NP: “It said click here to start a blog in 10 minutes. So I click there, it says, come up with a name. Well, my mother-in-law, she always said everything was awesome. She's like, well, that's awesome. That's awesome. I had this word ringing in my head. I was like, okay. I never used it myself. I was like, okay, awesome. And I don't know, a hundred felt small and a million felt big, so I just wrote a thousand. I actually did not do the math to realize that that actually would take four straight years. Everyone's talking millions, billions, thousands sounds small. Why do I mention that? Because it wasn't like a thing that I made a commitment to doing for four years, but it's still the hardest project I've ever undertaken. I will say creatively in my life. And many times over those four years, I wanted to quit. I wanted to stop. There was many days I'm like, well, that's the end of that. I got 12 ideas, we're done.”
Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I'm Light Watkins and I have conversations with ordinary folks just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path. Their purpose or what they've identified as their mission in life. And today we have a bite size plot twist episode.
A plot twist is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares a story of the pivotal moment in their life trajectory. And the idea behind sharing the plot twist is to inspire you to lean into those plot twists whenever they happen in your life. Because usually when you get turned around from what you thought was your path, what's actually happening is you're being detoured towards your actual path.
And sometimes that looks like getting fired or maybe losing all of your money, or in the case of author and speaker, Neil Pasrika, he got cheated on and he lost his best friend to suicide, which are some of the toughest plot twists to navigate. So it's not surprising that Neil experienced some very dark times where he was living in a tiny little studio in Toronto and spending a lot of time on his own and going to therapy.
And one way that he decided to lift his spirits was to start a blog called 1000 awesome things. At first it was crickets. But then it became huge and slowly Neil's life began to turn around. Let's listen in.
[02:27] NP: I was dating a woman, the first person who liked me back in my life before I went down to Harvard, and after a few months of being together, a few months, I got down on one knee, and I proposed, she said, “Yes,” and then I was whisked off to Boston. And our engagement was spent, from a distance, planning the wedding that we were going to have the next summer. Okay. I then became great friends with Chris. And what happened after Harvard was a couple of things. So, I moved back to Toronto and Canada, after a 10,000-mile road trip with Chris around the whole state, whole US, it was wonderful, one of my fondest memories, and I settled back into my marriage, into my life there.
Unfortunately, although my wife and I had now been together a couple years, it turns out, we were just getting to know each other then and it turns out that it wasn't going great. I was all in. I was of the East Indian mentality. There's no such thing as divorce in the culture that I grew up in. You just never hear that word. No one gets divorced. It's a black mark. It's not the sign of an enlightened culture as sort of The Rogue Economist and books like that would argue today. That is the sign of actually healthy culture that people feel free to not be entombed into relationships that may be riddled with abuse, or financial dependency, et cetera, et cetera. No. It was not something you did.
I drove home from work one night, and I was back in Toronto now working at Walmart, I got my office job, I'm working in human resources, I'm at a leadership development manager. I drove home from work, we just bought the house, and she says to me, “I'm out. This isn't working. I don't love you, and I've met someone else.” That was a huge psychological trap for me because I was in shock. But also, I told you, I grew up with such low – it was like, “Now, I'm a failure at this, and now I'm not attractive, I'm not deserving of love. I'm not” – the confidence and all these traumas were just really kind of inside of me kind of bubbling to the surface. At the same time over this kind of tumultuous path post Harvard, Chris attempted suicide once and it was a terrible experience.
I’d just visited him, we were talking on the phone three, four times a week, he called me up from the hospital and said, “I'm in recovery, I have attempted suicide. I'd love you to come visit me and I need you to help me because I need to get on the right medications. I need to see the right psychiatrist. I need you to get a bit more involved in my health?” And I did. But then, as I was going through this process of the divorce and the selling my house, he then attempted to take his life a second time and this time was successful.
[05:04] LW: You talked to him the night before?
[05:06] NP: Yeah, well, I talked to him the night before that he left. He left, basically, driving down the road trip path that we had come on the other way. We drove from West Coast to East Coast. On the return trip, he drove from East Coast to West Coast. We caught up to him. Yeah, I haven't talked about this before. We caught up to him at a hotel room. We were trying to use the police to track his credit card payments so that we could find him, because we thought it was pretty scary situation, and we caught up to him at a hotel room in Colorado, and the sister was able to get them on the phone. In that particular state, even with police and psychologists present, you cannot enter someone's hotel room. She was able to talk to him on the phone at the hotel and then he shot himself overnight in the hotel.
But I talked to him the day before he left. I talked to Reena, his sister. I said, “I think it was the last person to talk to him.” She’s like, “Actually, I just talked to him last night.” So, I was just a complete disaster. I'm trying to sell a house, which its own mess. I'm trying to process my divorce paperwork. I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that my wife is interested in another guy, and my best friend is gone. He just disappears. This is the person that would probably be most talking to about the whole divorce at the same time, and the person I'd be talking to most about losing my friend is my wife, and that was also gone.
I felt completely untethered. I felt completely searching. There's a lot of tears, there's a lot of stress, I lost a lot of weight. And in the midst of this zone, really, it's a period of that stretches out over a few months, that’s when, to try to cheer myself up. I started a website. I started a website, because what else am I – there's news that’s negative, everything online is negative, I’ve got no one to talk to. I'm home by myself, I go to Google, I type in “how to start a blog.” I press, “I'm feeling lucky”.
Light, at the time, you remember this. But blogs were what everyone was doing. 50,000 blogs were started the day. It was kind of pre-Instagram and Twitter and stuff getting real popular. And so, I started a website called 1000awesomethings.com as a way to try to cheer myself up. It was like the way you would reach for something and not know if it's going to work. But I was like, I just want to force myself to write something positive before I go to bed, because I can't sleep because I got all this stress in my stomach. So, it sucked. My website sucked. The number 1000 posts on my blog was called broccoflower, the strange mutant hybrid child of nature's ugliest vegetables. I mean, my website sucked. But it was me trying to reach for a line out of the quicksand.
[07:47] LW: You were seeing a therapist twice a week. Was that an idea that she said, “Neil, you got to start journaling. You got to start expressing.” Is that where that idea came from? Or what preceded you getting online and starting up that website?
[07:59] NP: I had written for a comedy newspaper in college. I remembered the deep joy that I had as a child writing and reading, especially comedy, and that love I had, that early love of writing comedy and trying to write comedies. It was a safe place for me. The therapist actually came from my mom, I felt like a real loser at the time for my mom suggesting I go to therapy. I equated therapy. It wasn't in the – A, I wasn't where I am now. But B, I don't think therapy was where it is now. It was equated with, “you got problems.” You're crazy. You got total problems. And so, I went to the therapist, and you're supposed – it was my mom's therapist. So even worse, even more embarrassing for me, she's like, “You need to see a therapist now and you should go to the one I got. Just go now.” I'll give you my appointment kind of thing. And so, I go see the guy, and he's like, “Can you come back tomorrow?” It was like, I had a lot of stuff to process. A lot. I was trying to process massive amounts of emotional stuff all at once and I didn't have the tools to be able to do that. So, the blog was one tool. The therapy was one tool. Yeah, looking back, I know that focusing on gratitude is scientifically proven, and we can talk about that. I know that journaling is scientifically proven and we could talk about that. But I was just grasping at stuff. I was just grasping at stuff.
My parents were also trying to load up my freezer with like healthy, homemade food. I wrote about Chris on my blog. I wrote a big essay about my relationship with him, and it turned my little tiny comedic blog about broccoflower into something that I posted it – I called it ‘smiling and thinking about good friends who are gone’, and I wrote a big essay about him. So, I was trying my best with the limited tools I had to process things however I could, and I will – it's pretty obvious looking at it now. I didn't have that much perceived challenge in my life until that point. So, when I hit these two huge things at once, I didn't have the equipment, I didn't have the skills, I didn't have the resilience to deal with it.
[10:10] LW: You've mentioned in a previous interview, I heard, you said, when you were younger, you would quit things a lot. And your mom would be cool with you quitting things a lot. Talk about your sort of mental process and locking into a thousand things in the schedule every day. Where did that come from? Did you inherit that in business school or working in leadership development at Walmart?
[10:32] NP: So, first of all, I started the blog in 10 minutes. You type in, “how to start a blog”. You press, “I'm feeling lucky”. The first hit that comes up, Light, is a site I had never heard of at the time called WordPress. I clicked that button and it said right there on the button. “Click here to start a blog in 10 minutes”. So, I click there. It says, “Come up with a name”. Well, my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law, in the relationship that I was in, that was ending. She always said everything was awesome. She's like, “Well, that’s awesome. That's awesome.” I had this word ringing in my head. I was like, “I never used that myself.” I was like, “Okay, awesome.”
I don't know, a hundred felt small and a million felt big. So, I just wrote a thousand. I actually did not do the math to realize that that actually would take four straight years of writing one every day. I was like, “A thousand doesn't sound that big, does it? Everyone's talking millions, billions. Thousand sounds small.” Why do I mention that? Because it wasn't like a thing that I made a commitment to doing for four years, but it's still the hardest project I've ever undertaken, I will say, creatively in my life. Many times, over those four years, I wanted to quit. I want to stop. There as many days, I'm like, “Well, that's the end of that. I got 12 ideas, like we're done.”
But what happened was, when you put a little flag above yourself in the world, that old Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, isn't that far off. When you decide what you want to do, the universe conspires to make it happen. When I started writing about awesome things, I eventually sent an email after 5 or 10 posts to people, my mom sends it to my dad, my traffic doubled, I started getting 10 hits. Guess what? When anyone in my life started thinking of something good that happened to them, they sent it to me. And the little blog, which had one comment started to get three comments. And people post, like, “Oh, how about the cold side of the pillow? Or have you written about getting called up to the wedding?” So, I was just taking other people's idea and trying to write them out.
And when you do that more, the comments get bigger. I remember the first day I got like 20 comments on a post. And then one day, I got 100. And then I wrote this post called old dangerous playground equipment, I got 500 comments, right? It made the front page of this website at the time, which is really big, called fark.com. I don't know if you remember this. Fark.com, and that was like digg.com, right? Like, those are the websites that kind of started, the blog started getting 5,000 hits a day, 10,000, say 50,000 hits a day, and started getting bigger and bigger. A million blog hits on the side, then 5 million and 10 million. I didn't think of it like a project I was necessarily going to commit to for a thousand days. But I'm saying that second law of physics, an object in motion will stay in motion, unless acted upon by an equal or greater force. It’s true.
So, the hardest part often is to start these things. Sometimes, when they start, the momentum, and the motivation, and the capability that you think in your own head, that comes after, right? So, it accelerated as a practice and it became easier as I was doing it, not always easy, and often not. But it became easier than those first clunky attempts on the first day and the second day and the third day.
If you ask me, where did I get into like a publishing rhythm? Yeah, I mean, I guess at Queen's University, when I was editor of that campus common newspaper. We put out a paper every single week. So, I was familiar with the process of getting together on Sunday, with a group of people, having literally nothing written, and not going home till 4 AM, on Monday morning when the thing was done, and it would come out every day at Wednesday. It was a comedy newspaper. We weren't reporting on things. We made it all up. And it was like a 40-page newspaper. We wrote an entire newspaper. It’s the number one campus newspaper across the country, in terms of ad sales and ad revenue, because it was very, very well read. And we put the whole thing together every single day.
I just knew that mental philosophy of starting with nothing, and then publishing before you go home. So, I had that baked in me, I think, from four years at Queen's.
[14:38] LW: Your most recent book, Our Book of Awesome. In the introduction to that book, you admit that you needed this exercise. So now, I’m going back to the original one, I know, for myself, I've been writing this daily dose of inspiration for over six years now. So, I literally see the world in frames of inspirational experiences. Was that happening to you? Were you like going out of your house now, living your same life, but now all you're kind of noticing are awesome things to write about, especially when you're getting those 20, 30, 40, 50 comments on your posts?
[15:12] NP: 100%. I was keeping notes in my pocket, it was easier to add to them, and you know what, it was a years later that I first heard of this thing in your brain called your visual cortex. And it was years later that I heard that there's an area in your brain called area 17. And it was years later that I heard that there's these famous researchers down at University of Texas called Slater and Pennebaker, who did all this foundational work on journaling, and they showed that when you journal about a positive experience that happens in your daily life, and you know this because you see the world this way through your inspiration emails, guess what? It lights up area 17 in your visual cortex as if you're doing it again.
Your brain does not know the difference between what's happening right in front of your eyes and what's happening in your mind. Meaning that, if you write about the cold side of the pillow, it feels to your mind like you are flipping to the cold side of the pillow. And if you read your own journal, if you read your own email, which you do before you send it, and I did before I post it, and I did after, then guess what? You get a doubling, a tripling, a quadrupling effect. And on top of all that, you are actually carving out the neural pathways in your brain responsible for positive thinking. And this activity and this behavior is so fundamentally important to all of us, because our brains naturally go the opposite way.
300,000 years of Homo sapiens evolution on top of three million years with the same brains, we're good at looking for problems, man. Our brains are good at looking for problems. That's what they are designed to do. You look for problem, you find problem, you solve problem. And that is still the orientation of our entire society today. When you get the math test back, look for the one question you got wrong. When you get the blood test back, you look for the high cholesterol. When you look at the reviews on your podcast, I guarantee, your brain looks for the one that's one star first. When you go on Amazon, you look for the one-star review first. Our brains are designed to look for problems.
However, we happen to live in the most abundant society ever in human history. I'm not saying that stuff happening in the news isn't real. I'm not saying that. But I am saying we do live in the most abundant time ever in human civilization. You can press a button, have food on your porch in 20 minutes. You could go anywhere in the world, like, feasibly. You could see things. We live like kings lived 100 years ago. But we don't feel that way. Because our brains are still the same brains. And so, this exercise and this practice that you have with your six-year-long daily email, and I had for the four years I did the blog, and the 11 years I've done since, still writing them down. That's the basis of Our Book of Awesome. It's another 500 of them, okay, is a vital practice to cultivating a positive mindset. If you can cultivate the positive mindset, man, everything else opens up and we can talk about the research on that.
But it is the lead domino to productivity, to creativity, to social connection, to almost anything you can measure. This comes from Sonja Lyubomirsky over at Stanford, then the University of California from her wonderful book The How of Happiness. Cultivating a positive mindset is the lead domino. It’s almost everything. You don't necessarily need to listen to this and say, “Oh, I’ve got to write a daily email like Light.” Or “I’ve got to write a daily awesome thing like Neil,” but there’s got to be something. There's got to be something that you do, where you look for positive things every day. You can put it on a pen and paper. You could do a two-minute morning journaling practice, which you talk. This is another thing I'm a big advocate for. You could write it on your phone when no one sees. But if you do that practice, you're cultivating the mindset that will lead to massive benefits for you.
[18:59] LW: You've become one of the thought leaders in positive thinking practices, and I'm curious, at what point, and I kind of think I know the answer. But I want to hear your version of this. But at what point did you transition from a leadership development coach who had this little part-time blog thing on the site, to an awesome blogger who was moonlighting as a leadership development coach, in your mind?
[19:19] NP: Well, okay, so I worked at Walmart from 2006 to 2016. I started writing 1000awesomethings.com in 2008. The Book of Awesome, which is the book based on my blog, not to be confused with Our Book of Awesome, which is the 10-year later sequel that I’ve just written. But The Book of Awesome came out in 2010. Light, for eight overlapping years, eight overlapping years, I wrote five books, I gave 200 speeches all on the side of working my full-time job at Walmart. And the reason I did that was a couple fold.
One, I just got the worst – I had three contacts in my phone. Now, I'm living in a shoebox apartment, and I got nothing else to do. There's 168 hours in a week, you divide it by three, you get three buckets of 56, right? You sleep eight hours a night, that's eight times seven, that's 56 hours a week. You work a job, like I had, a very busy demanding job at Walmart. I went from manager, leadership development, to my last job at the company was director of leadership development. In the middle, I had a four-year development assignment working for our CEO as his project manager.
So now, like writing speeches, traveling, doing work for our CEO, and these are big jobs. But I'll say, even though they're big, they weren't more than 56 hours a week. They weren't more than 56 hours a week. That's still eight hours a day plus 16 hours on evenings and weekends, right? Well, that's still afforded me the time and the ability to spend 56 hours doing something else. And what I did when the blog started to take off and I'm starting to get invited to like give TED talks or whatever, is I went to the Walmart ethics department, which they had, because they're the world's largest company, they got departments about anything.
I talked to the guy and I said, “I'm getting invited to like do speeches and stuff that I'm getting paid for. What's the conflict of interest here?” And he said, “Let me get this straight. You're writing a blog on the side about how to be happy, little positive things?” I was like, “Yeah.” He's like, “And you are trying to teach other people through motivational speeches?” I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Are you mentioning in your speech anything confidential about Walmart?” I said, “No, my speech is not about Walmart. It's the three A's of awesome. That's the name of my TED talk.” He's like, “Okay.” He just double checked. He was like, “No.” He's like, “Basically, you're great.” In fact, he's like, “There's people at Walmart all over the place.” They’re like, “I'm a DJ on the weekend. I'm a wedding photographer. I'm a real estate agent.”
These days, we have words for it now, the side hustle. At the time, I thought I was breaking some law. So, I double checked with ethics. And they're like, “What you're doing is good. In fact, do you mind giving a motivational speech to the auditorium here? We aren’t going to pay you, you work here. But could you give the talk?” So, I do stuff like that for Walmart. And I happened to have a wonderfully progressive culture and company that just supported me.
They were kind and supportive, and they loved the fact that I was doing this stuff on the side. And so, I got lucky that way. I think in some organizations, they have a pretty clear policy that you can't do two jobs at once. But in this case, what I would do is I would look at the amount of vacation time I would get from Walmart per year, and it was like three weeks of vacation. And then I would calculate how many, for example, speeches I wanted to do. I told the speaking bureau, I want to do 20. All right, and this is a little bit inside baseball, but I know you're interested, and maybe some of your listeners are. And then I would say that the speaking bureau, how many of those 20 can you move to evenings and weekends? And they'd say, “About half, maybe.” I say, “Okay, well, the evenings and weekends, I'm good. What about the other half?” They're like, “That’s 10 more speeches you got to travel for.”
So, then I'd go back to the warmer HR department, and I'd fill out a little piece of paper that said, annually, I would do this. And everybody can do this in every company, people don't realize this, all you have to do is fill out a piece of paper with your HR department, you say I request 10 days of unpaid leave per year. Almost every company has this. People don't use it. So, I would turn my three weeks of vacation into five, and it would supplement the time I needed to do the extra speeches and so on. I did both for as long as possible. And now you're probably wondering, how did you decide what to do?
By the way, the motivational speaking and writing all these books job, sounds cool and sexy. But don't forget, man, it's got no pension, it's got no benefits, you get fall off the face of the earth in 10 minutes if you aren't showing up on Light Watkins podcast. You know what I'm saying? So, there's a lot more grind in that job. And so, I called up Dave Cheesewright, who was the CEO that I worked for at Walmart. And I called him up and I said, “Dave, I'm trying to decide what to do.” And he said, “Neil, you only got to perform two tests, my friend. Number one, the deathbed test. When you were deciding between two jobs, or our current job and a future job, which would you regret not doing more on your deathbed? That is the deathbed test.”
I said, “Okay, well.” Dave had moved on to a kind of a mentorship role to me, so I was like, “I think I’d probably regret the writing thing more if I didn't do it.” I'd written a few books at the time, like, but I had never leaned in all the way or I was spending my time writing. You mentioned my podcast, well, I could not even imagine and stuff like that, because I was working a full-time job. Because I think I'd regret that more.
He said, “Okay, the second test is the plan B test, which is you got to conceptualize and visualize and get comfortablized with what you would do if you failed.” Okay. So, he said, “Okay, so tell me Neil, if you go be a writer full time, and it flops, because the odds are it will, just the odds, general odds in life about trying to make it as an artist of any kind is pretty low. So, what are you going to do?” I said, “Well, I guess I'm going to be dusting off that LinkedIn profile. I'll be knocking on the door of Walmart and any other company.” And he said, “Okay, could you get your mind around being comfortable with that?” I said, “Yeah, I think so. I've got 10 years of work experience here. I've got the background here.” He's like, “Okay, I think you already know what you want to do. Then you did the two tests.”
I say that because those two tests are valuable tools for anybody who are considering between a current option or a future option or two different options, the deathbed tests and the plan B tests. If you can answer those two questions in your mind, it'll help you make the decision. So, at that point, 200 speeches, five books, in 2016, I then went to become what I do now, and I say what I say that I do is, I say I think, write, and speak about intentional living, right? I've subsequently written books about happiness, called The Happiness Equation, a book about resilience called You Are Awesome. This new book, which I feel it's centered around community, which is called Our Book of Awesome. Yeah, it's a litany of awesome things. But you read the book, you know it's like there's voices that appear, and there are comments that fly in. I'm trying to do some creative stuff in the book.
To be honest with you, now that I look back, man, I think I was too risk averse. I think I was too risk averse. I have the cultural heritage of being a doctor. And if not, definitely be a lawyer or an engineer. And if not, definitely have a job, like, have a place you go with a salary you get, have a benefits plan, man. So, I look back and I think, well, if I left a couple of years earlier, maybe then I could have started that podcast or done that training course. Who knows? But I did it the way that was meant to happen for me and that's the thought process and the process that I went through to do it.
[END]
That was New York times bestselling author, Neil Pasricha. To see how the rest of his story plays out, you want to check out the original episode, which is episode 133 in the archive. And I recommend following Neil on the socials at @NeilPasricha. That's N E I L P A S R I C H A. And if you know anyone who's making the world a better place and they've had an incredible plot twist in their life, feel free to email me your guest suggestions at light@atlightwatkins.com.
My other ask is that you take a few seconds to rate and review the show. You hear hosts like me ask listeners like you for ratings all the time, because that's how a lot of the bigger guests will determine whether or not they're going to come on to a podcast. So it does make a huge difference. All you have to do is look at your device, click on the name of the show. Scroll down past the first five episodes, you'll see a space with five blank stars. Just tap the star all the way on the right. And you've left a five star rating.
And if you're feeling generous, you want to go the extra mile, feel free to leave a review, just one line about something that you would appreciate about this show, and that will go a long way as well.
Also, you can watch these plot twist episodes on my YouTube channel if you prefer to see what Neil looks like as he's sharing his plot twist. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube as well.
Alright, I'll see you on Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place. And until then, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart and keep leaning into those plot twist and keep leaning into those plot twists when they happen in your life. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic weekend.
