README: A 60-second summary of all this…

Neil Pasricha

Hey everyone,

My name is Neil Pasricha and here’s a quick summary of this blog 1000 Awesome Things and my life since then:

  • 1979 – I was born in Oshawa, Canada (a suburb of Toronto) to parents from Nairobi, Kenya and Tarn Taran, India.
  • 2008 – This blog became therapy after my marriage fell apart and best friend took his own life. I was 28.
  • 2008 – 2012 – I wrote and published one awesome thing here every single weekday for 1000 straight weekdays. It was the most rewarding and demanding creative project I have ever done. This blog went viral and scored over one hundred million visits and won “Best Blog in the World” two years in a row from a somewhat dubious organization called the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
  • 2010 – I gave a TED Talk called “The 3 A’s of Awesome” which has over three million views and is ranked one of the 10 “Most Inspiring” TED Talks of all time. 
  • 2010 – today – I signed a series of book deals after the blog got popular. Today I am very, very lucky to be the New York Times bestselling author of nine books and journals including The Book of Awesome (2010 / gratitude), The Happiness Equation (2016 / happiness), Two Minute Mornings (2017 / morning routine), You Are Awesome (2019 / resilience),  and many more. The books have been on bestseller lists for over 200 weeks and sold over two million copies. I know how crazy rare and lucky this is. 
  • 2014 – I got remarried. This requires a lot more than a bullet point or even a whole blog post.  
  • 2016 – I quit my job at Walmart to focus on writing and speaking full-time. I had written five books and given 200 speeches by 2016 which is testament to how little I believed I was having anything beyond ’15 minutes of fame’ and how kind, generous, and supportive the organization was for eight years I did both. 
  • 2016 – I gave the world’s first ever TED Listen, which was a TED Talk composed entirely out of questions. YouTube commenters rate it one of the 10 “Least Inspiring” TED Talks of all time. 
  • 2016 – today – I try to read 100 books a year and send out a monthly Book Club with my book recommendations each month. I sort of tangentially ended up writing the most popular article on HBR for 2017 called “8 Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books This Year.” 
  • 2016 – today – I launched The Institute for Global Happiness. While I am proud of it I have not done a good job growing or maintaining it. I started hiring people and looking at office space and realized I prefer spending time with my family and writing on picnic tables in the park. 
  • 2016 – today – I give around 50 keynote speeches a year on topics like resilience, happiness, and cultivating positive mindset in times of uncertainty. 
  • 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 Brené Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, George Saunders, Quentin Tarantino, 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 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.)
  • December, 2022 – I wrote a brand new booked called OUR BOOK OF AWESOME

#218 Drinking from the hose

Neil Pasricha

It’s the buffalo of the backyard.

Yes, when you’re a kid you live off that hose. It’s your friend. It’s your enemy. It keeps your entire afternoon moving with ritual cool downs, face-spraying entertainment, and lots of rust-and-plastic flavored water to keep you hydrated. Oh sure, sure — maybe it’s not technically meant for drinking, but there’s just nothing more satisfying than stealing drips from the snakey drain right below the window pane.

Feel free to enjoy your hose drinking with the classic Dribble Pour Technique, chaotic Thumb-Stop Surprise Spray, or the painful Garden Gun Squeeze to the back of the throat. All work just fine but if you’re looking for +5 Bonus Points you can try drinking straight from the sprinkler. Bit risky but that’s just the way you roll sometimes.

Yes, drinking from the hose in the backyard is one of the places where after having a few sips it’s completely acceptable to spray your brother in the face.

Enjoy the summer.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here and here

#221 Using your keyless entry remote to find your car in a big parking lot

Neil Pasricha

First, there is nothing.

You mindlessly walk into the Sea of Cars from the mall and start tapping your remote over and over and over again into quiet and silent night. Foggy memories of parking near the pizza smell by the back slowly hit you and you groggily stumble forward like a zombie … deeper and deeper into the concrete bowels of the lot. Yes, wedged between door handles and tailpipes you’re a Parking Lot Disaster until — suddenly! You hear it! Getting closer!

Be-beep.

Be-beep.

Be-beep.

Be-beep.

Be-beep!

Be-beep!

AWESOME!

#223 Seeing what comes out of the garden at your new place

Neil Pasricha

My friend Ago got excited.

We were hanging out after work the other day and he started going on and on about how the previous owners of his new house had planted perennial flowers. “They just popped outta the ground,” he said, completely astonished, eyes popping wide like a giant squid. “It was like magic.”

He and his wife Nat gazed upon the earthy brown patch outside their home every day and started enjoying the random mish-mash garden that bloomed straight up out of it. “It was like a free garden,” he said to me, jaw dropped, tongue hanging out like an eager puppy. “No money!”

And he does have a point.

After all, if you’ve ever moved into a new place you know how empty it seems when you get there — old mothballs in the closet, cobwebs where the couch was, rock-hard baking soda in the fridge, that’s all you got.

But someone was there before and it was a home before it was your home. So it’s fun to stop and think: Who used to live here? What did they do? Did they have kids? And hot water problems, too?

Plants and flowers left behind form a loose connection between everyone who ever lives in the same place. They’re little notes scratched between yesterday and tomorrow’s tenants connecting us all through maple trees, sharp shrubs, and whatever comes out of the garden in the spring.

So when you’re moving take your dining room table, take your tube TV, and take your rusty drive. But make sure you leave something good growing in the garden … make sure you leave a little hello and high five.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

#225 Peeling a hard boiled egg and getting a big chunk of shell all at once

Neil Pasricha

It’s time for open egg surgery.

Sure, maybe you didn’t make it in med school, but now’s your chance to tenderly crack open the egg skull and reveal the soft white brain below. After you successfully remove a giant chunk all at once make sure to delicately leave it on the plate before holding the egg under a light to examine it for shell dust particles.

All eyes are on you in the operating room theater of your kitchen.

Get crackin’.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

#226 Furiously scratching a mosquito bite even though you know you shouldn’t

Neil Pasricha

That pesky mosquito.

Did you know those jabby jerks are responsible for more deaths on earth than any other creature? It’s true, homes. With millions of people getting malaria every year they’re bringing us all down, down, down. And they look so innocent too! Why, I almost feel sorry for them with their tiny lives, terrible hangouts by dumpy ponds, and their plain unluckiness when it comes to getting caught in slow-flowing amber back in the Jurassic.

Now it’s getting to be prime season for skeeters up here and those buzzy bullies are always zzz-zzz-zzz’ing in my ears. Sometimes they’ll land and jab their stingers into my arm before I notice I’m getting blood sucked good. In the words of Stephanie Tanner — how rude.

The fun really starts when I get home from the dimly lit patio and end up covered in an itchy patch of bright red dots. Cut to the annoying Five Day Scratchfest where instead of buying calamine lotion, wearing oven mitts, or soaking in bath salts, I choose instead to furiously scratch those itches over and over.

Because who doesn’t love that?

Yes, I say gimme that soothing one second relief from the mild burn in exchange for the fiery reburn any day. Because holding out is just too difficult and taking a little break from itchiness feels like standing straight under Niagara Falls.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here and here

#227 When you finally get rid of that thing that’s been rolling around the trunk of your car forever

Neil Pasricha

It haunts you on every turn.

The muted thump of that half-filled water bottle, grass-stained golf ball, or pair of skates clanging against the side of your trunk. And you think it’s annoying, and you think you’ll get rid of it, but when you arrive at your destination it’s suddenly about getting out, getting in, and getting it tomorrow.

That’s what makes it great when the glorious day finally comes.

When you clean out the trunk and it sounds like

AWESOME!

Photo from: here