Mistborn and Human Potential.

 One of my favourite authors when I avidly read fantasy was Brandon Sanderson. 

His world building and pacing was something that always kept me on the edge of the page while reading through the first few books of the stormlight archive. It reminded me of a childhood experience I had with Christopher Paolini's books. As the perspective shifts between multiple deeply fleshed out characters, I am tempted to read another chapter just to get back into the stream of consciousness of a character I had become absorbed in. Before I know it, I have devoured half of the book in an afternoon, the pages standing in my wake as Roran's epic battle with the hammer or an Atium fueled spree at the end of mistborn.

But perhaps what I appreciate even more about Sanderson's writing is just how much of it there is. The cosmere is chock full of such stories which he has been putting out at an astounding pace over the past few years. If you put out a thousand page book every 6 months for a decade, it doesn't matter how you start out; You will get really good. 

It reminded me of the vedanta sara, which is a picking of the most important verses from an old vedanta book with over 100,000 verses composed by a single rishi. For an average person, this is insane to even comprehend the scale of this intellectual purity. It requires decades of continued flow state experience to even come close to writing this much. 

These people are monsters. Not in a negative connotation but in the sense of a small tinge of insanity and genius that you can sometimes see in people's eyes. It's like the pewter savant from mistborn. Loving your craft is in some ways equivalent to burning a metal. Every time you engage in it, you are burning a part of yourself - that which is impure, dishonest, insincere. To become a monster at your craft is when you have left that metal burning in yourself for considerable proportions of your life. 

Questions such as competition, resentment, insecurity become irrelevant at that point. You are in a set of size one. And that is every human's birthright. To seek and fight through for that. 

Namaste