Happiness guru was miserable after hit book
Neil Pasricha seeks happiness formula after literary success
It fits nicely into Neil Pasricha’s public persona that he would exhibit such exuberance upon discovering the Fairmont Palliser offers Sriracha among its hotsauce choices.
The bestselling author, who became a literary sensation by enthusiastically extolling the virtues of simple pleasures in 2010’s Book of Awesome and its three followups, has just ordered an exceptionally large second breakfast in Calgary.
This, he sheepishly explains to a waiter, is due to the fact that he started his very busy day before 5 a.m. to attend morning TV interviews, requiring a hasty early first breakfast in the car, and won’t eat again until 3 p.m.
Whatever the case, the impressive spread includes a number of awesome items that Pasricha could very well have praised in his blog-turned-book: Steaming baked beans, extra spinach on the eggs Benedict, a side order of organic chicken sausage, hollandaise sauce on the side, fried mushrooms, smoked salmon and, most importantly, a restaurant that serves Sriracha sauce.
“This is like two meals!,” the amiable Pasricha jokes. “Brunch, I think they call it. How embarrassing that I ordered, like, six things.”
Ever since Pasricha rose to fame as an advocate for finding awesomeness in life’s modest joys — whether it be fully appreciating your pillow or finding money in your coat pocket — it has been difficult to separate the perpetually enthused author from his lifeaffirming work and world view.
This seems to have stuck when promoting his new book The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything (G.P. Putman’s Sons, 288 pages, $35), which focuses on answering the question: “What is the simplest formula for a happy life?”
The Calgary visit just happens to fall a few days before Sunday’s International Day of Happiness and on the heels of a The World Happiness Report, a United Nations-backed study that found Canada slip from No. 5 to No. 6 this year.
Last month, Pasricha left his job as the head of leadership training for Wal-Mart after a decade with the company, in part to spend more time overseeing The Institute for Global Happiness. While his past books had an endearing off-the-cuff nature to them befitting folksy pearls of wisdom that originated as a blog, The Happiness Equation is full of the “collected wisdom” of Fortune 500 CEOs, cross-cultural comparisons, low and highbrow popculture references and a number of academic wellness studies.
So there is plenty to talk about other than himself. But given the nature of his writing, there is always a tendency to see how closely Pasricha follows his own rules. The biggest irony of his early literary success may have been that, at the height of his fame as a champion of positive thinking, he was miserable.
“I get that question a lot, ‘Are you happy?,’” says Pasricha. “2010, 2011 and 2012 were brutal years for me. I was getting two or three hours of sleep a night. Being single, you just drive yourself. There’s no one to say ‘Can you give our child a bath?’ There’s no interruptions. Which meant my output was huge. A thousand blog entries every day for 1,000 straight days. A full-time job working for the CEO of the
For any parent, you get this sense that you want your kid to live a happy life, you want that more than anything else. But there is no instructional manual for happiness.
world’s biggest company. Plus three books, plus over 100 speaking events all over the world. I wasn’t sleeping very much and not treating myself very well because of stress. I lost 40 pounds. The Toronto Star called me The Pied Piper of Happiness and I was deeply unhappy.”
By 2012, profiles of Pasricha would still often focus on how his life hadn’t changed much despite becoming a New York Times bestselling author and in-demand speaker. He drove the same car. He was still single. He had the same 700-square-foot apartment and the same job. But after 2012, his life began to undergo monumental change. He is married now and has a new house in Toronto. He has a two-year-old child and one on the way. He quit his job.
It was right before a return flight from his honeymoon that his wife revealed she was pregnant, which offered the early glimmers of inspiration for The Happiness Equation. He began thinking about it during the long flight back from Asia. It took the form of a letter to his unborn child.
“For any parent, you get this sense that you want to make your kid to live a happy life, you want that more than anything else,” he says.
“But there is no instructional manual for happiness. So what I tried to write was a letter. I wrote pretty much every day from my wife’s pregnancy.
The first sentence was ‘Dear Baby, I want you to have this in case I don’t have a chance to tell you. Love Dad.’”
He added to it, of course. Pasricha’s fatherly advice turned into a self-help book that promises to unlock the 9 Secrets to Happiness, and includes such headings as “7 ways to be happy right now” and “What can the healthiest onehundred-year-olds in the world teach us?”
“It was way harder,” he says. “The Book of Awesome was a blog to book. Which means I blogged daily about small, pithy little things that were big to me — bakery air, warm underwear from out of the dryer. They didn’t have to be cohesive, there was no arc to the book, there was no table of contents, no index. This one has all those things.”
While Pasricha is still open during an interview, there are hints that the spotlight on him as a self-help writer, popular TED speaker and all-around happiness guru has required some privacy safeguards now that he is a family man.
He asks that journalists not reveal the name of his son, for instance. But that doesn’t stop him from proudly brandishing an iPhone full of baby pics, which show a young boy who seems happy and, unlike his father, in possession of a very healthy and lush head of hair.
“We haven’t cut his hair yet,” says Pasricha. “I have no hair. I said when he was born: ‘Tall or short, straight or gay, university or college or nothing, artist or businessman, whatever he will be, he will be.’ But I must insist on living vicariously through his hair.”