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
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:
“I will let go of …”
“I am grateful for …”
“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