The first time I heard about Brandon Sanderson was when my mother, who is a long time Wheel of Time-fan, read the last book in the series. I wasn't that into WoT though, I'd kinda lost hope in fantasy books for a while back then and read very little in my spare time. Then later my boyfriend came over and brought The Way of Kings with him. He recommended it to me with a comment along the lines of: "It's the kind of fantasy you'd like: it's got a unique setting and a cool magic system that makes sense." I recalled that it was the same author that had finished WoT and thought that "Yeah, this author seems to be pretty good, this book should be all right".
So I decided to give WoK a shot, and I remember being instantly intrigued by the world and how different it was from anything else I'd read. It didn't take long before I realized that WoK was far beyond "all right", it was probably the best fantasy book I'd read. My old hunger for reading came back after that and I devoured WoR as soon as I was done with WoK, and then went on to the Mistborn books which made me find out about the Cosmere and ... then the rest of the Cosmere books followed. Aaand here I am.