The Pied Piper of Happiness

How Commerce grad Neil Pasricha conquered the web and topped best-seller charts with his take on life’s little pleasures

By:

Shelley Pleiter

Issue:

Summer 2011

In Neil Pasricha’s world , all awesome things are created equal. Walking the red carpet in New York between Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart is awesome, but no more awesome than picking up a ‘Q’ and a ‘U’ at the same time in Scrabble. You could call him an equal-opportunity purveyor of all things awesome. Or, as Maclean’s magazine dubbed him, the person partially to blame for turning this increasingly popular word into “the exuberant adjective of our time.”

He is the international best-selling author of The Book of Awesome, recipient of three Webby Awards (the web’s Oscar equivalent) for his 1000awesomethings.com blog that has registered more than 31 million hits. His follow-up, The Book of (Even More) Awesome, debuted April 26 with book tour stops across Canada and the U.S. and an appearance on The Today Show, NBC’s flagship morning program.

Neil, a BCom’02 grad, juggles his work on all things awesome with his day job in Mississauga, ON, where he’s a Project Manager at Walmart Canada’s head office. Every weeknight, before his self-imposed midnight deadline, he sits down at his computer and posts that day’s blog entry. He also responds to the 50 or so emails he receives daily from followers who have been touched, inspired and sometimes affected in life-changing ways by his writing. The trick in fitting all this in, he says, is that it’s not work; it’s something he loves to do.

Writing is something he’s loved to do for a very long time, including during his time at Queen’s as a contributor and later co-editor of Golden Words, the university’s somewhat irreverent student newspaper. “Every Sunday, I’d go to Clark Hall and work all day and into the night on Golden Words, starting the first Sunday of Frosh Week in 1998, right up until the Sunday before my graduation in 2002. I really enjoyed it. One of the things my Queen’s experience taught me was to do what you love, so when I finished Queen’s, I kept up the writing.”

Broccoflower: a bizarre misfit child from two of nature's most hideous vegetables.

Following Queen’s, Neil’s path took some interesting turns. He worked as a comedy writer in New York, in marketing at Proctor & Gamble in Toronto, and then went off to Harvard for his MBA. After returning to Toronto, he landed at Walmart, got married, and bought a house—all hallmarks of a settled life, it seemed. It didn’t last. As he neared his 30th birthday, his deteriorating marriage ended in a separation, his closest friend, Chris, was battling a major depression and attempted suicide, and Neil found himself living in a small apartment in downtown Toronto, wondering what had hit him.

He started looking for little things that would brighten each day and recorded them in a blog he dubbed “1000 Awesome Things.” His first entry on June 20, 2008, was No. 1000: “Broccoflower: a bizarre misfit child from two of nature’s most hideous vegetables.” Other equally whimsical, sometimes nostalgic, but always upbeat entries followed, from popping bubble wrap to the smell of Play-Doh. A link from heavy-traffic website Fark to his entry about old playground equipment sent the number of visitors skyrocketing. Other links—from CNN and Wired—followed. Within a year of its launch, 1000awesomethings.com reached the 10 million hits marker.

When he first started the blog, Neil would call his friend Chris each night and talk about that day’s posting—an exercise he hoped would cheer them both. “At the start, it was hard to write,” Neil recalls. “I’m no different from anyone else. I have good and bad days. But I’d had a string of too many bad days in a row, so much so that I was trying really hard to find something good.”

Despite attempts to preserve the marriage, he and his wife divorced in January 2009. More heartbreak followed the next month when his friend Chris succeeded in taking his own life, in spite of the efforts of an extensive support network. Both events are sensitively chronicled on the site at #829—“Smiling and thinking of good friends who are gone” about his friend Chris, and # 854—“Crying: Why letting the big wet tears rain down is great” about his marriage.

A phone call in March of that year delivered the news that his blog had won a Webby. Could he come to New York to accept the prize? He did, and made the aforementioned red carpet stroll, a surreal moment if ever there was one. When he returned to Toronto, there were messages from ten literary agents, all wanting him to sign a book deal. A New York agent was chosen at the recommendation of fellow Canadian blogger Christian Lander, whose blog Stuff White People Like had morphed into a best-selling book.

The Vancouver Sun calls the Awesome Things blog “a countdown of life’s little joys that reads like a snappy Jerry Seinfeld monologue by way of Maria Von Trapp.”

The Book of Awesome was published in April 2010 and became an instant national bestseller in its first week. Since then, it has spent more than 40 weeks on The Globe and Mail bestseller list and more than 20 weeks (and counting) in the #1 spot. Media attention has been intense, with interest from TV producers, appearances on The Today Show, and also on Oprah’s best friend Gayle King’s TV show.

Neil has been happily surprised by the success of the book, especially since his awesome things are available without charge on his advertising free blog. “People tell me I’d make a lot of money putting up ads,” he says, “but I feel that would make it like a business. All I want to do is write, and the book is a natural outlet from that.”

This is one web-savvy Gen-Xer who doesn’t see the web crowding out the written word anytime soon. “A book is a book. It’s something you can give as a gift, take to the beach, read on a plane,” he explains. “It gets tattered, you can write notes in it and highlight passages for your boyfriend or girlfriend. There’s also the whole back-of-the-toilet thing—you really can’t read a blog there very easily.”

Finding the awesome in everyday pleasures has become a daily ritual, providing material for his blog and for books that include new entries as well as ‘best of’ picks from his blog. It’s clear he’s having fun and enjoying bringing pleasure to others, but there’s a serious side as well. While many of the emails he receives are from people offering their own awesome experiences, others are tales of suffering and despair. “A man emailed me that he had planned to commit suicide that evening,” Neil recalls sombrely. “He received The Book of Awesome from his son that same day and said he couldn’t stop flipping through it. He wrote to say the book saved his life.”

Little wonder Neil is committed to continuing the countdown to #1—coming to his blog in mid-April of 2012. If he stays true to form, the day will pass without much hoopla. When his book hit #1 on the bestseller list, he didn’t make a big deal of it. “Writing these things makes me really happy. Almost everything else is nice, but I’ve never celebrated any of them. Really, I’m very appreciative that other people like Awesome Things as much as I do.”