README: A 60-second summary of all this…

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 BrownMalcolm 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 InstagramFacebook, 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.org3books.co, and neil.blog.)
  • December, 2022 – I wrote a brand new booked called OUR BOOK OF AWESOME