Our Book of Awesome Introduction

In my late twenties my wife left me and my best friend took his own life. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I lost forty pounds due to stress. I started going to therapy twice a week, and began a blog to try and cheer myself up. The blog was called 1000 Awesome Things and for the next 1000 straight weekdays I posted a short essay about one small joy in life. 

My mind was dark and many of my attempts were duds—my first awesome thing was broccoflower, the strange mutant hybrid child of nature’s ugliest vegetables—but some posts started finding a nerve. Warm underwear out of the dryer, the smell of bakery air, when cashiers open new checkout lanes at the grocery store, getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, and playing on old, dangerous playground equipment. (Who else remembers burning hot slides?) 

Still, nobody read the blog except for my mom. Although, one day, she forwarded it to my dad and my traffic doubled. And then one day I started getting tens of hits. And then one day I started getting hundreds. And then thousands. And then … millions. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and then I got a phone call and the voice on the other end of the line said, “You just won the Best Blog in the world award!” 

And I said, “That sounds totally fake.” 

But turns out it was real. It was The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and they flew me down to New York City to parade me down a red carpet before handing me the award for “Best Blog” in the world. When I got home to Toronto I found ten literary agents waiting for me in my inbox, eager to turn 1000 Awesome Things into . . . The Book of Awesome. 

The Book of Awesome came out in 2010 and landed on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on international bestseller lists for over two hundred weeks.

Over the next two years a litany of sequels and spin-offs followed: The Book of (Even More) Awesome, The Book of (Holiday) Awesome, The Calendar of Awesome, The Journal of Awesome, The App of Awesome, and on it went. 

The book spawned a pre–social media movement of people mailing in photos of themselves with the book in front of famous landmarks and hundreds of elementary and high schools creating plays, projects, and homemade Books of Awesome based on the concept. I was invited to give a TED Talk, got asked to “teach America to be happy” on the Today show, and was flown to Abu Dhabi to speak to the royal family. 

It was an overwhelming couple of years. Through it all, I was driving to my nine-to-five job at Walmart every day, going to therapy twice a week, and feeling pretty lonely in my tiny bachelor apartment downtown. I also felt destabilized by the newfound visibility and pressure, so two years after The Book of Awesome came out … I stopped. It was painful but I stopped writing the blog, stopped writing sequels, and finally started realizing how depleted I was inside. I knew something was missing.

After hundreds of bad dates over the next couple years, I met and fell in love with a woman named Leslie, an inner-city elementary school teacher in the Toronto public school board. After a year of dating we moved in together, and then a year after that, I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. She said yes. 

Over the next few years, my writing went to new places. After Leslie told me she was pregnant on the flight home from our honeymoon, I started writing a three-hundred-page love letter to our unborn child about how to live a happy life. That letter became The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything. After struggling with overwhelm and mental disorganization I created a daily journal to help myself called Two-Minute Mornings. After getting addicted to social media and late-night scrolling I started a podcast called 3 Books to help me reprioritize reading in my life. And after years suffering with low confidence, low resilience, and thin skin, even despite my perceived success, I wrote a book called You Are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure, and Live an Intentional Life. I continue, or hope to continue, keep exploring other themes under the big question of how we live our most intentional lives. 

So now, more than ten years after The Book of Awesome, why write another? Why return to that old and tired concept? Is this a desperate cash grab? A response to a viral online campaign? A guy completely out of ideas? No, no, and I hope not. 

To be honest, I just . . . needed it. My brain needed awesome things again. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself feeling overwhelmed by a world that seems messed up with algorithm-infused addictions, widening wealth gaps, destabilizing senses of reality, reductions in privacy and freedoms -- all against a backdrop of environmental, political, and mental health turmoil. I have felt raw, fried, chewed up, and spit out, and so I have turned to the medicine that works for me. Finding small pleasures. Writing them down. Focusing on gratitude. Soaking into the endless simple joys we’re surrounded by every day. 

Sure, yes, I know the research: writing down gratitudes improves our mindset, helping us to be positive. But what truly matters is how we feel. The Book of Awesome was never designed to be a prescriptive tool-kit teaching you how to find gratitudes. Rather, it’s meant to bathe us all in a big awesome pool and maybe offer us an awesome lens so we might sharpen the same seeing skills ourselves. 

What makes something awesome? Awesome things might be simple, free, universal, snappy, idiosyncratic, nostalgic, silly, joyous, poignant, or even bittersweet. I have never been writing from a place of mastery -- just one of looking and learning as I go. 

Over the last twelve years I have met so many of you.

On the blog, in a bookstore, at festivals, at conferences -- even just walking down the street. You know who you are. I know who you are. And I really wanted your heart in this book. So I have woven your letters, submissions, comments, and suggestions into this volume so it hopefully climaxes far from where I started to end somewhere in the great beyond. 

My goal is to disappear by the end so that this isn’t my book of awesome or a book of awesome but our book of awesome. I hope it serves your home, classroom, community, or, you know, toilet, and I hope it can be a reminder of just how much we have to be grateful for at the end of the day. 

And now . . .

A deep pool of awesome awaits us.  

So let’s strut confidently onto the pool deck in our Speedos. 

Toss our sunglasses and towels on the beach chairs without breaking stride.

Let’s look at each other … let’s smile … let’s nod

And let’s start running and jump in

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