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).
