Hey everyone,
My name is Neil Pasricha and here’s a quick summary of this blog 1000 Awesome Things and my life since then:
- 2008 – This blog became my therapy after my marriage fell apart and best friend took his own life
- 2008 – 2012 – I wrote and published one awesome thing here every single weekday for 1000 straight weekdays. This blog went viral and scored over 100,000,000 visits (!) and won “Best Blog in the World” two years in a row from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
- 2010 – I gave a TED Talk called “The 3 A’s of Awesome” which has over 3,000,000 views and ranked as one of the 10 “Most Inspiring” TED Talks on TED.com
- 2010 – today – I landed book deals after the blog got popular. Today I am the New York Times / #1 international bestselling author of seven books including The Book of Awesome (gratitude), The Happiness Equation (happiness), You Are Awesome (resilience), and many more. Collectively, the books have been on bestseller lists for over 200 weeks and sold over 1,000,000 copies
- 2016 – I quit my job at Walmart to focus on my writing and speaking full-time. Yes, it took me a while.
- 2016 – I gave the world’s first ever TED Listen, which was a TED Talk composed entirely of questions. It was rated one of the 10 “Least Inspiring” TED Talks by most people who viewed it.
- 2016 – today – I try to read 100 books a year and I send out a monthly Book Club with my book recommendations each month
- 2016 – today – I launched The Institute for Global Happiness. I am proud of it but have not done a great job growing or maintaining it.
- 2016 – today – I give around 50 motivational speeches a year on topics like happiness, resilience, and cultivating a positive mindset
- 2018 – I gave a SXSW Featured Keynote called “Building Trust in Distrustful Times”
- 2018 – 2031 – I run an award-winning podcast called 3 Books where I am counting down the 1000 most formative books over 333 straight lunar cycles. Guests include Malcolm Gladwell, Judy Blume, and David Sedaris.
- 2019 – today – I launched Neil.blog as a new personal home. Here is my latest bio. Most of my latest writing in published there and comes out via a series of newsletters. (I also sometimes write for HBR and Fast Company)
- 2020 – today – For the first time since 2012, I began posting 1000 more awesome things. I am doing it for my own mental health during the pandemic. The awesome things are published at 12:01am every day on this email list and @neilpasricha on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. (I don’t love social media but didn’t want to mess with this antique site which lives in a very specific corner of my brain and also didn’t want to run a fifth site after this site, globalhappiness.org, 3books.co, and neil.blog.)