The Three As of “Awesome”

Posted by DJL on Jan 23, 2013 in Living Well | 2 comments

Neil Pasricha didn’t start out to create a killer-blog, he was just going through a really, really hard time and decided he either needed to look for some of the simple joys and pleasures of life or… well, he actually wasn’t sure what else he would do.

And so he had a simple idea – notice the small delights of life and share them on a blog. And he executed it really well – these ideas are often quite simple and yet, perhaps for that reason, take you off guard. And it doesn’t hurt that his posts are written with care.

1000 Awesome Things became his project and blog. It received a couple of hits, and then a couple dozen, and then a couple hundred, thousand, and now millions. Actually, almost 50 million!

Why? Because we all need to be reminded of what is going right in the world when so much news conspires to convince us that everything is going wrong.

But Neil doesn’t want this to remain all up to him. He wants us all to notice and share the awesome things around us. And so in this TED Talk, Neil shares his 3 A’s of awesome:

1) Attitude: making a choice to choose to focus on what is going well. So much is out of our control, but how we respond to what happens to us isn’t.

2) Awareness: Go through life like a 3 year-old, or at least let your 3 year-old self notice from time to time the wonder of the world that is all around us.

3) Authenticity: Be who you are, do what you love, let your heart lead you…and you won’t go wrong.

And here’s the thing – there’s so much awesome stuff around, but we only get a certain amount of time to enjoy it.

The implicit element of the Neil’s Talk and blog that I’d like to make more explicit is simply that in the face of all this awesome stuff it’s hard, finally, to be anything but grateful. And out of our gratitude we can share what we see with others and spread the awesome – and the awesome gratitude – around.

So notice a couple of wondrous things…and then tell someone. You’ll make your day and theirs better.

Notes: 1) If you are receiving this post by email, you may need to click here to watch the video.
2) Neil wrote up his posts into several books; if you’re interested you can look at The Book of Awesome and his follow-up The Book of (Even More) Awesome here.