Write more" is useless; learning that Sanderson needed 13 manuscripts changes what you plan for.

Planning for people who find planning stressful

• Planning anxiety is normal. Confronting a too-large stack of commitments short-circuits the brain's planning centers; the anxiety fades once the plan is made.
• Weekly planning hits harder than daily planning because it confronts the full overload. Daily planning, anchored to the weekly plan, is calmer.
• Baby step: start with one block per day for a specific cognitively demanding task; leave everything else as default shallow/email time.
• Add a focused admin block after a few weeks. Granularity can increase gradually.
• The critical binary is zero-to-one: doing a bad plan beats doing no plan every time.

Student scheduling without burnout

• Use an autopilot schedule rather than daily time blocking. Identify all recurring work and fix it to the same days and times each week, including weekends if needed.
• Autopilot is low-friction: you are not wrangling every minute, you are just executing a rhythm you already decided on.
• For one-time deliverables (papers, exams), put a note in your calendar one month before each due date: "make a plan for this." Then spread the work across normal autopilot sessions.
• Starting a month out eliminates the all-nighter. Work feels manageable because it is.
• If the schedule is still too crowded, reduce extracurriculars — as a student you can actually control your load.

Living a deep life alongside anxiety

• Anxiety will come and go regardless of how well-designed your life is. The goal is not to eliminate it as a precondition for living well.
• Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) challenges distorted ruminations directly and works well when the anxious thought is genuinely exaggerated. Cal used it successfully for sleep anxiety in grad school.
• Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) — see Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap — takes a different approach: make space for the feeling, name it, then act on your values anyway without engaging the story the feeling tells.
• ACT is especially useful when the fear is not distorted — you cannot talk yourself out of a realistic worry, but you can still act despite it.
• The deep life framework (identity → philosophy → framework → behaviours → outcomes → feedback) is useful, but fiddling with the system must not crowd out actually living.
• Check in on the system twice a year. Spend the rest of the time living inside it.