the 3 as of awesome

7/30/2019 The 3 as of Awesome

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The three A's of Awesome - Part 1 - Neil Pasricha

A. ________I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little

pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough -- things like

waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first

table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warmunderwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-

out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line -- even if you were

last at the other line, swoop right in there. (Laughter)

B. ________And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the

line said, "You've just won the Best Blog In the World award." I was like, that

sounds totally fake. (Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want

me to wire all my money to? (Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane,

and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy

Fallon and Martha Stewart. And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for

Best Blog. And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only

overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents

were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book. Flash-forward to the

next year and "The Book of Awesome" has now been number one on the

bestseller list for 20 straight weeks.

C. ________2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason, too. I

was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. My marriage wasn't

going well, and we just were growing further and further apart. One day my

wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of

tears, to have a very honest conversation. And she said, "I don't love you

anymore," and it was one of the most painful things I'd ever heard and

certainly the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever heard, until only a month later,

when I heard something even more heartbreaking.

D. ________ My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy

childhoods. We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. We grew up

taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn't take for granted

when they grew up -- things like power always on in our houses, things like

schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the

backyard. We grew up, and we grew older. I went to high school. I graduated.

I moved out of the house, I got a job, I found a girl, I settled down -- and I

realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens' song --(Laughter)

E. ________but life was pretty good. Life was pretty good. 2006 was a great

year. Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got

married, surrounded by 150 family and friends. 2007 was a great year. I

graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest

friends. Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the PacificOcean. We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to

take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads.

(Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe

me. (Laughter)

F. ________So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my

mom and my dad came to Canada. My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. My dad left a

small village outside of Amritsar, India. And they got here in the late 1960s.

They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto, and they settled

into a new life. They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, andthey had their first kids.

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G. ________2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. I know that they were

tougher for a lot of people, not just me. First of all, the news was so heavy. It's

still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flipped open a

newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars

going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was

wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so

many of us losing our homes, or our jobs, or our retirements, or our

livelihoods.

H. _______My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been

battling mental illness for some time. And for those of you whose lives have

been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be. I spoke

to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday night. We talked about the TV

show we watched that evening. And Monday morning, I found out that he

disappeared. Very sadly, he took his own life. And it was a really heavy time.

I. ________And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. I

mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those

50,000. And nobody read it except for my mom. Although I should say that my

traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my

dad. (Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and

then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then

hundreds and then thousands and then millions. It started getting bigger and

bigger and bigger.

J.________And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it

really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really

needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. So I came home from work

one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website

called 1000awesomethings.com.

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ANSWER KEY:

A. 8

B.10

C. 5

D. 2

E. 3

F. 1

G. 4

H. 6

I. 9

J. 7


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