Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

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I am so excited to be interviewing Neil Pastrucha, who is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Book of Awesome series, which has spent five years on bestseller list and has sold over a million copies.

He has also written the number one international bestseller, The Happiness

Equation, Want Nothing, Plus Do Anything, Equals Have Everything. And he's written a children's book

called Awesome Is Everywhere. One of the most popular TED speakers of all time, Neil is a frequent

keynote speaker and the director of the Institute for Global Happiness. With degrees from

Queens College and Harvard Business School,

Neil currently lives with his wife and sons in Toronto. Welcome, Neil. Thanks for coming on. Moms Don't have time to read books. Thanks for having me, Zibi. This is seriously such a treat as I was going through all the materials. I was like, I don't even know how to come up with the questions. There's so many things I wanted to talk to you about. So let's just start first with your book, the happiness equation. Want nothing and do nothing equals have everything, which is your science-based, obviously. You know this approach to happiness

using positive psychology studies. I was actually a psych major, so this is particularly

interesting to me. So you basically answered the question, what's the secret of

happiness? And you have nine major secrets and in that many other secrets. So that's enough of me

talking. You tell me what the secret to happiness is. Well, the whole story is because you're a mama four,

right? I am a mom of four. You're mama four. So I was a dad of zero when my, Leslie, and I were coming home from our honeymoon. And literally on the plane, she's like, I don't feel well. I'm not feeling good. So we do a layover, scheduled layover for six hours in Malaysia. She finds a pharmacy. She finds a place to lie down. We get back on the plane. It's a 12-hour flight home. on the airplane, she goes to the little tiny bathroom.

She comes back to our seats and she says, I'm pregnant. See, she bought the prancing

test in the airport pharmacy, did the prergancy test in the airplane bathroom and told me she was

pregnant at like 50,000 feet above sea level. Now, why do I tell you that story?

Because when I landed home in Toronto as a father of zero, we just got married, I was like, oh,

oh my gosh, I'm going to be a dad in nine months. So I then spent the next nine month writing a 300-page

letter to my unborn child on how to live a happy life. And so the happiness equation that book you just showed me with your hand is that letter, which is why, I don't know if you notice, you probably didn't because most people don't. Then on the copyright library of Congress page in like two point font, I even have a little note hidden in there that says, to my baby, I wanted you to have this in case i didn't have a chance to tell you love that oh that's so sweet so then you said like well what's the so that's like i did i should tell you that i did not even write a post-it to any of my four kids before they were born now i feel terrible no no no no no no no i also like submitted it to a publisher and they printed it as a book and I am a writer. So I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I also, like, submitted it to a publisher and, like,

they printed it as a book and I am a writer. So I'm like, yeah, like, that is why I wrote it. And then, of course, I'm like, yes, and I'm like, I'm going to like, and I'm going to publish it. So here I am. Actually, maybe I'm exploiting my children and you're actually just like, you know, not exploiting your kids the way I was.

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