Category: Awesome Things

That thick, smoky barbecue smell floats through the yard and everybody starts salivating for dinner.

Yes, sizzling sides of beef and black-burnt weiners are coming right up when the sun’s dropping, the party’s hopping, and your friends are all chilling with ice-clinking drinks on your backyard patio. And if you’re in charge of grilling up dinner, then there aren’t many things that scream I’m Serious About This more than really, really selling it to all your friends. Oh sure, some things come close such as:

• owning a shiny, oversized nine-piece barbecue tool set and having it folded open on the picnic table
• not leaving the barbecue area at any point and even holding onto the handle when the lid is down to make sure nobody attempts to flip burgers when you aren’t looking
• wearing a giant apron with your name on it
• asking everybody constant questions at all times such as “Did you say medium or medium-well?” and  “You’re toasted, you’re toasted, you’re untoasted, right?”

Yeah, don’t get me wrong, all those things shout I’m Serious About This, too. But nothing quite screams it like really selling it to the crowd. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever hammed it up with any of these classic moves:

• “Dog up, I gotta dog up, who wants a dog?!”
• “Come on Andrew, you’re not eating salad, are you? Come on, how many more can I sign you up for? Two at least?”
• (walking around the deck with raised eyebrows holding a cold cheeseburger on your BBQ flipper and occasionally waggling it in someone’s face)
• “Okay, I got a slightly burnt one. Who likes them nice and crispy? Nice and crispy one here, everybody. Niiiiiice and crispy.”

Yes, if you’re getting your barbecue groove on strong and you’re rocking the sales pitch long then kudos to you. Every deck party needs somebody to tell everybody else to eat more burgers. So today we salute you for embracing the job. You sold it. We bought it. And now we’re all feeling stuffed, bloated, and so completely

AWESOME!

Photos from: here, here,and here

Hey, eating in the car is tough.

Weaving that big, bulky clunk of metal through highway traffic, off off-ramps, over speed bumps, and into parallel parking spots is no small feat. And you know what makes it even tougher? Having a hot, crumpled bag of steamy Drive-Thru riding shotgun, that’s what.

Yes, resisting the temptation is tough, but then again unwrapping a sloppy, mustard-dripping burger over the steering wheel probably isn’t good for anybody. So there’s really only one option to satisfy your urges to both eat and live.

That’s right: dip your hand into the crinkly paper well and squeeze it between the cool packs of ketchup, big wad of napkins, and waxy-wrapped burgers, until you find that little treasure trove of spilled fries at the bottom of the bag. It’s a bit like panning for gold and is known as the Pre-Lunch Munch in some circles.

Also, we can’t forget the Classic Afterburn maneuver. Yes, extra fries at the bottom of the bag star again, but this time they’re the cold, limp n’ salty chasers that follow your last slurp of bland, watered-down cola. Yes, we both know you’ve got to finish the meal off with a flavor-saving punch and the extra fries at the bottom of the bag will do the job just fine.

So dip that hand in deep, give it a swirl, and chomp on a nice little bite of

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

Somebody shushes, conversation hushes, and all eyes flicker with delight as you watch your sizzling, glistening meals cruise out of the kitchen and slowly descend in front of you.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

There’s something therapeutic about finger-peeling that dark-gray-with-red-flecks fuzz patch off the trap, rolling it into a ball, and tossing it in the trash. Yes, after you ditch that hot, furry blanket both you and your dryer can finally breathe again.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

Sure, anybody can wake up with some serious bedhead.

Tangled dreads, pillow-dented part, static-flared bangs — whatever you got, we’ll take it. Much like rain hair, bedhead is your temporary ticket to Cowlick Country, a place where looks just don’t matter. It’s fun to take a trip and enjoy your citizenship before shampoo, hair straighteners, and sculpting clay step in to mess things up.

And hey, don’t look at me, I play the game, too. I shampoo, condition, and run Glue Stick over my head in the mornings. And sure, I check myself out in the mirror throughout the day to make sure I’m still going bald and double-checking that my sideburns remain extremely uneven.

But I guess that’s what makes getting away from it all so great. I mean, just look at babies of the world with their Always-On Bedhead, sometimes for years on end. Folks, it’s like I always say: we can learn much from the baby.

Now don’t get jaded in your old age. There are some classic ways you can still pull it off:

• No-Time Bedhead. This is where you wake up in a panic an hour late and barely have time to throw on jeans and grab your keys before bolting out the door for work. This is accidental bedhead that may result in some worried finger-combing on the bus or a splash of water from the bathroom sink later on. Still, you got bedhead all day and that’s what counts here. 5 points.

• Lazy Sunday Bedhead. You wake up at noon, throw on some sweats, have some good friends over and play video games all day. Or maybe you channel surf with your boyfriend on the futon or watch a golf tournament with Grandpa. Either way, no showering or leaving the house is involved so the bedhead lives long and lives strong. 10 points.

• Just Don’t Care Bedhead. Top of the charts right here. This is where your day actually involves going out and doing things, but you just don’t care about your sharp, sideways bedhead. If you can pull off grocery shopping, going to class, or hitting the mall with jagged, bent-up hair, then you win. Note that this is not the same as Fake Bedhead, which involves applying a series of creams and lotions in an attempt to give yourself bedhead-looking hair. No, we’re talking about cruising around town with the real thing here, people. 25 points.

Yes, bedhead is a temporary escape from that Hair Prison we all live in everyday. Freeing your hair is the first step to freeing your mind and freeing your life. When you get up and just let it go you sort of let yourself go for a moment, too.

Suddenly Juggling Jane relaxes into cool, casual Leg-Stubble-N-Sweatpants Babe who’s much more fun to cuddle up with under a warm blanket in front of a flickering television. And Suit-and-Tie Sam melts into our old pal Couch-Dent Sam, who laughs at all our jokes and doesn’t take himself so seriously.

Bedhead all day long, people.

Because sometimes it’s great to ditch the comb and just see what happens.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here, here, here, here, and here

Because you’re going to figure it out eventually.

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

It all starts with The Hunt.

Mall-walking, clothes-shopping, you’re searching for cute tops and a new pair of jeans. You pop into stores, you do the Figure-8 Walk Around, you pop right out. You pinch fabrics, peek at wash instructions, and hold pants in front of mirrors, bending knees, biting lips, and flipping over price tags.

Sure, everything’s fine and everything’s dandy until later in the afternoon, when you’re still empty-handed and your legs start burning, your boyfriend starts whining, and you get really, really, really, really, really, really thirsty.

But you don’t stop, won’t stop, can’t stop the walking, just can’t stop the shopping. So you keep going, keep plugging, keep trudging along. You keep moving, keep motoring, keep soldiering strong. No, you won’t quit, won’t split, won’t call it a day. You won’t run, won’t ditch, till you find a shirt and pay.

So you keep looking and looking until it finally comes — that moment where you spot a perfect top glowing from the other side of the store. You hold your breath, run over to check, and the color looks good, the material looks good, the price looks good, the wash instructions look good, but …

Do they have it in your size?

Panic sets in as you begin frantically flipping through the hangers. Shoot, XXL, XXL, XXL, XL. As you flip you suddenly start worrying that you wasted the day. Your calves ache and your stomach rumbles and you ask yourself: Did I survive six hours on a Dilly Bar for nothing?

But then just as the worry is settling in, putting its feet up, and getting comfortable …

It happens.

You find one.

Clouds part, sun shines, bugles blare, and angels sing, as you somehow manage to score the absolute last item in your size at the store. Oh, you’re buzzing free and your brain flies as you enjoy one of the three versions of this classic high:

• Version 1: Back o’ the rack. Just as you’re getting bummed out by all the oddball sizes, you eventually find your perfect shape chilling out in the shadows at the back. Good find!
• Version 2: Lost in Thread Paradise. Hey, employees struggle to keep restocking customer throwaways so sometimes that perfect shirt gets lost in thread paradise. You discover it hanging with the wrong clothes, crunched in a ball in the change room, or laying on the counter behind the cashier. Good find!
• Version 3: Same solar system, different planet. Now, this isn’t technically the last of your size in the store, but it’s still a classic. Here’s where you start crying on the floor and pounding your fist into the ground until a friendly cashier calls a nearby store and has them hold one for you. Good find!

Oh look, shoot, there’s a giant empty wall of Dark Knight DVD cases. Wait, wait, there’s one left in the corner!

AWESOME!

Photo from: here

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 a therapy after my marriage fell apart and best friend took his own life. I lived alone for the first time, lived downtown for the first time. A lot of things were happening all at once. I was 28. 
• 2008 – 2012 – I wrote and published a short essay extolling the virtues of 1 awesome thing every weekday for 1000 straight weekdays. It was the most rewarding and demanding creative thing I’d done at that time. This blog went viral and got over 100 million visitors 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 at TEDxToronto called “The 3 A’s of Awesome” which now has millions of 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 lucky to be the New York Times bestselling author of 10 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), Our Book of Awesome (2022 / community) and many more. The books have been on bestseller lists for over 200 weeks and sold over 2 million copies. I feel most grateful for the incredible people I’ve met through this experience.  
• 2014 – I got remarried. (This requires a lot more than a bullet point or even a whole blog post. I talk a lot about Leslie on my podcast… below!)    
• 2016 – I quit my job at Walmart after a decade in order to focus on writing and speaking full-time. I had written 5 books and given 200 keynote speeches by this time which is testament to both how little I believed in myself and how generous and supportive Walmart was for the eight years I did both. I worked in many jobs there including Leadership Development Manager, Learning Manager, Project Manager to the President and CEO, and Director of Leadership Development.    
• 2016 – I gave the world’s first ever TED Listen, which was a TED Talk composed entirely out of questions. Some YouTube commenters rate it one of the 10 “Least Inspiring” TED Talks of all time. 
• 2016 – today – I try to read 50-75 books a year and send out a free monthly Book Club email with my book recommendations on the last Saturday of every month (over 100 months in a row.)  I put a lot of reading systems in place to do this and the piece I wrote explaining this in Harvard Business Review was called “8 Ways To Read (A Lot) More Books This Year.” and was the top result on Google for years for “how to read more” (until HBR suddenly paywalled it). 
• 2016 – today – I launched GlobalHappiness.org as place to centralize my thoughts around living a happier life and share video clips and details on the talks I give as a motivational keynote speaker. All my talks explore the intersection of leadership and happiness. I talk about personal mindset, happiness as a practice, and how small habits can meaningfully change your life. I give 40-50 keynote speeches a year to places as diverse as Shopify, Disney, and The Cleveland Clinic. (Mel Robbins says really nice things about my speeches.)
• 2018 – I gave the most attended SXSW Featured Keynote called “Building Trust in Distrustful Times”
• 2018 – 2040 – I run the Apple “Best Of” podcast 3 Books where I am counting down the 1000 most formative books in the world … 3 books at a time. Every ‘chapter’ of my longform show drops on the exact minute of the full moon for 333 full moons in a row. It’s a slow-paced show with no ads or commercials and it’s made for people aspiring to read more or read better. We comprise a community of “3 bookers” with many book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. Past guests include Brené Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Nikki Giovanni, Cheryl Strayed, George Saunders, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Franzen, Judy Blume, and David Sedaris.
• 2019 – today – I run Neil.blog as a new personal blog. I write about happiness at a high level — mixing in excerpts, longform quotes, bits of poetry, and, of course, birdwatching. (Here’s the full archive. I add a new post every couple weeks and offer them as an email newsletter, too.) Many pieces here are pulled from my book on happiness ‘The Happiness Equation‘ or my book on resilience. Here’s my full bio on the site. Most of my latest writing is published there and comes out via a series of newsletters. (I also sometimes write for HBR and Fast Company and MSNBC)
• 2008 – today – I still write 1 awesome thing every single day and release them over email every night at midnight (and on Instagram / Facebook). 

Okay, who’s the smart one who brought an umbrella? Because I know it’s not me.

No, when the sky cracks up and the rain smacks down, I’m the one wearing heavy jeans and a thick, spongy sweater that soaks up everything and turns me into swampy slab of peat bog. Yes, I’m drenched, I’m dripping, I’m ice-chilled to the bone.

But that’s what makes it so great when it starts coming down and out pops a giant umbrella from a friend who offers to gimme shelter for a few minutes. Yes, if your special someone is packing some giant nylon heat, then I think it’s fair to say you’re smiling high, your clothes are dry, and you’re rocking the streets under a tiny little patch of

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here