Hey Goodreads peeps, Pass me a drink. Let's chill on the ripped couch at the back. I love this place. Book lovers are my favorite people. (And my favorite lovers.) My name is Neil Pasricha (pass-REACH-ah) and I'm the New York Times / #1 int'l (blah blah blah!) bestselling author of ten books on living an intentional life including THE BOOK OF AWESOME (gratitude), THE HAPPINESS EQUATION (happiness), TWO-MINUTE MORNINGS (habits), and the poorly-titled YOU ARE AWESOME (resilience.) My books are published in a lot of languages I can't read and sold a couple million more copies than anyone was expecting. My background? Well, trust me: Nobody expected me to be writer. Least of all me. My parents aren't jazz trumpet players and watercolorists who raised me in Manhattan. They're hardcore Indian immigrants from Punjab and Nairobi who arrived in Canada scraping to get by. I was supposed to be a doctor! That was the life plan. But after my wife left me and my best friend took his own life in my late 20s I started a blog to cheer myself up. That blog was called 1000awesomethings.com and basically turned into everything else I've done and am doing. If you want to hang out without social media algorithms in between us (no offence, algorithms! please don't punish my search results!) then join the thousands and thousands of good-hearted kindred spirits globally who get my newsletters. I put a lot of work into my newsletters—they're sort of my weird digital babies—and they contain my book recommendations, my new articles, my podcasts, and, of course, my daily awesome things (which I've been writing for 15 years now!). Sign up at www.neil.blog/newsletters Hit me up if you wanna be friends! I love this clunky old site because it feels like my old hometown library somehow. Shall we both get back to reading now? XOXOXO Neil neil@globalhappiness.org