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 - 2011 - 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 ten 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 / gratitude) 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.
• 2015 - 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 the 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, Vivek Murthy, Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Franzen, and David Sedaris.
• 2019 – today – I launched Neil.blog as a new personal home. Here is my latest bio. 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)
• 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.)

Thanks!

#775 When someone holds your keys and wallet in their purse

January 2, 2026

Hey, nobody likes walking around with big bulging pockets. So today let's give thanks to the Bag Ladies of the World for their giant purses and free storage.

AWESOME!

Even more awesome:

Photo from: here

#776 When you're watching one of your favorite movies and you realize you don't remember how it ends

January 1, 2026

You know the feeling.

Your favorite characters are introduced, the story kicks off, but then a couple plot twists and turns seem a bit unfamiliar. Suddenly it's dawn on you: you have no clue how the movie wraps up. You can't remember who is the killer, who dies, or if the cats ever get martinis. You can't remember the ending at all, and you're loving every minute of it.

Yes, you dim the lights, snuggle under the blanket, shush up your chatty husband, and sit glued to that screen.

Because it's like hey, guaranteed Blockbuster.

AWESOME!

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Photo from: here and here