In this episode, Neil Pasricha explores the idea of unlocking every day awesome and how to find joy in the ordinary. Neil delves into the challenges of living in a mindset focused on problem-solving and the importance of recognizing the small joys in life. Neil emphasizes how appreciating simple pleasures—such as the sound of birds, the taste of coffee, or the feel of warm laundry—can help us break free from the cycle of constant task management. He shares practical tools for reclaiming our attention from distractions and encourages listeners to find happiness in the present moment.
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding the importance of self-care in a world filled with distractions
- Being mindfully aware and finding small joys to learn to appreciate the present moment
- Engaging in gratitude practices, like writing down specific moments of appreciation, to enhance well-being
- Embracing the role of new experiences to foster personal growth and learning
- Learning to shift focus from what we lack to what we have to shift perspective and cultivate a mindset of appreciation
Connect with Neil Pasricha: Website | Instagram | X | YouTube | Neil’s Dashboard
Neil Pasricha thinks, writes, and speaks about intentional living. He is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation, which together have spent over 200 weeks on bestseller lists and have sold over a million copies. He hosts the award-winning podcast 3 Books, where he’s on a fifteen-year quest to uncover the 1000 most formative books in the world by interviewing people such as Malcolm Gladwell, Judy Blume, and the world’s top-ranked Uber driver. He gives more than fifty speeches a year, appearing for audiences at places such as Harvard, SXSW, and Shopify. His latest book is called “Our Book of Awesome: A Celebration of the Small Joys That Bring Us Together”
If you enjoyed this episode with Neil Pasricha, check out these other episodes:
How Relationships Shape Our Happiness and Well-Being with Robert Waldinger
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer
Do you ever feel like life is just a series of problems to solve? The constant hum of what’s next, planning, fixing, optimizing, it can take over and before you know it, the moments of your life just become tasks to manage. I’ve been there, still am there a lot of the time, and I know how hard it is to break free from that mindset. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Neil Pasricha, best-selling author of The Book of Awesome, to talk about how focusing on small joys, like the sound of birds, the taste of coffee, or the feel of warm laundry, can help us step out of that loop. Neil shares practical tools for reclaiming our attention from distractions and finding happiness in the present moment. If you’ve ever felt too busy solving life to actually live it, this conversation is for you. Stick around and let’s explore how to start seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Hi, Neil. Welcome to the show.
Neil Pasricha
Thank you so much for having me, Eric. It’s good to be back.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it is a pleasure to have you on. We’re going to be talking about your latest book called Our Book of Awesome, a celebration of the small joys that bring us together and any other miscellaneous things that we come up with. But before we do that, let’s start like we always do with the parable. You’ll get another cut at it. I think it’s this time, number three, maybe, but it changes for people, interestingly, over the years. So in the parable, there’s a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do?
Neil Pasricha
Today, the message I get from the parable, honestly, is all about self-care. I feel like we are living in a time today, Eric, where it is more and more difficult to focus on taking care of ourselves. I think the algorithm-derived, addictive technologies that we surround ourselves with, that we sleep beside, that we wake up beside, that we touch thousands of times a day, constantly pull us away from things that we know to be true, to be good for us. like walking in nature, like deep restful sleep, like time with friends and family without our cell phones. And so when I hear the parable, all I think about is, focus on the things that matter so that I can live life feeding the good wolf, the wolf of love, you know, away from all the things that the world is always trying to suck us into.
Eric Zimmer
So that gives us a place we might as well just jump in, which is you have some fairly strong positions on cell phone use. Here’s my question. Everything you say, I think I agree with, everybody agrees with, right? We all know this isn’t the most helpful thing. We also know that the genie is kind of out of a bottle, so to speak. right? We as a society don’t tend to go backwards technically. So is it really for you is the focus is on how do we use these tools intelligently and wisely?
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s three problems with cell phones, Eric. They start with the letter P. First one is psychological. I think we can’t overestimate this one. You know, when I was a kid, I could be the best basketball player on my high school team. It was feasible for me to do so. Now somebody’s on YouTube throwing free throws with a blindfold on behind their back from half court. And no matter what it is, he can’t be the best at it anymore. You’re always a loser on the internet. And I think no wonder we’re seeing higher than ever rates of anxiety. One in three college students have clinical anxiety. Dr. Gene Twenge at San Diego State University says that we’ve never seen anxiety rates this this high. Jonathan Haidt at NYU is saying the same thing. So let’s just be really aware of how psychological inferior we often feel online. Second P is physical. You know what, when you look at a bright screen within an hour of bedtime, you don’t produce as much melatonin. Blame your pineal gland for that one, but evolutionary biologists are now saying, you know what, actually when you turn off a bright screen, you get a boost of energy. If you, like me, ever turn your phone off right before going to bed, don’t you feel like it’s time to like, you know, get the cave set up and build a fire, right? That’s what primally is in us. So there’s a huge, huge physical issue. And then, The third one is productivity. I think that right now, when you look at the phones, and they keep getting more and more gamified, right? Things flying in, flying out, everything’s got a little number in the corner to hook your attention. We all know what hooks us now. What’s happening is, you know, we’re spending more and more of our time, some reports are saying it’s 31% of our time now, bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks. So is the genie out of the bottle? Yes, it absolutely is. But are there simple tools and behaviors we can do to control it? I think there are, and I think, honestly, Not very many of us are doing these things. I’ll tell you right now, I’m talking to you from my basement. You know what else is down in my basement, Eric? My cell phone charger. It lives in my furnace room, the most disgusting cobweb-filled room of my house. And by leaving my charger in this room, I’m forced to take a 20-second walk from here to my bedroom, and that prevents me from sending that email I’m gonna regret the next morning, or quickly, low-resilience me grabbing my phone in the morning. So the first thing I think we need to do is we got to get the phone out of the bedroom. When I do polls right now, I’ll tell you 95% of people are sleeping with their cell phone beside them. And what are they doing before bed? Checking their phone. What are they doing when they wake up in the morning? Checking their phone. Look, if we’re doing this with a bottle of wine, we’d have no problem saying you’re an alcoholic. But right now, we don’t have this phonoholic term in society. We think it’s just normal. So first thing we need to do is get the phone out of the bedroom. And if you want to go deep on it, I have a morning practice that I use to fill in the anxious tendency. My brain wants to grip something and grab something when I wake up.
Eric Zimmer
We may get to that. It’s interesting. This phone in the morning thing, it is a plague that I fight back and I am successful with for a while. And then somehow there I am. I’m like, how has this happened again? Where like I’m checking my email first thing in the morning. So then I go through the whole process of trying to get it out. You know, I think that’s a lot the way ubiquitous things that are around us all the time are like that. It’s why, you know, if you didn’t want to smoke cigarettes, you would get rid of them completely. It makes it easier than having cigarettes that you smoke some of the time. I think you’re right. We need the distance if we can get it. I mean, the cardinal rule of good and bad habits is if you want to do something positive, make it as easy as possible to do it. And if you don’t want to do something negative, make it as hard as possible to do it, right? Like give yourself those things. So putting it out of the bedroom certainly means you can’t get to it. I mean, I know people who lock their phone in one of those, you know, little boxes that has a timer on it.
Neil Pasricha
Phone cell. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a website, phonecell.me, P-H-O-N-E-C-E-L-L.me, if people are interested, like $100 glass case, you can put your phone in and set the timer. Yep. The two biggest barriers I hear on the cell phone bedroom thing are number one, it’s my alarm clock. And I always say, have you heard of Walmart? Like, can you go buy a $10 alarm clock? But even to this point now, I actually travel now with a little white box alarm clock because I notice hotel rooms are taking them out of the rooms. Right? Because they’re just so used to people sleeping beside them. And the second thing I say is get a landline. Get a landline. The phone companies are desperate to sell you one. They cost $10 a month because no one wants one. But you give that phone number to your emergency people and the idea that they can reach you in an emergency relieves you of the obligation of leaving that phone next to you with everything else that’s got in it.
Eric Zimmer
Those are wise tips. There’s lots of places to go here, but I would love to start with, let’s just hit the new book for a few minutes because that’s the, it’s the top thing on the list. And then I’ve got, I’ve got lots of other things we can go through. So the new book is called our book of awesome, a celebration of the small joys that bring us together. You’ve got previous books around awesomeness. Why this one and what’s different about it.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, absolutely. So more than 10 years ago, my wife left me, my best friend took his own life. And I started a blog called 1000 awesome things as a way to cheer me up, right. So from 2008 to 2012, I wrote one awesome thing every single day as a journaling practice to try to focus on the positive. I wrote about flipping to the cold side of the pillow. I wrote about wearing warm underwear from out of the dryer. I wrote about playing with old dangerous playground equipment, right? If you’re listening and you remember hot slides and falling into cigarette butts, you know what I’m talking about. The blog hit nobody at first, then my mom, then my dad, and my traffic doubled. It got really big, it got really popular, and it turned into this book that came out in 2010 called The Book of Awesome. The Book of Awesome came out, Eric, and it became my life for a few years, all these sequels and spinoffs and so on. And then for about a decade, I didn’t write those books. I felt like I was getting pigeonholed, the Krusty the Clown imitation gruel clip from The Simpsons flashed back through my head. I got to focus on other things and I was also working a full-time job at Walmart at the time. So I started focusing on exploring happiness and exploring resilience and now I’m exploring trust these days. Other big terms under this umbrella of how we live our most intentional life. So the kind of why this book, Why Now? Honestly, the last two years of the pandemic have completely beat me up. I have felt tired, anxious, overwhelmed. I have felt symptoms of depression. I felt a lot of symptoms of stress. And so I started again. I started writing an awesome thing a day again, as a way to cultivate a positive mindset. We know from research from Emmons and McCullough that if you can write down 10 things you’re grateful for a week, They compared it to test groups who wrote down hassles and test groups who wrote down events. Then after a 10-week period, you’re not just happier like you may expect, you’re also physically healthier, which is incredible. If you think this is a bicep curl, I’m flexing on screen here for those who are listening, then gratitude turns out to be a pretty powerful brain curl. because we got something in our brain called our visual cortex. There’s an area in there called area 17. And when you talk about wearing that warm underwear from the dryer, or you write it down, or you share it with a friend, it jogs the memory in your mind, right? So why did I write our book of awesome for the first time in a decade, I’m looking to try to jolt the world back into a feeling of general positivity when I feel like outside of the one you feed, which is endless positivity, you know, all these great positive. For the most part, when I look inside, it’s pretty negative. So this is just, you know, a 400-page hardcover book full of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of new awesome things.
Eric Zimmer
And some of them, the R part of the book, O-U-R, not A-R-E, O-U-R, is that you took submissions from your community also, of things that they loved.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, you know, it’s funny, in the book of awesome at the very back page, I put like, if you have your own awesome suggestion, you know, send it to this email address. And hadn’t checked that email address in years, but there were over 10,000 people who had submitted essays 10,000. Right. And some of them were like, here’s what we’ve done in my classroom. Here’s what we’ve done. you know, and I’ve got these letters over the years. I’m like, why don’t we stitch these together so that the book feels like something we are talking about as people? And so I also, to that point, tried to take myself out of it as best as I could. I put Neil Pasricha and friends on the cover. I took out the photo. I took out the about the author. I took out the dedication. I took out the acknowledgments. At the end of the book, what happens is, if I did it right, it culminates in this sort of like cacophony of awesome from around the world where these this voice gets louder and louder and it’s everybody from around the world screaming and sharing positive things and So the last 10 20 pages of the book are literally just fade to black with smaller and smaller awesome things You know, I’m trying to sort of make it feel like you’re flying out to outer space But just surrounded by lots of simple pleasures because to me that is certainly the dose I need you know right now when I look at the news when I look at doom scroll on social media and on.
Eric Zimmer
So is writing down awesome things just a particular form of gratitude? Is that really what it is? Or do you see it differently?
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, you know, we’re not alive very long, right? At the end of the day, it feels long when we’re in it. But the average person is only alive for about 30,000 days right now. That’s like the North American number. It’s about 5000 days less than as a global average. So we’re alive for 30,000 days. And then a given day, we are awake for about 1000 minutes. You start doing the math, Eric, and it starts to feel shorter and shorter. To me, what we feel like we’re playing for, what the greeting card industry is oriented around, there’s the baby industry, there’s the wedding industry, we orient our industries in capitalism around these big major life moments, right? The day you walk across the graduation stage, well, that’s a whole industry, that’s a whole season, that’s a whole event, right? You know this. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation. And then we’ve got when you get married, right? Then when you have a kid. And what I think we’re missing from this cultural focus on the big things is how many simple things you have in your day that if you just take an extra second to watch that swirl of cream dissolve into coffee, You know, those little almost micro-mindfulness moments, to use a phrase I’ve never used before, but it sounded pretty good. The three M’s. The three M’s, yeah. They awaken you to how joyful life really is. And I say this as someone who has a tendency towards anxiety. I say this as someone who has a tendency towards feeling overwhelmed and stressed a lot. When I’m writing awesome things, when I’m reading awesome things, they have a pacifying quality that just sort of like reconnects me to the wider delight of consciousness. It reconnects me to the wider appreciation for what this is. We don’t know what it is, man, right? We don’t know what this is. But if we can be like, oh yeah, the sound of the wind whispering through the trees. Or something as funny or simple as texting your husband to do something when he’s upstairs and you’re downstairs. I wrote that one in the book when my wife texted me to bring down the laundry. I’m like, wow, that’s hilarious. How funny is this moment? I remember seeing those vacuum chute tubes at the side of office buildings when I was a kid. I’m like, the future has arrived. Is it just gratitude? Yeah, and that is the research there, but if you want to layer in other research, we could talk about Slatcher and Pennebaker at the University of Texas doing all the research on journaling. Perhaps it’s a journaling practice, right? We could talk about all the research on mindfulness, on sort of living in the present moment. Perhaps there’s some of that, just pausing on things that typically take a microsecond. So I think You know, separate from all the research studies, there’s just something about it. There’s just something that’s silly and joyful and fun, makes me feel good, and hopefully it makes others feel the same way.
Eric Zimmer
I like it because we’ve talked about gratitude on this show countless times. It is one of the biggest effects in the positive psychology world. When people look at what has the strongest effect, gratitude and kindness to others, you know, they just stand out as these extraordinarily positive interventions. However, gratitude can become very dry and dull if it’s just, what am I grateful that I have? I mean, that’s good to be. Like, it’s good to be grateful that I have a house over my head. It’s good to be grateful that I have a wonderful partner. It’s good to be grateful that I get to do this amazing work. And I am, and I do reflect those things. However, for me, I do need also, as you said, to be looking for those little moments. The word I often use, and you used it somewhere in there, is appreciation. Yeah, you know, can I just find little things to appreciate throughout the day?
Neil Pasricha
And emphasis on little, like little, little. Yeah. Like really little, you know? Like when your kids don’t hear you opening a bag of potato chips, right? That’s what I put in the book. or sending a private message during the video conference and seeing your co-worker look down and silently smirk. You know, that one got… I liked that one. I liked that one. Right? When the cake plops flawlessly out of the pan. Part of it to me, Eric, is remembering that they got to be specific, right? So, you know, writing down my husband, my kid, my dog, that ain’t gonna cut it. It’s when my husband, Eric, put the toilet seat down, right? When… Always happens. When our five-year-old daughter started writing her name out. When the rescue puppy we got during the pandemic stopped peeing on the pillows. So just something be really specific. And I think a way to integrate this into your life is, I know you talk about gratitude a lot, but there’s a game that my wife, Leslie, and I play with our kids at dinner almost every night called Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud. We force our family, and it’s hard at first, and nobody wants to do it. It feels clunky and awkward to just say, hey, what was your rose from the day? The rose is the awesome thing. The rose is the gratitude. When you force it to be from today only, your mind has a very limited time frame to sort through, and it picks out something small or sweet. Hey, there’s a new donut at the coffee shop, or the crossing guard remembered my name, or I got a B plus on my math test, whatever. You do it again, that’s the second rose. Then you make space for a thorn. And I think this is missing from a lot of the gratitude practices we have in society. You got to have a place to vent. And so what we try to do is just say to the kids, oh, that sucks. Just that’s it. You don’t try to solve the problem. Just hear the thorn. And then finally, a bud. It’s a nice way to end. That’s B-U-D, which is something you are looking forward to.
Eric Zimmer
And that- Not something that you are smoking with your children. Just for my stoner listeners, I want to clarify what we’re talking about here.
Neil Pasricha
Rose, rose, thorn, bud, a simple dinner time, dinner table practice, or you can do it with your partner at bedtime, whatever, to get the gratitude or the awesome thing kind of into the conversation in a way where it doesn’t feel like you were mentioning, you know, sort of dry or repetitive, right? Now you’re forced to think of one each day at dinner.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, and I think that practice, any of these practices, right, there’s different ways of doing them, but they get us looking for the positive. It’s like when I went through a period where I was like, I’m going to take a picture every day, which meant that I was looking for something beautiful all the time. not just the one moment I took the picture, that oriented the way I went through the world. And it’s the same way if we’re looking for what we appreciate, we’re just naturally going to notice more things than if we’re just kind of on autopilot.
Neil Pasricha
Have you been hearing all of this new research coming out on just the idea of expanding or dilating your pupils, sort of consciously expanding your vision to that idea of seeing wider vistas because it relaxes you? Have you been following all of that, Andrew Huberman and so on?
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I’ve been following it and what’s interesting is that my primary spiritual practice is Zen and that is a very old Zen technique. I mean that has been thousands of years through the Zen, well I wouldn’t say thousands, a thousand years at least in the Zen tradition has had that as a practice. So it’s been really interesting to see it sort of show up in the scientific literature. Yeah, I think it’s amazing.
Neil Pasricha
It’s amazing how much scientific literature just tells us what our grandma told us. It’s like, why do I have to quote research about gratitudes and journaling and all this? Because that’s what makes people agree that it’s worth it, right? It just feels good. It’s just the right way to do it. Not everything needs science behind it, but yeah, the science convinces us that it’s the right thing to do.
Eric Zimmer
Absolutely. Yeah, we are oriented that way. I’ve always said that I love it when there’s like different points of support. So like if I read scientifically, okay, this thing is good. And then I can also see it in wisdom traditions that have been around for, you know, thousands of years. Then I’m like, okay, good. And then if I actually then have done it in my life and seen it to be good, then it’s like, I’ve got sort of the triple crown there. And I’m like… Proof point trifecta. Yeah. The proof point trifecta. Yes. And I love that Rose Rose, Bud, Thorne. I think you also are doing a Hilo Buffalo with your kids now.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, if the kids protest Rose, Rose, Thorn, bud, and they sometimes do, because again, like I said, no one wants to play at the beginning, but you can’t go around the dinner table and say, say roses without people feeling good about it. So the ending of, it’s like a workout. You feel good when it’s over. You got to hold on to that thought at the beginning. But if they protest, we say, okay, how about High Low Buffalo? And suddenly they’re interested. Well, guess what? The first two things are the same, right? High is an awesome thing, a rose, a gratitude, a highlight. Low is the same as a thorn. Buffalo is something weird that happened during your day. Just something funny, something strange, an aha, a strange encounter, a little anecdote. And those end up being, you know, what people look forward to sharing and hearing.
Eric Zimmer
Oh, I’m sure.
Neil Pasricha
How old are your kids? Well, Leslie and I have four boys under eight years old.
Eric Zimmer
Oh, it must be spectacular Buffalo world.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, they often relate to candy, weather, splashing, you know, like random stuff. But it’s beautiful. I know during those loud, chaotic, crazy moments when I can feel my overwhelm rising, I’m just like, I’m going to miss this. I got to enjoy this. There’s only a few years when they’re going to be this small. So we’re in those years right now.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah, if I were in your shoes, I would be writing some of those Buffalo things down because my son, I thought, I’ll never forget the things he said. And of course I have forgotten the things he said when he was little. I mean, I remember a couple of them, but not the vast majority of them. That’s just the way my brain works.
Neil Pasricha
You’re right, and actually this reminds me of a wonderful gift we got that I might share with your listeners as well. When we sent out our birth announcement, which is in the form of an email to our friends and family, a couple, Martin and Farah, who we’re friends with, they took a line from our own birth announcement and got it printed on a hardcover blank white book with the name of the baby on the front and just lines in between. And they mailed it to us with a story saying, we’ve kept a book like this with our son, who’s now 16 years old, of the funny and interesting things he said. Well, of course, we started doing that, especially on the first kid, right, Eric? And then every subsequent birth announcement, they’ve done the same thing. And so we wouldn’t have done it for ourselves. We just wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making a book with our kid’s name on the front. But because we have those books, we now leave them in conspicuous locations, and the quote gets written in there right away. I, in an ideal world, we miss stuff all the time, but it’s a nice, you know, similar to the memory box idea that some people keep for their kids in their closet or an inbox that you send you BCC emails to for years and then you eventually give them the password, right? I think I stole that from a Google commercial. But, you know, there’s these ways to kind of create future memories for kids and for yourself, which are kind of beautiful.
Eric Zimmer
Absolutely. All right. Let’s turn to your podcast, which is called Three Books. And so what you do is, well, I’ll just let you tell people what you do. I don’t need to tell them. You tell them.
Neil Pasricha
Okay.
Eric Zimmer
What’s Three Books?
Neil Pasricha
So I have been obsessed with this number 1,000 for a very long time. I started a blog called 1,000 Awesome Things, as you know, and I talked about how we’re awake for a thousand minutes a day. And I mentioned 35,000 days. Guess what? That’s also a thousand months. Like, you know, you’re alive for a thousand months. So I started feeling this number of thousands is a really important number. It’s bigger than a small goal and smaller than a huge goal, right? And so in 2018, I decided that as one of the methods to force myself to read more, I introduced a number of systems in my life, Eric. You know, moving the TV to the basement, putting a bookshelf at the front door, Canceling my subscription to the two newspapers I was getting, and that includes news sites, right, online. Little systems, little systems, little systems. One of the systems was starting a podcast dedicated to uncovering the 1,000 most formative books in the world. It was partly inspired by the fact that I was endlessly frustrated with the, I think the algorithms are terrible when it comes to book recommendations. I think Amazon back in the day used to be pretty good, and now when it’s all sponsored and ad-driven, you know, you don’t actually get stuff that is related to the bookery and they can’t get off the money that they make from those sponsorships. So now you don’t get good book recommendations. So what I’m doing on my podcast, Three Books, is I’m spending almost 15 years sitting down with 333 inspiring people, which is including Eric Zimmer on an upcoming chapter. and asking them which three books most changed your life. So you give me your books, Eric, I buy the books, I read the books, that’s my goal, and then I sit down with you and I talk about the themes from those books, okay? So I am skewing everywhere from Quentin Tarantino, Judy Blume, Brené Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, to Uber drivers I had, Variety Store owners at the corner of my street, and people I meet on the back of the bus. I mean, I’m trying to get as best I can a cross section of people with the only common characteristic is, and they like books. If you like books, you like reading, let’s talk about which three shaped you. And that’s the whole idea behind it.
Eric Zimmer
So I can’t help but ask you, what are three of your formative books? Maybe you’ve already been asked this, probably, because it’s an obvious question and you have them. If you haven’t, then you can just pick three important books to you.
Neil Pasricha
No, no. I always joke that that’s going to be the very last chapter of the show, because it buys me time till 2031, when the last chapter of three books actually airs. And I call them chapters, right, instead of episodes, just to be bookish. But truthfully, I’ll share a few with you for sure. The Babysitter’s Club Treasuries. When I was a kid, I read outside of my gender, I’m using quotation marks because I crossed over to my sister’s bookshelf, and I found the idea that this woman, Ann M. Martin, could write a book from five different girls’ perspectives where they alternated by chapter totally fascinating. It exposed me to the concept of voice. in a book and the idea that a really good author could sort of remove themselves and enter into different perspectives. So, why do I mention that? Well, because our Book of Awesome is written in a very different voice than You Are Awesome. I know the titles sound the same, but You Are Awesome is my book about resilience that came out two years ago, and that’s a little bit more of like research-based. Here’s some theories on resilience. That’s a different voice. And I’m not as good as her, but just the idea that I could be different people under the guise of letters was a very formative discovery for me. That’s one. Another one is The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, nonfiction, behavioral economics. If I could boil down what that book taught me is the world is chaos, random, and unpredictable. So your best bet is actually to put a chip on every single number on the roulette wheel and give it a spin. Why does Neil Passariccia have a blog called Neil.blog, a speaking business? I’m giving speeches. I’m writing books. I’m doing podcasts. In a way, Eric, what I’m really doing is just constantly trying new things. As Seth Godin once said, I’m a big fan of poof. Think somebody asked him why he starts and quits so many projects? Well, this is the black swan theory. Expose yourself to as many opportunities as possible because you don’t know which one’s gonna take off. And when one does, you can then increase your personal resources onto that one with very, very little trade-off costs. It’s an important formative book to me because it constantly reminds me to try new things and not be too hung up on the outcomes because truthfully, I can’t control them that well. You know? I just can’t. And so, this book reminds me that the world is chaos and random, you know, written by someone way smarter than me, you know? So, it sort of relaxes me into thinking, okay, I’ll do what I can, but the most important thing is to try new things. One other metaphorical takeaway from this is go to parties where you don’t know anyone. It’s the same idea. Expose yourself to places and situations where you’re more likely to learn a lot, but you’re less likely to know a lot.
Eric Zimmer
We’ll get to your third book in a second, but you’ve got something on your personal dashboard, which is to do some new experience every month. I also noticed you have something called Neil’s Night Out each week, which is something I’ve started post pandemic, which is. at least one night a week, I have to get out and do something. It doesn’t matter what it is, but I have to be out and about. And ideally it’d be with a friend because I just realized like I’d gotten comfortable being at home. And if I don’t actually make a specific point of it, it doesn’t happen that often. It’s amazing to me. I think some of that’s age maybe, but I share your basic thing of like, how do I get a little bit of new experience into my life on a consistent basis?
Neil Pasricha
Absolutely 100%. And so you know, this this little monthly dashboard that I draw is just a way for me to constantly like right size where I’m going. The top two boxes are called strong core business and fastest learning and they have things on them like you know, give four speeches, write one chapter of a book, write one article, and things like read eight books a month, have one new experience. The bottom is self care, self care for my family. Number of nights away is usually four or less per month, number of dinners at home, and number of nights out. That’s what you’re talking about. Eric’s night out, Neil’s night out. I force myself to go. Also important to introduce new stories into the relationships. I find, as Leslie and I have now been married for almost nine years, our tendency is to have all these experiences together, but when I go out or when she goes out, you come back with new energy. a new person you met, a new person you saw, etc. And then the bottom right quadrant is taking care of myself. This one’s often red, but it’s like number of workouts, number of cardio experiences, and so on. Why do I do those two things? Well, the Neil’s night off and Leslie’s night off, Leslie’s my wife, LNO is her night off, they pay for each other. That’s really an important point. So when you have lots of kids or a little kid or whatever at home, you got responsibilities. Me taking off for a night is guilt ridden, right? I’m leaving her alone with the babies. But because she’s got a night off three days from now, they pay for each other. You don’t feel bad because she’s got one coming. And on my night off, I’m happy to have no plan. I’ll just go on a really long walk. I believe in the Jane Jacobs philosophy, and we live in downtown Toronto. The urban center offers something other places cannot, namely the strange. I end up talking to a lot of people living outside or in the late night bookstores or on the street and I’ll tell you, I learn more from those conversations than anything else. It just puts me in constant situations and oftentimes it makes me feel very, very lucky, right? Just to have a roof over my head and so on. So I try to get out. Tonight I’m going to a techno concert at an underground bar that somebody invited me to online, okay? Awesome. I don’t know anything about any of those words I just said, but I’m sure something interesting will happen. And if not, that’s a learning tale. So I do those things. And the one weird growth opportunities, it’s like pushing myself to do something out of my comfort zone each month.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah. So this techno event would count in that, right? Because it’s something you would never do.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah. Yeah. It’s not perfect. The point of this dashboard is just to kind of right size my ship. Not everything’s always green. I use this the way say, Oh, next month, I need to invest a bit more in self care or, oh, you know, next month, I need to read a bit more because I didn’t really read many books this month or whatever.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I really like the idea. It’s very simple. We’ll put a link in the show notes to where there’s an article about it. People can see this. I have a couple questions about it though. Question one is, do the four quadrants ever change? Are they always the same? And then do the things in the quadrants change?
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, and just to say, I stole this idea of doing this box from David Cheesewright. David Cheesewright was my boss when I worked at Walmart. He was the president and CEO of the company, and he drew this model as the strategy for the organization. Now, it’s kind of weird to use an organizational strategy template as mine, but I really like the philosophy underpinning it, which is in the center, he wrote, We save people money so they can live better. Well, that was the Walmart purpose, or is the Walmart purpose. I no longer work there as I’m kind of doing this artistic stuff like you full-time. But in the center, I advise people to put your icky guy, right? This is a word we talked about in our last conversation. I-K-I-G-E-I. The reason you get up out of bed in the morning. So I write down now, you know, helping people live happy lives, or figuring out how to live an intentional life myself and sharing that with the world or whatever that is. Put that in the center. That’s gonna be your kind of north star. The top two boxes I mentioned, which I call strong core business and fastest learning, are what I do. The principle underpinning those two are what I do. Right? And you should revisit and wrestle and change and examine, right? Otherwise, that means you’re kind of static. So I do change and tweak those things all the time. And I also might be, I think it was like six speeches a month, but then I had one kid and it was five speeches a month. Then I had two kids and it was four speeches. You see what I mean? So I’m like, I’m changing this whole thing in accordance with my life situation. Those are the top two boxes. The bottom two boxes are how I do it. They’re the energy source. That’s why it’s best family and best self. Because if I’m not properly investing in those dinners at home, those nights at home, those workouts, those meditations, I don’t have the headspace and the energy to be able to do the stuff on the top. And so yes, to answer your question, the words and specific bullet points can change. But what doesn’t change is the high level design of the dashboard. Icky guy in the center, what you do on the top, how you did on the bottom. Got it. I feel a bit funny describing all this verbally. So yeah, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, what is he talking about? Do check out the show notes where I actually show a graphical interpretation of this dashboard so people can actually see it.
Eric Zimmer
Yep. All right. We got through two books. I don’t think we got to the third.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, and I’m picking not the three most formative but three formative books. The other one I’d really want to suggest is On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. It’s less of a book than it is a 2,000-year-old letter written by Stoic philosopher Seneca. It’s about 20 pages long. There’s something about this letter, Eric. I don’t know if you’ve read it or not.
Eric Zimmer
I have at some point in the past, yes.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, it’s a really, really thin. They made a Penguin Classics version of it, which is out of print, but you can still get online. And that’s also if you buy letters from a stoic by Seneca, it’s one of those letters. I keep a copy of this in my suitcases all times. I find it incredibly grounding and centering and stress relieving because here’s a guy 2,000 years ago, which is, and it’s written like an email from your buddy. Like it just sounds like, I know it must be the translation, but it just sounds so current. It sounds fresh. And he’s essentially arguing that life is long if you know how to live it. In a lot of ways, it’s an argument towards saying no to lots and lots and lots of things so that you can say hell yeah to the ones that really matter to you. And it’s a grounding and a remembering force to me to be a little more kind to myself and a little bit more selfish about what I say yes and no to. Why do I travel with it? Why do I travel with the same book in my suitcase? Because I find that when I land in hotels and random city in a random time zone in a random place, I’m stressed. And so I have two things in my suitcase at all times for that. One is On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and two is a lacrosse ball. So that I can rub my back and rub my arms out on the wall of the hotel and then parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and I fall asleep.
Eric Zimmer
Perfect. So now I’m going to flip the question a little bit and ask about a couple books that you have heard from others. Yeah. You know, people who came on your show said, this is a really formative book. A couple of those that turned out to be really meaningful to you. And again, I’m not going to ask you to pick the most meaningful or anything, because I hate when anybody asks me like, what’s your favorite podcast episode? I’m like, I don’t know, but just any that come to mind.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so which books have people mentioned on the show that have been really formative to me once I read them? You know what’s interesting is they’re often books I’ve completely never heard of. So this is one thing that just surprises me, although it shouldn’t, is that people are always suggesting books I’ve just never heard of. It’s completely formative to them, I’ve never come across it, right? So, I interviewed Shane Parrish back in Chapter 60 of Three Books. He’s the guy that runs Farnham Street. For people that don’t know, this is a wonderful self-improvement page. It’s fs.blog. I can’t recommend it enough. He tipped me off to the book called Poor Charlie’s Almanac by Charles T. Munger. Have you heard of it?
Eric Zimmer
I have. I have. I know that book and some of the wisdom from it. It’s kind of remarkable.
Neil Pasricha
It’s a remarkable book. This guy is still alive. He’s in his mid to late 90s. Co-founded Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett. In a way, he’s kind of the, I guess, the quieter of the two of them or the less well-known, but he’s essentially amalgamated in a very, very large, thick book. all of its sort of mental models, life advice, commencement speeches, and all these things. It’s just a trove of wisdom. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book. Poor Charlie’s Almanac by Charles T. Munger, one of the few books that you can go online, there are thousands of five-star reviews, and again, never heard of the thing. Another one that has been recommended to me recently. I interviewed the filmmakers Daniels. You know, they did that movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, which it came out right at the end of the pandemic, or not that the pandemic’s over, but you know, spring 2022, let’s say, and you know, it made like 40, 50 million at the box office, which was remarkable considering how few people were going to the movie theaters. Yeah. And I think we’re going to hear about it a lot more as we get into Oscar season, because this movie is just really revolutionary in terms of how it was made and what it’s about. But they tipped me off to a book called Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Kasilda Jathop. Again, a book I’d never heard of. And the reason they picked it was because essentially the moors of society are shifting rapidly when it comes to sexuality. And for years growing up, Eric, I have felt like inside myself. My feelings about sexuality have often been folded in with feelings of guilt and with shame and with all kinds of other emotions that are largely negative. This book really helped me shirk a lot of those things I had been historically layering on and feel more accepting of myself for the places that my mind goes when it comes to sex and exposes a lot of the evolutionary reasons why some of those thinking things might happen. It is especially a good book to read for those people that may be curious, interested, or in a poly or non-monogamous relationship, which is not the case with me. I am in a monogamous relationship with my wife. However, the conversations it spurred with my wife and I were remarkable and transparent and, I think, enabled by this wonderful book. I would not have expected at the start of this podcast to be going on the record and saying Sex at Dawn is a great book, but I just think it’s so underrated that people don’t share it because of the content. Thank you to Daniels because they had the courage to, you know, want to talk about it and to explore how we think about sex in our society. And for those that have seen Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, you know that that movie also has jarring explorations of sexuality. But we need to get sex out of the closet more, especially in regards to getting rid of some of the shame and guilt, if you, like me, feel around it. Around the things that you think, the things that you desire, the things that you may have felt or experienced, or even things around your body and how your body looks and how it works and why it… There’s a lot in that book. It’s essentially a history of sex through an evolutionary perspective. Awesome. Wonderful read. Got one more? Yeah, sure. You want me to keep going? Yeah, I love this. This is really fun for me, too. I interviewed the slam poet in Q, and he recommended that I read Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. Such a good you know that book. I do that is you know, but most people don’t I didn’t that Cheryl strayed pre-wild Yeah, so, you know, she wrote this famous book wild it turned into the movie with Reese Witherspoon That’s kind of that up that’s it up. Boom, right like a big big thing but before that she wrote an anonymous column and nobody knows her and She was called Sugar, right, for an online and maybe in print literary magazine called The Rumpus. Again, maybe no one read this magazine, but people would write these deep emotional questions and she would answer them with these thousand to two thousand word essays that showed a depth of emotional empathy that I’ve never experienced before. Obviously, it speaks to the tremendous richness of her ability to do that. But if you read this book, Tiny Beautiful Things, I’ll tell you, it’s like an Ann Landers column. you know, which I grew up reading in the Toronto Star, for the modern emotional complexities that we feel. Written by a star writer who was then writing under a total pseudonym. So, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, recommended to me by NQ, whose work I also recommended for those that may not know him.
Eric Zimmer
We had NQ on sometime in the last year. It was such a great interview and episode. He’s really remarkable. He’s special. And that book is an amazing book. You’re right. Her depth of emotional empathy and wisdom is truly amazing. I think when you get that and you get it with somebody who can write as well as she can, you have something really special because she’s an exceptional writer.
Neil Pasricha
I mean, one of the best. One of the absolute best. I’m like desperate for a Tiny Beautifuls thing too, you know? It’s the kind of thing also, I’ll just say this book, I’m often seeking for ways to stop feeling so worried about things. I’ve got a book launch coming, that’s why we’re having this conversation. I’m always worried about it, man. I’m always stressed about it. Why? When you read books like these Seneca books or this type of thing, it zooms you out of yourself. You stop caring so much about you, you, you, and you realize, ah, the vast human experience that we all share is just a wonderful thing to be part of. I go from living in a washing machine to looking at a washing machine through often the power of books. Part of the reason why I’ve made such a big stake on doubling down on reading, because in addition to a reading-based podcast, I have multiple newsletters. I have a monthly book club where I’m telling people which books I’ve read every single month. I’m posting every book I’ve read online. I’m trying my best to get out of my own head, but of course, it’s hard to do that. As soon as they put the camera on the front of the iPhone, we were asking for trouble with that one.
Eric Zimmer
Totally.
Neil Pasricha
Selfies went up. We’re all looking at ourselves all the time now.
Eric Zimmer
That zooming out time-wise is such a powerful thing to do, and there’s so many different ways to do it. In the Spiritual Habits program I’ve created, we talk a lot about that perspective, and the core principle is just when in doubt, zoom out. Like, any way you can. Time-wise, space-wise, other people-wise. I mean, just the broader our perspective, The better off we are and the more narrow our perspective is, the more we tend to suffer. It’s such a simple idea, but we so rarely remember to do it.
Neil Pasricha
And it’s so hard to see how we can. Tomorrow, I would love, I think I will, I’m hoping to take the morning off to go birdwatching, okay? I got into birdwatching during the pandemic. I have found it to be an incredible, wonderful way to connect with the natural world, to be part of something bigger than myself, These species have typically been here a lot longer than we have, and they’re right there in your backyard, these dinosaurs. It’s unbelievable, right? But in my head, the tape I’m playing right now is, well, I can’t. I got to pre-write an email blast, and I’ve got all these tweets. There’s so much pressure, especially on anyone, and there’s most of them, creating stuff to constantly be putting out stuff across all channels at all times for everyone’s consumption. And unfortunately, the side effect of that is the barrage for all of us gets louder and louder and we get a fragmented and a more fragmented reality to the point where we’re all just eventually talking to the 10 people around us.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah. Yep. I agree. I mean, as somebody who puts out two of these episodes a week, I worry a little about that element of it is like I am contributing to the noise. Now I think it’s a positive contribution to the noise. And I think it’s a long form conversation where you have a chance to slow down and settle in and think about important things, but it’s still a lot of content. Just bam, bam, bam.
Neil Pasricha
But kudos to you for leaving it with all those tenets and principles that you’ve always had, which are their long form. You aren’t doing what the algorithms are telling you to do, Eric, which is slice it and dice it and put it in one minute morsels and two minute morsels to pump up the algorithm with your incredible daily distribution. That’s what you quote unquote should be doing. If you were feeding and to try to gamify yourself to the top of these charts to get more dollars per ads, etc. I’m saying you’re also listening to your inner voice on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And as long as you’re holding on to that, well, that comes through in the art.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s obviously a, and I know you talk about this is as a creative in the world, you’ve got to make a living. So you’ve got to pay some attention to the external things. But if too much attention gets drawn to the external versus the intrinsic or the internal, then what are we even doing? You know, and that’s been a really interesting thing for me is this has become what we do full time is how do you balance that? Like, okay, now I got to make a living doing this. Like, But I don’t want to let that corrode the thing that I started doing because I love doing it. And so how do you balance those things? And I think you talk really well about that in your three S’s.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’m going to jump into the three S’s. And I also – have you read the essay The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace? No, I have not read that one. I would add this to your reading list. It’s not available online. It’s only available in a book called Both Flesh or Not, which is a collection of his essays released after he died. The title essay is about his essay on Roger Federer that he wrote for the New York Times Magazine. But in there is an essay called The Nature of the Fun, and essentially what he’s arguing is that When you chase commercial success, as you undoubtedly do, because you’re so excited that people want the thing you’re making finally, you end up producing that second Strokes album that sounds kind of like the first or whatever it is. And then you have to eventually remember and hold on to the fact that what made that first thing good in the first place was you did it for fun. You did it for fun. So holding on to that, plus a question I would personally insert, and I wrote about this in the Harvard Business Review article around retirement, is would I do this for free? If you can keep answering yes to that question, would I do this for free? It tells you, it gives you the proof point to yourself that you’re doing it for intrinsic reasons, right? Because as soon as you say no, it feels like work, that’s where you gotta watch out. I’m not saying, oh, hard left. I’m just saying just watch out. What could you put back in place? What could you disable access to? Could you disable access to your stats? Or could you separate your ad recordings from your days that you do your creative, interviews or, you know, what other things can you put in place like that? Me personally, yes, I hold on to a little triangle in my mind. I call it the three S’s of success because what happened to me after the book of awesome came out, the first one, not our book of awesome, which is, you know, the new one, but the book of awesome is people kept introducing me to their friends who wanted to write books. And whenever they introduced me to their friends, the friends would say, how do I do what you did? You sold a million copies of the book of awesome. Tell me how. And I’d say, well, what are you writing? And they’d say, oh, I’m writing my grandmother’s memoirs. And I’d say, oh, well, can I ask you why? And they’re like, well, it’s just been my life goal to capture this incredible story she had. I was like, oh, OK. What are you hoping to do with it? They’re like, I just really want to get it done. I just really want to have it as a thing for our extended family as a way to pass along her family history. Oh, OK. That’s a different kind of goal, right? Mm-hmm. And so I started drawing this little triangle, three S’s. The first S is sales. This is commercial success. This is chasing the capitalism dream, right? You made a million dollars. You sold a million books. You did a million, whatever. You just got a million followers, whatever. That’s sales. The big number. There’s a reason it’s the front of a lot of people’s minds. The second S is social. We are social creatures. We often do things for social success, social proof points. There’s a huge dichotomy between the two, by the way. In the book world, as an example, sales success means it sold a lot of copies. Social success is you’re a New York Times book reviewed book. Those books don’t necessarily sell that many, right? You’re nominated for the Penn Hemingway Award. Those books don’t necessarily sell that many, right? But you see, you’ve got the social proof point. And the third S is self. You’re doing it because you want to. And I know it’s in almost any industry. If you think of these three things like an old school wobble board at a gym where you can kind of balance on two but you can’t get all of them, you just can’t get all of them at once. Look at the movie industry. I guarantee you, whatever’s going to win Best Picture this year was a relative box office flop to the Fast and the Furious 12 movie that came out. Fast and the Furious 12 made $700 million. Moonlight or The Hurt Locker, pick these movies that actually win Best Picture. They’re $30 million movies. They’re $50 million movies. They’re way smaller. Which would you rather have? So, be clear about those two things and the third S itself, you can’t have all three of them. So, pick the one you’re going for and aim for that. Don’t try to get them all. I’ll tell you what, Eric, none of my books have ever had a review in the New York Times or been nominated for any literary prizes, ever. I’m saying not once, right? Mark Manson often talks about this because he says, you know, Subtle Art of Not Giving the fuck came out. It got zero love from the social world of books. Nobody wanted to put the effort on TV or magazines so they weren’t covering the thing. So yeah, he sold 15 million books but no one ever gave him a prize. You could have the opposite way too.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that’s really wise. And, you know, back to that question of would you do this if you didn’t have to or if you didn’t get paid, I think there’s an important nuance in there. And that nuance is that it doesn’t mean that every time you do it, you want to do it. And what I mean by that is there are days that I don’t want to record a podcast interview. I don’t feel like doing it for whatever reason. I didn’t get enough sleep. The nuance is you’re not always going to feel like doing anything all the time. And so that’s not the measure we’re after. Because I think people can get hung up on that and be like, well, if I don’t want to do it all the time, is it really my passion? Well, nobody wants to do anything all the time. But broadly speaking, That’s it. You know, broadly speaking, more times than not, do I really want to do this? It’s interesting for me. I took a month off in June. I’ve never ever taken anything like that amount of time off in my entire life. I started working when I was 13. I mean, like it was unheard of. And. boy, when I came back, I was like, I am ready to podcast. Like before I left, I was a little, you know, a little tired, you know, a little ground down by it. So sometimes also, if it’s something you love, does a break help restore it sometimes can be really helpful.
Neil Pasricha
Absolutely. You know, there’s this word I’ve recently discovered called Karoshi, which is a Japanese word that means death by overwork. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this.
Eric Zimmer
No.
Neil Pasricha
Um, so, you know, in English, the highest, word we have for working too hard is called burnout. But that word burnout does not include dying, right? It’s burning out. Whereas the late 80s in Japan, they had a number of executives and major companies all dropped dead at the same time. So they had a huge cultural issue and so they came up with the word karoshi, death by overwork. To me, what’s interesting is that 30 years of research have gone into this in Japan and they’ve come up with shinrin yoku. Shinrin yoku in literal translation is forest bathing. and i think about this metaphor a lot because forest bathing doesn’t mean taking a bath in the forest it means actually removing yourself from the clinical surroundings you’re probably in if you’re in a hotel room if you’re in a conference hall if you’re in an office building if you’re in your basement if you’re in your basement studio whatever like i am right now you know you got a hard pavement floor around you you got fake walls around you you’re surrounded by artificial light you got to take a rest strategic rest and insert some Shinrin Yoku. Yesterday, Eric, I got off a plane back home in Toronto from Boston at 1 p.m. I knew my kids were coming home at four. Yes, I got lots to do. What did I do? Three hour walk in the woods. Three hour walk in the woods, the phytoncides that trees release actually lower your cortisol and adrenaline. The birds that I was looking at make me happy, make me feel part of something bigger than myself. And I didn’t take my phone, that’s my new thing. Even though I wanna use the eBird app to track the birds, I actually just resist and write it down on a piece of paper and enter them in the app when I get back. So your month off, It’s very similar to my kind of strategic rest phenomenon. If people want to go deeper into that, I wrote a HBR article called Why You Need One Untouchable Day Per Week and How to Get One, which is just this idea of becoming invisible to everybody for at least one day a week so you can kind of figure out yourself.
Eric Zimmer
I think when I interviewed you last, I came across this idea. I don’t think it’s that new to you. I may be wrong, but I feel like in my mind at that time, I was like, there’s no way I can do that. Right. In the same way that if you told me I could take a month off, I would have been like, are you out of your mind? That is impossible. But once I started really thinking about it, I was like, Well, you know, okay, you have to do a lot to line that up. But as I was going back through your work again, I came across the idea of the one untouchable day a week. And I went, oh yeah, like that’s a really good idea. And I can see my way to it. But it’s funny, this being able to take time started with me saying things like, all right, I’m going to start taking two weekend days off. On the weekends, I’m actually not going to work. It may not sound revolutionary.
Neil Pasricha
I’m laughing because I can relate to working all weekend.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah. But to me it was, it was a big deal. And I would say, you know, it’s no big deal. Like I only take one or two coaching calls on the weekend or, you know, I only put an hour or two in, but I didn’t really get that some extended time of break was important. So this all started with me just committing to weekends off. And then as I did that, I went, Oh, that actually helps. That’s restorative. It works not just for me personally, but for me business wise. And so that’s kind of grown. So I say all that to say, I’m going to be thinking about your untouchable day and I’m re-inspired by it. I always write down after I go through somebody’s work, kind of my key takeaway. And my key takeaway for years I wrote was untouchable day. So thank you.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah. People always challenge me on this, Eric. They say, oh, I can’t. You don’t know me. You don’t know my boss. You don’t know how many emails I get. And I say, well, could you just start with lunch? Because I spent 10 years working in corporate at Walmart, and we tether ourselves at lunch. What’s wrong with leaving your phone at your desk? You don’t have to take it with you. You can go out for an hour. You can go for a nap in the park. Try it for an hour. People aren’t going to harass you for one hour at lunch. If you can do that, try two hours. You’re not taking two hours off of work. You’re taking two hours off being connected to everything. What happens is the better thoughts, the creative thoughts, the making sure I’m doing the right things rather than just doing things right, they naturally bubble to the surface. And so we have to create space for them. It’s imperative, especially in our culture today, which we began the conversation by saying, I feel like we’re drowning. How many emails do you get on a given date that you have no memory of subscribing to? Those all take your attention.
Eric Zimmer
Thank God I have a filtering system, otherwise I would probably hang myself from the rafters. I mean, it’s so many. What do you use? I use something called Sanebox. S-A-N-E-B-O-X. Sanebox. Oh, I don’t know that. Yeah. It does two main things for me. It gives me, in my inbox, what it thinks is most important. Then it has something called sane later, which it means like, I think this is somewhat important to you, but you don’t need to get to it anytime soon. And then it’s got something called sane news, which is all the newsletters, all the shopping, all the crap. And so I don’t even see either of those categories until I go looking for them. Oh, that’s good. I got to get that. I still get too much email. But even then, with all that filter, I still feel like I spend too much time on it. But oh, it makes a big difference. Because yeah, like you, I’m like, every little thing that you have to look at to decide whether to get rid of or scroll past for the fourth time, it all takes time.
Neil Pasricha
Plus, every single technology platform is integrating chat and messaging into their services. So most people now have like seven to 10 different inboxes, including DMs on Instagram, DMs on Twitter, DMs on Facebook, text messages, inbox one, inbox two, the inbox you don’t tell anybody about that everybody finds out about, et cetera, et cetera. So you know, then you suddenly, now we got another problem, which is we got too many things to check.
Eric Zimmer
I know. I know. So if you’re listening to this and you want to contact me, doing it on any social media platform is a terrible idea. I will never, I just won’t see it or I’ll see it and I’ll forget about it.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah.
Eric Zimmer
To your point about take an hour away, take two hours away. I’ve shared this before, which is for the four years that I started this podcast, I was also working in a corporate job and I wanted as much time to do this show as I could. Plus I had two kids. I mean, so, I got really good at ignoring a lot of things that I would have thought you can’t ignore. And I got good at thinking about like what’s really important. And the ironic thing is that as I gave it less of my time, I got better at what I did. I mean, I kept getting promoted and they wanted to hire me. And I was like, part of me is feeling bad because I’m like, well, I’m not putting in nearly the amount of effort that people around me are. But yet I’m still considered highly successful. And I think it was just, as you said, thinking about what really matters here. What’s the most important thing? What drives success in this role? And given an excessive focus, instead of getting swept up in all the day to day, moment to moment, answering every email, feeling like I had to be in every conversation, you know. And I’m not saying that everybody can do that, but I think the point is, and you made the point, is that I think we tether ourselves more than necessarily we are being tethered. Again, that’s not for everybody. There are toxic overwork cultures where, you know, you are driven way beyond what’s reasonable. But my experience was I tethered myself a lot more than I needed to.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, I can completely relate to that. And I do think that part of the design of the technology is to make us feel that way. In The Happiest Equation, I write a story about a CEO that I worked for who simply did not use email at all. And he had an inbox. He’d see the emails. He just wouldn’t reply to any. And he had just mentally reasoned that email was work given to him by other people. And so he’d spend his time walking around the hallways, actually talking to people. And while people were always upset that, you know, He didn’t reply to my email. I don’t know if he got it, etc. It freed his time to focus on what actually mattered. Now, it’s a difficult practice to start, especially if, like me, you’re always trying to please. You want to reply. You want to reply with, like, thank you. You know, that’s the worst thing to reply, right? Thank you. Unnecessary email number one is the reply just to say, I got this, I appreciate it. But yeah, it’s about baby steps, right? If you can’t take an untouchable day, take an untouchable hour. If you feel like you have too many emails, delete the one access point that you use the least. First thing I’ve done is I’ve deleted every single social media app off my cell phone. So right away, I only can get into them off a laptop. I do not save any passwords, so I have to enter the password. Because it’s two-factor authentication, I’d have to go to my email box, and then log in to get the code to type it in. So just creating these extra pieces of friction also helps me do what we’re both advocating. Still hard to do, but systematically designed to prevent me from being tempted to compulsively check.
Eric Zimmer
Yep. All right. Well, we’re nearing the end of our time. I want to hit just a couple things that you wrote in an essay called 43 things I’ve almost learned as I turn 43. And this one caught my attention because I agree with it. And I sometimes feel like it’s a bad rule, but I do live by it, which is you’re not allowed to leave a bookstore without buying a book.
None:
Yeah.
Neil Pasricha
So just as a quick background, I’ve never talked about this list publicly with anybody. This is the very first time I’ve talked about it, but I’ve just started stealing the idea from Kevin Kelly to write a list of pieces of advice on your birthday. So I just published, just turned 43. 43 things I’ve almost learned as I turned 43. Yeah, one of my life rules, Eric, is I cannot leave a bookstore without buying a book. And part of the reason I do that is because if you’re in a bookstore, and if you’re in downtown Toronto, you know, 9 out of 10 of the bookstores are independent bookstores. There’s a couple chains.
Eric Zimmer
I’m surprised you’ve got 10 of them.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, we’re very, very lucky. But the reason we have them is because we keep supporting them. I just think this is somebody who’s paying rent, paying property taxes to the local town, which buys the flowers in the park, and cleaning up the cigarette butts outside of the swings. This is something I want to live and work in a society full of trust. So I think buying a book at a local bookstore should be a life rule for everybody. You cannot walk out without buying a book.
Eric Zimmer
I agree. I always say if I want something to exist, which I always want bookstores to exist, I have to support them. Like I can’t get mad when things go away that I didn’t support. And so I’m the same way. I’m like the last thing in the world I need is another book. I don’t know if I’ll ever read this book because I’m probably get mailed about 500 for free a year, too. Oh, I mean, they just show up constantly. Yeah. You know, I am inundated with books, but I still it’s the same thing. I’m like, I want this bookstore to be here because I love the ability to walk in and browse books, even as my reading patterns have changed dramatically towards e-books, which I have very mixed feelings about. But I still every time I walk into an independent bookstore. Yep. I’m like, I have to buy a book.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, and high level, I want to just say here, and this is something that took me a long time to really just get sealed into my brain, you know, Amazon helps you find the book that you’re looking for. Bookstores help you find the books that you aren’t. Yeah. It’s the serendipitous and what’s beside the thing on the shelf, that is what you’re finding and you can’t find that online. You just, it’s very, very difficult.
Eric Zimmer
Yes.
Neil Pasricha
Monocle magazine, which I don’t know if you know that magazine, they have a wonderful list that’s published every year, like the 20 most livable cities in the world. And one of their key criteria is the number of independent bookstores per 100,000, which I think is just a wonderful metric to weave in, because what a great sign of cultural health to have independent bookstores. I’ll tell you, I was just down in the Bronx interviewing Latanya and Jerry, who drive around in the Bronx, something called the Bronx Bound books bus. It’s the only bookstore in the Bronx. Now the Bronx has the same population as Manhattan. Manhattan has 80 bookstores. Wow. Okay, so it’s just like they’re giving books to a book desert and driving around to different schools every single day to bring books and they say everyone tells us kids don’t want to read books anymore, kids are addicted to their phones, kids like games. They say when we pull up in the park You should see the delight, the excitement, the joy of perusing shelves full of stories and fiction and nonfiction and the touching and they love it. And so part of it is access. Amazon’s got 70% of the book market or something like that in the U.S. So we have to very consciously spend with our time and our attention. And if you and I want to go on the record and say, support your local independent bookstore, I’m very, very proud and happy to do so. Also, I do think that at some point in my life, I’m going to be the person running one of those bookstores. It’s a life dream of mine that has not yet been realized. You see it all over the place. Ann Patchett’s running a bookstore in Nashville. Judy Bloom’s running a bookstore in Key West, Florida. Ryan Holiday’s running a book in Bastrop, Texas. You know, maybe that’s the path for the author eventually to go down is you just eventually fall into the world of books and just live there. That sounds pretty good to me.
Eric Zimmer
Yeah, yeah, it does. And then the last thing that will hit from your 43 things as we turn 43 is easiest way to love a park. Pick up one piece of trash every visit.
Neil Pasricha
Yeah, you know, we live near a park and just every time I leave, I just say to my kids, Oh, we’re leaving. Just meant it’s a mental check. I got, I got to find one piece of garbage and put it in. And I just, You know, if they start to mimic that behavior, if other people start to do it, then the park is just always clean instead of always dirty. Yeah. You know? The way this came about, by the way, Eric, was I did a study at Walmart trying to compare why two stores across the country, they had to be the same square footage, 120,000 square feet, same labor dollars, you know, same number of people that could feasibly work in the stores. One of them would be looking like trash and the other one would be totally clean and spic and span. So I did a study at Walmart to try to compare the two stores, not just two specific stores, but the idea of the two stores. And I’ll tell you, it came down to whether or not the store manager themselves picked up garbage on their way walking around the store. If that one person did, everyone mimicked and copied the behavior. That’s fascinating. That’s it. It was just that. If the store manager picked up a piece of garbage in the parking lot, the parking lot was clean. When you’re in a position of leadership, what you do is mimicked and copied and followed. So I’m a leader for at least a few little kids, so I’m going to pick up the trash hoping that they do it too. So far, no one has, by the way. They’re like, Dad, what are you doing? I’m like, just trust me on this. I’m going to pick up a piece of garbage every time.
Eric Zimmer
Well, and also, things you invest in, you care about. And picking up a piece of garbage is a very small investment, but it makes you care about that place more. So, well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on. As always, I love talking with you. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get your latest book, to your blog, to a couple of things we talked about. I always enjoy it.
Neil Pasricha
Thank you so much for having me, Eric, and thank you for the gift of this wonderful podcast. It’s a true delight. I really enjoy listening. You have wonderful guests. You have thoughtful conversations. It’s a real, real gem in the world. Thank you.
Eric Zimmer
Thank you.
