The Power of 1000

Hey everyone,

Last week I suddenly gave my 600th speech.

I went back and pulled up the ​first 10 speeches I ever gave​ -- in my hometown library, at the local book festival, on the stage at ​TEDx Toronto​. In the last couple weeks I spoke at Coca-Cola's head office in Atlanta, to all global tax partners at the world's biggest accounting firm ​on trust​, and then to the CEO and his top 300 leaders down at The Cleveland Clinic. That's a lot of speeches so how do we balance things out? Leslie and I pull out our ​family contract​ each year and one very important number on there is nights away. Everybody is different but we've decided I will travel for a max of 10% of the year. That way I'm home 90% of the time. But yet: 600 speeches! How did that happen? Well, it's because my goal is 1000. And as you'll see in my post below I feel like 1000 is the absolute perfect moonshot number. It's a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race number that's big and challenging ... while also reachable.

I feel the number 1000 can be a useful pull for all of us. Ask yourself: "What can I do 1000 of?"

As you'll see below I came about this thought slowly and through a number of projects over the past 16 years. I hope you like my post below on The Power of 1000.

What will you do 1000 of?

Neil

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I didn’t realize it at the time, but something special happened to me on June 20, 2008.

I was in a pretty depressive state with my marriage heading the wrong direction and my best friend suffering from severe mental illness. I needed an escape. An outlet. A place to go. A place to vent.

So, I typed “How to start a blog” into Google and pressed that “I’m feeling lucky” button, which no one ever presses. And 10 minutes later, I started up a tiny website called ​1000 Awesome Things​.

My idea was to write down 1000 awesome things for 1000 straight weekdays to cheer myself up.

Why 1000?

Well, 100 awesome things sounded too low. Too easy! I could whip that off in a few months and I’d be finished. I didn’t expect I’d have things figured out in my own head that quickly.

And one million awesome things sounded like too much. A million! How many years would that take? Oh, just a couple thousand. Since I’m not Gandalf, I knew I was aiming too high.

1000 became my baby bear bowl of porridge.

It sounded jussssssssst right.

For the next four years, for the next 1000 straight weekdays, I really did write 1000 awesome things on my blog. And while ​my marriage fell apart​ and ​my best friend sadly took his own life​, that tiny blog became a salvation, a place to escape to, a place to disappear to.

On April 19, 2012, 1000 weekdays after I launched it, I announced the No. 1 awesome thing in a downtown bookstore beamed live to the CBC National News.

And then … that was it. I hit 1000. The project finished. The blog ended. And I moved on.

But something happened to me over the years.

And it’s something I never put a finger on until more recently.

The number 1000 kept popping up in my life.

I thought maybe it was just the famous ​Baader-Meinhof phenomenon​. You know, when you keep seeing the same obscure word jump out at you after hearing about it for the first time. Does that happen to you, too? In 1994, a commenter on the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s online discussion board came up with that strange term after hearing the name of the ultra-left-wing German terrorist group twice in one day.

But the number 1000 felt deeper than that.

When researching ​The Happiness Equation​,I looked at lifespans around the world. I was trying to understand why people in Okinawa, Japan, for example, live seven more years than North Americans and have no word for retiring.

So, guess what our average lifespan is? Here’s the interesting thing. It’s 1000 months. Or just over 83 years.

“There’s that number again,” I thought to myself.

A year later, I was working on my journal ​Two-Minute Mornings​. I found I was stressed out so I came up with a routine to help me chill. Each morning, I would wake up and answer three research-backed prompts to both clear and focus my mind:

1. “I will let go of …”

2. “I am grateful for …”

3. “I will focus on …”

When part of your life is doing interviews with media, you get good insights from journalists. And that’s what happened. I was doing the TV, radio, and podcast circuit on this journal and a host said something that struck me. She said:

“Today, we welcome Neil Pasricha on the show. His challenge? You’re awake 1000 minutes every day. Could you take two of them to make the other 998 even better?”

Wait a minute.

You’re alive 1000 months.

You’re awake 1000 minutes a day.

What an incredibly helpful way to measure what you’re doing in life in the broadest possible sense.

Renovating your fixer-upper for three months? Feels awful. But maybe small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. After all, it’s only 3 of your 1000 months. Hate your 100-minute commute? That makes sense! You’re only awake 1000 minutes a day, so you’re burning 200 or 20% of them in the car.

What’s another reason 1000 is such a powerful number?

Because it’s a moon shot number that’s actually realistic.

When you’re only alive for 1000 months (or roughly 30000 days), then doing something for 1000 of them is a massive commitment … that you can actually do.

Can you do 1000 morning runs?

Can you cook 1000 homemade dinners?

Can you teach 1000 students?

Can you help 1000 people?

Yes, you can. It will take you a while.

But you can.

Why 1000?

Because it is clear and measurable and big and daunting … but reachable. I wanted to quit so many times while writing ​1000 Awesome Things​. But I had that number, that commitment, those three big zeros staring me in the face.

Once I’d spent a year writing a few hundred awesome things, could I look at myself in the mirror if I quit? I decided I couldn’t, which is where duds like, say, ​#806 Ducks​ came from on my blog.

How do I use it in my life today?

I decided I wanted to try and read the 1000 most formative books in the world before I die. Easy math. About a book a month. I realized there was no list of 1000 books I could trust and no algorithm that could feed me these 1000 important, life-changing books.

So, I made my own. I decided to interview 333 people who I find inspiring and ask each of them for the three books which most changed their lives. Who? Authors like ​Judy Blume​, ​George Saunders​, and ​David Sedaris​. Artists like ​Sarah Andersen​, ​Daniels​, and ​Quentin Tarantino​. And inspiring people I stumble upon like ​Vishwas Aggrawal​, ​Rebecca S. Kaye​, or ​Elder Cox and Elder Corona​.

I record these conversations in a podcast called ​3 Books with Neil Pasricha​ and I release one chapter on the exact minute of every full moon up to 2040.

2040? Yes! That’s the magic of 1000.

It’s a moon shot — I may never make it. I started the project at 38 years old and I’ll be 60 when it’s over. It's 1000 books so it will take a long time. But I now know, and I now believe, in the power of 1000 to lead me there.

As George R.R. Martin wrote: “A reader lives 1000 lives before he dies … the man who never reads lives only one.”

There it is again.

A one with three zeros.

What can you do a thousand times?

Just sign up for doing 1000 of something and then get ready to drop your jaw and stare back at yourself as you accomplish your massive goal.

Good luck!

A slightly modified version of this article originally appeared in the Toronto Star

7 Customer Service Lessons From The World’s Greatest Uber Driver

Do you Uber?

I’ve probably hailed an Uber two or three times a day for the past couple years and every time I do I scroll down to check the driver’s rating and number of rides. Do you do that? I’m always curious so I’ve sort of made a little mental map over time of what the ratings mean. 4.3? May drive on wrong side of the road. 4.5? Get ready for loud GPS directions. 4.7? Messy trunk with no suitcase room.

But something different happened the night I hailed an Uber driven by a guy named Vishwas Aggrawal, who goes by Vish for short. He had a staggering 4.99 rating. 4.99! I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen a 4.99 before. I just figured he was just a brand new driver with a handful of rides until I scrolled down and saw that he’d given almost 5,000.

How was that possible?

Well, when I sat down in Vish’s car I realized how it was possible. The five-minute drive home blossomed into an interview I did with Vish the following week (in the back of his Uber, of course) for my podcast 3 Books with Neil Pasricha, where I discuss the three most formative books of inspiring people like Seth Godin, Judy Blume, and Gretchen Rubin. Vish was officially the first Uber driver on the show, and he shared with me why he cares so deeply about his service quality–even though Uber has no leaderboard, ranking, or major incentives tied to it–and what he does in order to keep that service so high.

1. MAKE A 10-SECOND OFFER, THEN CONFIRM THE DEAL

After Vish confirms his passenger’s name and destination, he always asks, “Do you have enough room back there?” while actually moving his seat up. So within 10 seconds he’s able to show — not tell — that he’s in the high-service game using a repeatable method to demonstrate this quickly.

After Vish moves his seat up, he says, “It will take 11 minutes to get to your destination. Does this sound good to you?” The purpose of the question is to establish the service being offered and find out if the passenger is in a rush. If they are, he’ll work hard to shave even a minute or two off the arrival time. If not, he knows the offering has been crystallized by both sides. The deal is confirmed.

2. YOU SET YOUR OWN STANDARDS EVERY DAY

Born and raised in Indore, a city in central India, Vish earned his MBA and held sales and marketing positions at Coca-Cola and New York Life, where he says, “I learned how to effectively deal with people” with tact and emotional intelligence. Eventually, Vish moved to Toronto and, like many immigrants, found it difficult to break into his adoptive country’s knowledge economy, despite his extensive corporate experience.

“Doing Uber was not my first choice,” he says, but he hasn’t lowered his work standards, even though the company doesn’t compensate him for it. “Why can’t you compare driving a car with flying an airplane? Like the pilot,” he points out. Both are fundamentally customer-service roles, requiring similar skill sets he developed earlier in his career. “One of my mantras,” Vish tells me, “is either I do the thing, or I don’t do the thing. But if I do the thing, I do it the best.”

3. IT’S ALWAYS THE CUSTOMER’S FIRST TIME

Despite the thousands of rides he’s given, Vish knows that “it’s always their first time with me.” He keeps wet wipes under his seat and cleans the floor mats between every ride. Why? “This car is my office. This is the only office I have in this business, so I’m supposed to keep it up, I’m supposed to maintain it, I’m supposed to clean it,” he explains. “Every day, even when I go home, I also take out the carpets, I clean them. If it is snowing or dirty, I wash them.”

As an Uber driver, Vish says, “I know I’m doing a service,” not just operating a vehicle. His passengers’ experience is really what they’re paying for, more than just getting safely from point A to B. Vish has his phone programmed to silent, and an auto-responder menu pops up on his screen to handle incoming texts and calls, allowing him to tap and send replies without losing focus on his passenger. The one I kept getting while trying to set up our interview said simply, “I am in a trip, please text me if needed” (followed by the smiley face and thumbs-up emojis).

4. GIVE THE TASK TO THE “YES” PART OF YOUR BRAIN

Vish says that the classic self-help book The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz gave him “a formula in life always–the formula of ‘yes man’ and ‘no man’.” As Vish explains, Schwartz argues that “the human brain is like a factory  with two foremen: one is a ‘no man’ and the other is a ‘yes man’ . . . If you give the job to the ‘no man,’ your own mind will start finding logic and reasons to prove how can’t you do this job.”

“You know debate competitions?” he asks me. The debater “who is speaking in favor looks quite right, and the person who’s speaking against also has valid logic, so at the time you feel both are correct.” In other words, we all have a choice as to which parts of our own brains we charge with executing certain tasks and tackling challenges. After reading Schwartz’s book, Vish says, “I started working on my ‘yes man.’ That’s what I do at Uber as well.”

Vish lets customers alter routes if they choose. He even calls passengers at home to tell them their UberPool-ing friend was dropped off safely, and tries to accommodate small requests along the way.

5. WE BUY WITH ALL SENSES

Vish only eats raw vegetables and salad in his car to avoid smells or odors. His car needs to be a blank slate that passengers can immediately feel ownership of, not like they’re suddenly in somebody else’s kitchen. He has the same theory about sounds, which is why his radio is never playing when a customer climbs in. If they want the radio on? That’s fine. But he turns it off for the next person. And if they’re eating a garlic stir-fry or smell like smoke? That’s fine, too. But he sprays a lemon air freshener and opens all the windows to start fresh the next time.

6. USE THEIR NAME

Vish says that Uber wants drivers to say “What is your name?” to customers before they get in the Uber. He ignores that. Instead, he greeted me with, “Is it Neil?” and a big smile. In fact, the excitement in his voice made it more of a statement than a question: “Is it Neil!” Real name, right off the bat, plus an immediate flash of intimacy.

“I try to break the ice by appreciating people,” Vish explains. “When you appreciate someone, you are not giving a discomfort to him or her.” Instead, he’s found that these simple moments of warmth he creates are almost always reciprocated. “They will surely come back with a positive remark or a positive affirmation, sentence, or a line or a word to you.” He adds, “If you start with a smile, 99% of people will smile back.”

7. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER SPECTRUM (AND WHO FALLS OUTSIDE OF IT)

I asked Vish how he deals with drunk customers on busy Friday and Saturday nights. He surprised me by saying he doesn’t serve them. Drunk customers aren’t his target market. As soon as he lands one, he heads home. It’s a signal he’s serving folks outside of his customer spectrum and his day is done. (In fact, Vish also benches himself whenever he’s having an off day because he says driving is too risky–a judgment call that takes real self-awareness, especially in the gig economy, where there’s no direct boss to manage your performance.)

“The most important thing in your life is to enjoy what you’re doing,” Vish adds, and for him, it’s as simple as that. Driving an Uber wasn’t his first choice, and it isn’t what he intends to do indefinitely, but he’s doing more than just making the most of it.

He’s enjoying what he’s doing–and creating an unbelievably positive experience for everyone he interacts with in the process.

Can we all say the same?

An earlier version of this article appeared in Fast Company

Why You Need An Untouchable Day Every Week (And How To Get One)

I hate meetings. They sit subconsciously in my brain, taking up space. I prepare for them in my notebooks. I travel to them, and then back again, in the middle of my work days. And what do most meetings usually result in? You guessed it — more meetings.

When I worked as Director of Leadership Development at Walmart, my days were full of meetings. Everybody’s were! And when I quit a few years ago to strike out on my own, I thought my days full of meetings were behind me.

But I was wrong.

I now have research calls and phone interviews, lunches with literary agents and web developers, conference calls about book titles and publishing schedules, and radio interviews and media prep calls. And before every speech I give, there’s always a meeting with the client and meeting planner to clarify goals and logistics for the event.

Meetings never really go away.

But the problem is that I’m now measured almost solely on my creative output. And there’s no time for it! It’s not just me, either. As our world gets busier and our phones get beepier, the scarcest resource for all of us is becoming attention and creative output. And if you’re not taking time to put something new and beautiful out into the world, then your value is diminishing fast.

I used to be one of those “wake up at 4 a.m.” or “keep chugging till 4 a.m.” guys who grinds away for hours while everybody else sleeps. It’s how I wrote The Top 1000 page in a thousand days. But I now understand that you can only drive in the express lane for so long before the wheels come off.

I’m working hard to no longer be that guy. Now when I get home after work, I soak in time with my wife and little boys. Nothing is or will ever be as precious to me and I resist insight from anyone who isn’t making space for loved ones. I realized that what I needed was apracticalway to get more work done without taking more time. And, to be honest, I needed it fast. Why? Because in my first year as a full-time writer I actually started feeling my productivityslipping —even though I had quit my full-time job. It wasn’t just disheartening. It was embarrassing! “So how’s the new book coming?” “Oh, now that I quit my job? Terribly!”

I finally found a solution that I feel has saved my career, my time, and my sanity. If you’re with me right now, I bet you need this solution too: I call it “Untouchable Days”.

These are days when I am literally 100% unreachable in any way…by anyone.

Untouchable Days have become my secret weapon to getting back on track. They’re how I complete my most creative and rewarding work. To share a rough comparison, on a day when I write between meetings, I’ll produce maybe 500 words a day. On an Untouchable Day, it’s not unusual for me to write 5000 words. On these days, I’m 10 times more productive.

How do I carve out Untouchable Days?

I look at my calendar sixteen weeks ahead of time, and for each week, I block out an entire day as UNTOUCHABLE. I put it in all-caps just like that, too. UNTOUCHABLE. I don’t write in all-caps for anything else, but I allow UNTOUCHABLE days to just scream out to me.

Why sixteen weeks ahead? The number of weeks isn’t as important as the thinking behind it. For me, that’s after my speaking schedule is locked in — but, importantly, before anything else is. That’s a magic moment in my schedule. It’s the perfect time to plant the Untouchable Day flag before anything else can claim that spot.

On the actual Untouchable Day itself, I picture myself sitting in a bulletproof car surrounded by two-inches of thick impenetrable plastic on all sides. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. Meetings bounce off the windshield. Texts, alerts, and phone calls, too. My cell phone is in Airplane Mode. My laptop has Wi-Fi disabled. Not a single thing can bother me… and not a single thing does.

But, what about emergencies, you might be wondering?

The short answer is that there really never are any. The long answer is when my wife asked me about emergencies, she didn’t love my rant about how back in the day, nobody had cell phones, and we were all unreachable at times. As a compromise, I told her that when I started scheduling Untouchable Days, I’d open the door of my bulletproof car for an hour at lunchtime. When I did, I came face to face with the whizzing bullets of seventeen text messages, dozens of urgent-sounding emails, and endless robot-generated alerts and feeds — and precisely zero emergencies from my wife. So after a few months, we stopped doing that and instead I just started telling her where I’d be. That gave her peace of mind that if something horrible happened, she could call the place I was working or simply drive over and find me as a last resort.

I’ve now pulled off Untouchable Days for a few years. Nothing horrible has ever happened, and we’ve both grown more comfortable with zero contact throughout the day.

So what do Untouchable Days look like up close?

I think of them as having two components. There is the deep creative work. When you’re in the zone, you’re in a state of flow, and the big project you’re working on is getting accomplished step by step by step. And then there are the nitros — little blasts of fuel you can use to prime your own pump if you hit a wall. These unproductive moments of frustration happen to all of us, and it’s less important to avoid them than to simply have a mental toolkit you can whip out when they happen. What are my tools? Going for a workout. Grabbing a pack of almonds. Getting up and going birdwatching. Just getting outside! After all, Thoreau said “I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” What else? A short breathwork meditation. Moving workspaces. Or my wonder drug of precariously turning off Airplane Mode for ten minutes (while staying off of email and text) and leaving voicemails for my parents and close friends, telling them I love them. It works every time, and I get back to work quickly because, let’s be honest, nobody ever answers their phone.

So what happens if the bulletproof car really does get bumped? Say I get an incredible speaking invite or somebody much more important than me only has this one day to get together? Red alert: The Untouchable Day is under threat. What do I do?

I have a simple rule. Untouchable Days may never be deleted, but they can move between the bowling-lane bumpers of the weekends. They can’t jump weeks, though. They are more important than anything else I am doing, so if they need to move from a Wednesday to a Thursday or a Friday, that’s fine — even if I have to move four meetings to make room. The beauty of this approach is that when you plant the Untouchable Day flag on your calendar, it really does feel permanent in your mind. You start feeling the creative high you’ll get from such deep output as soon as you start booking them in.

Before I started using Untouchable Days, I treaded water — I wrote articles, gave speeches, but something was missing. When I implemented Untouchable Days? Magic happened. I wrote two new books, wrote and launched a new keynote speech, drafted book proposals for my next two books, and completely planned and began recording my new podcast — all while traveling and giving more speeches than I ever had before.

With a few years of Untouchable Days under my belt, do I still go through the exercise of scheduling one Untouchable Day every single week?

Well, the honest answer is no.

Now I schedule two.

A slightly modified version of this article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review

Top 10 Reads of 2017

Snow is blowing in Toronto right now and frightful weather always makes for good reading. And good gift ordering. And good gift wrapping. Some of you have been asking for book suggestions for the holidays so here are my Top Ten Reads Of The Year. Below each I’ve included my attempt at (who they’re perfect for) to help with gift giving.

Enjoy and happy holidays!

10. The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey. This book is not about tennis! It’s a fascinating, plainspoken, beautifully vivid portrait of the inner “head game” we are always playing with ourselves. (If you play tennis that’s just a bonus.) Teaches you how to recognize, label, and strip away the inner voices. I would compare it to books by Steven Pressfield or Seth Godin. Can’t confirm but have heard this labeled as the original sports psychology book… was written a few decades ago but still reads nice and fresh. (Perfect for the self-help junkie who’s “read it all”, the thinking athlete, or the manager looking for a new lens on leadership)

9. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosch. That loveable bookworm Bill Gates tipped me off to this gem in the vein of David Sedaris or Jenny Lawson’s autobiographical hilarity. An evolution on those books with raw, edgy comedy written across Microsoft Paint-style cartoons. Despite the visual format the content can be deep and emotionally heavy. I could only read one or two stories at a time. Amazing introspection on the human condition especially topics such as mental illness, anxiety, and depression. (Perfect for self-aware and introspective millennials, graphic novel aficionados, and people who forward you absurdist YouTube sketch videos you’re not sure make any sense…)

8. Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler. I loved The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz when I was younger. That was the only other Mordecai Richler book I’d read until this… and this blows the roof off that one. It took me a couple tries to get in because the first person narration is so acidic and scorching. Very funny but almost too dark for me. But page by page Barney grows on you and this fictional “righting of wrongs” memoir reveals all kinds of hidden storylines, quiet love, and almost unbelievably beautiful writing as he shares his life story in three sections dedicated to his three wives. This is the only novel I can recall that just killed it across both Canada and US awards circuits (Giller / NYT Notable) and it’s easy to see why. An ultimately heartwarming comedic masterwork. Sad Richler wrote no novels a decade before this and no novels afterwards until his death so this gem stands on a lonely island. (Perfect for people who know what divorce feels like, fans of Mark Twain, or anyone who loved A Confederacy of Dunces)

7. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida and translated by David Mitchell. According to the introduction, this is the only book ever written about autism … by someone with autism. Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida wrote this book with a Japanese alphabet pad and an assistant, one character at a time, and you can feel that slow tenderness and passion as he answers question after question. Why do people with autism talk so loudly and weirdly? Why don’t you make eye contact while talking? What’s the reason you jump? I said before I’ve loved David Mitchell since Cloud Atlas, so I originally found this book while searching for bibliographical scraps. I was in for a major surprise. In the introduction David Mitchell shares how his son has severe autism and he, like many, struggled to identify, relate, and support his child… until he read this book. He then worked with his wife to translate it at the request of friends and the book found a giant Western audience after Jon Stewart trumpeted it on The Daily Show and it hit The New York Times bestseller list. Completely expanded my perception of being human with an entirely new worldview. (Perfect for elementary school teachers, parents of children with special needs, and those with superhero levels of empathy or compassion)

6. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. Completely gripping, poetically written, powerfully provocative novel. I found myself stranded in the Minneapolis airport when I stumbled into a great indie bookstore and found this captivating historical fiction about Japanese “picture brides” shipped to Western California under false pretenses in the early twentieth century to live lives of servitude, neglect, and (very occasionally) beauty. I knew nothing about the background but the book was an eye-and-mind-opener and written in a really unique collective voice. This is one of those “you’ll be hooked in two pages” books. Slapped with all kinds of fancy awards on the back like “Pen/Faulkner Winner for Fiction” and “National Book Award Finalist”, if you’re into that. (Perfect for historical fiction lovers, poets, and native Californians)

5. All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai. I used to edit a weekly comedy paper called Golden Words back at Queen’s University. It was built up over decades by a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from people before me. Elan Mastai was one of those people. He edited it in the 90s and graduated before I arrived but we connected when I became a fan of his Toronto comedy troupe maybe fifteen years back. We then lost touch until earlier this year when we reconnected online and I noticed he got a seven-figure book deal (!) … for his debut novel (!) … which just came out (!) I ordered it right away and it didn’t disappoint. A fast-paced, mindbending time-travel book (There’s even a glowing blurb by Martian author Andy Weir on the back.) The pace of the book goes faster and faster the deeper you go. I can’t recommend it enough. (Perfect for anyone who liked The Martian or Dark Matter, casual readers who like super short Dan-Brown-esque chapters and fast-paced plots, and those who like brain games or puzzles)

4. Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I love books that take place over one school year. Book opens in September, big climax around Christmas, and nicely finishes up just before summer break. I love reliving that roller coaster school calendar feeling from when I was a kid. This book follows that pattern and didn’t disappoint. Auggie is a ten-year-old with a rare facial abnormality who is entering school for the first time. The author pulls a Jaws-like stunt by never quite revealing what he looks like until much later. Sure, bit saccharine, bit over-the-top, but unpredictable enough, with unique storytelling angles, to create a beautiful and funny read I’m already excited to share with my kids in a few years. I may or may not have cried at the end. (Perfect for teenagers, RomCom fans, and anyone who loved The Fault In Our Stars)

3. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Do you remember the feeling of playing Super Mario 3 for the first time? Running through levels feeling overwhelmed and delighted by the smorgasbord of enemies, power-ups, and challenges endlessly scrolling onto the screen. This book gave me that exact feeling and the cover blurb says it best: “Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.” Wild, totally gripping page-turner about a dystopian future with everyone racing through an online treasure hunt packed with 80’s references. (Perfect for gamers, “that guy who doesn’t read anything except magazines and websites”, and anyone who came of age in the 80s.)

2. The Moth Presents… All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing The Unknown. Picture your closest friends going around the red-and-white checkered tablecloth over beers and late night chicken wings sharing their best true stories. That’s The Moth. There’s one from the woman who became David Bowie’s hair stylist. From an African child soldier asked to go to a paintball birthday party in the forest with his new classmates in New York. From an Indian guy standing at his white prom date’s door and being told by her parents they don’t want him in their family photos. The stories are gripping, insightful, addictive, and most of them end without any smarm or Full House-style group laughs … but rather with an honest emotional candid of what life felt like, for that person, at that time. Hard not to laugh or cry along with them. (Perfect for big-hearted souls, budding storytellers or filmmakers, or anyone really into enlightened toilet reading.)

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I was sitting at a bar earlier this year and I started chatting with the guy next to me. The conversation turned to books and we learned we shared a taste for writers like David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami. I got excited and said “So, what’s your favorite novel of all time?” and, you know, it’s a tough question, but he peeled back the top of his shirt and revealed a gigantic tattoo of a tree branch. “What’s that?” I asked. And he said “East of Eden. John Steinbeck. This is a tattoo of the cover of the book.” I didn’t have a moment to really gather the fact that he had a book cover tattooed on his body before the bartender shouted “No way!” She came up to us and pulled up her shirt sleeve and revealed some indecipherable quote. “From East of Eden!” she said excitedly. “I got it on my arm.” I don’t quite remember what my reaction was but I think it was something like “If two random strangers who don’t know each other both have a book permanently tattooed on their body, then I really have to read that book.” I picked it up on my way home and started it as soon as I got home. It blew me away and I was honestly sobbing by the time I read the last page. The book is almost seventy years old but gave me the same feeling as reading a book like The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Long, fast-paced, biographical type narration with three dimensional characters all twisting and tying together over generations with giant themes of fatalism versus free will sitting on top. (Perfect for anyone who loves epics, crisp beautiful writing, and those unafraid at receiving a book the size of a dictionary.)

And as a bonus pick here’s my favorite kid’s book of the year…

The Street Beneath My Feet by Charlotte Guillain and Yuval Zommer. Earlier this year my three-year old was asking “Daddy, what’s under our house?” a lot so my wife Leslie picked up this perfect book to answer his questions. This is a gigantic hardcover that unfolds like an accordion and visually takes you all the way into the center of the Earth on one side of the pages and then back out again on the other. I’ve never seen a book like it. Water pipes, subway trains, archaeological treasures, gold mines, and the layers of the Earth are all explored in a real sumptuous visual feast. Nice to have some non-fiction on the very young reader’s bookshelf, too. (Perfect for curious three year-olds, budding archaeologists, or geography teachers)

Avoid Burnout By Asking This Question

In the late 1990s I began an undergrad business degree program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After nearly flunking Economics 101 and striking out with a majority of sports and teams, I finally found my home among a group of interfaculty misfits at the Golden Words comedy newspaper.

Golden Words was the largest weekly humor newspaper in the country, an Onion-esque paper publishing 25 issues per year, with a new issue every Wednesday during the school year. For the next four years, I spent every Sunday hanging out with a group of people writing articles that made us all laugh. We got together around noon and wrote until the wee hours of Monday morning. I didn’t get paid a cent, but the thrill of creating, laughing, and seeing my work published gave me a great high.

I loved it so much that I took a job working at a New York City comedy writing startup during my last summer of college. I rented an apartment on the Lower East Side and started working in a Brooklyn loft with writers from The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do what I love.”

But it was the worst job of my life.

Instead of having creative freedom to write whatever I wanted, I had to write, say, “800 words about getting dumped” for a client like Cosmopolitan. Instead of joking with friends naturally and finding chemistry writing with certain people, I was scheduled to write with others. Eventually my interest in comedy writing faded, and I decided I would never do it for money again.

When I started writing my blog, 1000 Awesome Things, in 2008, I said I’d never put ads on the website. I knew the ads would feel like work to me, and I worried that I might self-censor or try to appeal to advertisers. No income from the blog meant less time trying to manage the ads and more time focused on the writing, I figured.

I was smart about that…but not smart enough to ignore the other extrinsic motivators that kept showing up: stat counters, website awards, best-seller lists. It was all so visible, so measurable, and so tempting. Over time I found myself obsessing about stat counters breaking 1 million, 10 million, 50 million; about the book based on my blog staying on the best-seller lists for 10 weeks, 100 weeks, 200 weeks; about book sales breaking five figures, six figures, seven figures. The extrinsic motivators never ended, and I was slow to realize that I was burning myself out. I was eating poorly, sleeping rarely, and obsessing about whatever next number there was to obsess about.

I started worrying that the cycle — set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal — would never end. And I started forgetting why I started writing my blog in the first place. I was shaken by how quickly I had gotten caught up in the achievement trap.

Studies show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. The interest we have becomes lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire.

Keep in mind that there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is internal — you’re doing it because you want to. Extrinsic is external — you’re doing it because you get something for it. Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has performed some experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators with college students. She asked the students to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work, and some were not. What happened? Based on scores from independent judges, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work. Amabile said, “It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest.”

And it’s not just getting rewards that hurts quality.
 In another study conducted by Amabile, 72 creative writers at Brandeis University and Boston University were split into three groups of 24 and asked to write poetry. The first group was given extrinsic reasons for doing so — impressing teachers, making money, getting into fancy grad schools. The second group was given a list of intrinsic reasons — enjoying the feeling of expressing themselves, the fun of playing with words. The third group wasn’t given any reason. On the sidelines, Amabile put together a group of a dozen poet-judges, mixed up all the poems, and had the judges evaluate the work. Far and away, the lowest-quality poems were from those who had the list of extrinsic motivators.

James Garbarino, former president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development, was curious about this phenomenon. He conducted a studyof fifth- and sixth-grade girls hired to tutor younger children. Some of the tutors were offered free movie tickets for doing a good job. What happened? The girls who were offered free movie tickets took longer to communicate ideas, got frustrated more easily, and did a worse job than the girls who were given nothing except the feeling of helping someone else.

The Garbarino study raises the question: Do extrinsic motivators affect us differently depending on age? Do we grow into this pattern — and can we grow out of it? According to a recent study by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, we may be hardwired to behave this way. Their work found that if infants as young as 20 months are extrinsically rewarded after helping another infant, they are less likely to help again than infants who received either no reward or simple social praise.

I was surprised by the studies, but they made sense to me. I loved writing for Golden Words. It was a joy, a thrill, a true love. With the paid writing startup in New York City, I lost all my energy and drive.

When you’re doing something for your own reasons, you do more, go further, and perform better. When you don’t feel like you’re competing with others, you compete only with yourself. For example, Professor Edward Deci of the University of Rochester conducted a study where he asked students to solve a puzzle. Some were told they were competing with other students and some were not. You can probably guess what happened. The students who were told they were competing with others simply stopped working once the other kids finished their puzzles, believing themselves to be out of the race. They ran out of reasons to do the puzzle. But those who weren’t told they were competing with others kept going once their peers finished.

Does all this mean you should just rip up your paycheck and work only on things you’re intrinsically motivated to do? No. But you should ask yourself, “Would I do this for free?” If your answer is yes, you’ve found something worth working on. If the answer is no, let paid work remain paid work and keep asking yourself what you would do simply for the pleasure you derive from doing it. Chances are, if you’re working solely for extrinsic reasons such as money, you’re bound to burn out sooner or later.

A slightly modified version of this article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review.

How to Conquer Your Biggest Fears

We’re all scared of something.

Do you get heart palpitations at the idea of speaking in front of big groups at work? Are you worried you’ll never actually learn to swim? Do you stare at the ceiling, thinking you’ll never write that book you’ve been dreaming about for years?

Me, too. I’ve deeply felt all three of those exact fears, along with many others. But those fears are just a few I’ve started overcoming using a little happiness hack I can share with you.

Are you ready?

O.K., to start with, here is the thought process most of us follow when it comes to facing our fears:

CAN DO IT —> WANT TO DO IT —> DO IT

Before you do anything, you have to feel like you can do it first—and then you have to actually want to do it second.

Take my fear of swimming. Developed from a childhood full of ear infections and never-ending sets of tubes, I grew into the 30-year-old guy perpetually hanging by the grill at the pool party. I was afraid of the water. Why? Because “I can’t swim. I’ll sink like a stone! I can’t tread water, jump into the deep end, nothing.” And “You know, I don’t really want to swim anyway. No big deal. I prefer reading at the beach. Getting wet, showering, showing off spaghetti-noodle arms? No thanks. I’ll do without.”

Yes, I never got to do it because I never thought I could do it and so I didn’t want to do it.

It’s the same way many of us think about running a marathon, giving a big presentation or writing a novel.

So what happens if we think about that process in a different order? The same set of words, but said a different way? Specifically, what happens if do it becomes the starting point instead of the end? Well, then it looks like this:

DO IT —> CAN DO IT —> WANT TO DO IT

What happened with my fear of swimming?

Well, I started dating a beautiful woman who I fell in love with, fast. On our second date, she told me her family had a cottage on an island—and every morning in the summer, her little cousins and 80-year-old grandparents swam around the island together. And did I ever want to come?

That night, without thinking about whether I could do it or whether I wanted to do it, I just did it. I signed up for swimming lessons at the city pool. Shortly thereafter, I walked into the moldy locker room and listened to my heart thumping as I stepped onto the pool deck wearing a life jacket and goggles.

After that first 30 minutes of flutter-kicking in the shallow end and wearing a life jacket, guess what happened? I thought, “I can do this!” And so the next week, I wanted to do it. “Give me moldy locker rooms! Pass me the flutter board—in the deep end this time.” And after I had done it one week, I knew I could do it again.

How do you turn your biggest fear into your biggest success?

You place action in front of capability and motivation. You put do it before can do it and want to do it.

Turns out, it’s easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting. Those forced baby steps create the early belief in your abilities, which create the motivation—and a virtuous cycle quickly develops.

So go forward. Step into your fears. Because you’ll quickly see that, completely counter-intuitively, motivation does not actually cause action. Action causes motivation.

How to Add an Hour to a Day with Only One Small Change

I got my first office job in my early twenties.

For four months between school years in college I held the sexy job title of “summer intern” at a big consulting company in a downtown high-rise. Casey was my boss and the head of the project I was assigned to for the summer, which was for one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies.

One Monday morning, I was sitting in his glass-windowed corner office with the rising sun beaming onto the desk between us. More than three months of late-night stress and working on weekends had finally rolled up to right now.

We were minutes away from our big presentation.

Casey’s sense of humor had carried me through all the challenges and Chinese take-out boxes leading up to today, but he had just asked me a last-minute question that made me snap. My nerves were frayed. I had no energy left.

“Why do we have an assumption in here instead of an actual figure?” he asked.

“Because Roger didn’t write back to my three emails asking him for the right number and he never gave us a number where we could call him. I tried his assistant twice and never heard back, either. It’s like he forgot we existed. You know that.”

Roger was the highly touted CEO of the oil and gas company who everybody looked up to. He was highlighted in flashy magazine articles and known as a people leader who espoused work-life balance while nonchalantly beating his numbers every year. Meanwhile, employees at the company told us he ate lunch in the company cafeteria, drove a beat-up truck to work, and had dinner with his kids every night.

The man was a legend.

After our introductory meeting three months back I wrote Roger an email summarizing our meeting and next steps. He didn’t write back. I then took my laptop home every night in case Roger emailed with an urgent question or request. I checked email every half an hour just in case the CEO of the company ever emailed late at night asking for a project update the next morning. Just so if he ever needed something, anything, I’d be there.

But…there was nothing. In three months of working for him he didn’t write me a single email. He didn’t write Casey any emails, either. We dropped a few questions along the way but never heard back. And I had just told Casey my messages to his assistant weren’t returned, either. Now suddenly it was time for our big presentation and Casey was questioning why I didn’t have certain numbers.

I steadied my nerves as we stepped into the boardroom where Roger was sitting and chatting with our company president. He smiled and got up to shake our hands and thank us for the work we’ve done. “I’m so excited,” he said with a big grin. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate how hard you’ve been working. You guys are geniuses. I’m going to learn so much from this chat.”

The anger I felt about his unresponsiveness suddenly melted. I felt like a million bucks.

We jumped into the presentation and had a great discussion. It was casual, engaging, and open. He loved it. And I couldn’t believe how relaxed everything felt. He was talking to us like old friends. After the meeting was done there was so much trust between us. So as we were packing up, I thought about it for a split second, and decided to ask him one last question.

I couldn’t help myself.

“Roger, thanks so much for today. We had trouble checking some numbers by you in advance. And I know we didn’t hear from you on the additional questions we had. So, just for my own learning, can I ask why you don’t write or respond to emails? How do you do that?”

His eyes opened a bit and he seemed surprised by the question. But he wasn’t fazed.

“Neil,” he said, “there’s a problem with email. After you send one the responsibility of it goes away from you and becomes the responsibility of the other person. It’s a hot potato. An email is work given to you by somebody else.”

I nodded, thinking about all the emails I got from Casey and co-workers.“I do read emails, but the ones looking for something are always much less urgent than they seem. When I don’t respond, one of two things happens:

1. The person figures it out on their own, or

2. They email me again because it really was important.

“Sure, I send one or two emails a day but they usually say, ‘Give me a call,’ or, ‘Let’s chat about this.’ Unless they’re from my wife. I answer all of those.”

I was very confused.

How was the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees not emailing?

He paused to look at me and sensed I didn’t get it.

“You know what,” he continued. “Since I don’t write many emails, I don’t receive many either. I probably only get five or ten emails a day.”

Five emails a day? Here I was working at a consulting company writing emails morning, noon, and night. It was the same for everyone. “My inbox has seven hundred emails,” my coworkers would say and sigh. “I did emails all Sunday afternoon.” There was no way around it. After all, our bosses sent urgent emails at 7:00 a.m. Saturday, late Sunday afternoon, or 11:00 p.m. Friday. I knew this was common in my company and others. McKinsey had even reported that office workers spend on average 28% of their time answering email. Almost a third. And Baydin, one of the world’s largest email management services, says the average person gets 147 emails a day. We were all attached to our cell phones and computers, firing emails around, working hard to get everything done. It was part of the job. And we all wanted to do a good job.

Suddenly it started to click why Roger was known to come to have lunch in the cafeteria with employees every day and drive home for dinner with his family every night.

He didn’t respond to hot potatoes.

He didn’t write back to emails and create email chains.

I looked up at Roger again, and he continued.

“Most of the time Neil,” he continued, “people really do figure it out on their own. They realize they know the answer, they keep on moving, they develop confidence for next time. They become better themselves. Your assumptions in the slides today weren’t perfect, but they worked perfectly well and you learned by doing them. Don’t get me wrong. I sometimes walk over to chat with a person or pick up the phone. But if I wrote back to the email, I’d be sending a hot potato. And nobody wants to be asked by the CEO to do something…never mind on an evening or weekend. Why? Because people would drop everything to reply. And they would expect me to reply to that. Basically, if I sent an email, it would never end.

“So I end it.”

How to Protect Your Most Valuable Asset

You have only one brain. And it focuses on only one thing at one time.

Your brain is the most incredible and complex object in the universe. We have never seen anything like it. We barely understand it. We use it, but we don’t know how we use it. When we kick, we pull our leg back and swing it forward. When we think, we just think. As Cliff once said on Cheers, “Interesting little article here.

It says the average human being only uses seventeen percent of his brain. Boy, you realize what that means? We don’t use a full, uh…sixty-four percent.”

Your brain is capable of infinite possibilities: producing great works of art, building businesses, raising children. Brains made The Starry Night and the Great Wall of China. The Beatles and the Bible. Brains made planes, trains, and automobiles. Brains make your life what it is and die when you do. The good news is for no money down, no annual fees, and no monthly interest, you get one free copy of the universe’s most complex and powerful object. It’s yours for life! The only bad news is there is no warranty, it requires daily charging, and even the longest-lasting models in the world last only forty thousand days. (The average model lasts twenty-five thousand days.)

Roger was the smartest guy at the company. No doubt about it. In the years since, he’s gone up and up and up. All while eating lunch in the cafeteria every day and dinner with his family every night. I had worked with Roger only three months when I learned how to add an hour to the day with only one small change.

How?

Block access. Protect your brain. Guard it. Remove all entry points to your brain except a single one you can control. In addition to Roger’s approach to email, I learned later that he didn’t have a desk phone, personal email address, or any social media accounts. Fuel your brain and let it run wild by removing access points. Close the doors and lock the windows, but answer the bell.

What’s the bell? It’s your #1 top priority. What was Roger’s bell? Emails from the chairman of the board and his family. Not voicemail, not texts, not anything else. Have you ever shopped in a small town convenience store where they have a little bell on the front counter? They are busy stocking shelves. They are busy unpacking boxes. They are busy placing orders. But when you ring that bell they are right there, right away. That’s what it means to close the doors and lock the windows but answer the bell.

Let your brain produce great work, savor space, and power your  biggest ideas, most passionate efforts, and greatest accomplishments.

An older version of this article appeared in The Observer

This article is adapted from a chapter in my book The Happiness Equation