Book Review: You Are Awesome by Neil Pasricha

In our uncertain times and rapidly changing world, ‘You Are Awesome’ is a real tonic.  Luckily for me this book arrived several weeks ago and I’ve been devouring the book’s wisdom.

‘You Are Awesome’ is all about resilience and Neil uses his life experiences and research to highlight the secrets to developing resilience in an era of increasing anxiety, depression and loneliness.

The book is an easy to follow read featuring 9 concepts that explain how we can navigate failure, reframe our own perceptions and how to become our most powerful and awesome self.

Of course life brings us challenges, some much larger and more devastating than others.  It can be overwhelming when we are feeling stuck and caught up in these overwhelming situations.  Neil champions the idea that we need a quiet courage to keep going, keep moving forward, knowing that we can move past the situation, seeing beyond the current dilemma.

“There is power in moving slowly through the motions.  There is power in letting the story continue.”  ~ Neil Pasricha, ‘You Are Awesome’

This book acts as a useful life reviewer, making sense of past failures and challenges.  Showing how to survive certain situations, learn and grow as a result and explaining why a continuing supply of resilience can help with whatever life throws at you.

Neil draws on his mother’s experience as a young woman in Nairobi, Kenya and her life journey taking her to a new life in Canada as well as his personal experiences in childhood and as he navigated his adult life.  The stories show how he has made sense of life and explores his valuable lessons.

It was refreshing to reframe failure.  Understanding that everyone fails, from low achievers to high achievers.  But what makes high achievers different as a group?  They fail harder and take it more personally.  What can help to address issues of failure?  We can learn to share our experiences, talk about our failures, ask for help and learn to support one another.  We can understand that successful people have more failures.  They may look as though they have everything sorted and in order but it is likely that they have experienced many failures before they have reached their ‘successful’ position.  They had the resilience to keep getting up, to keep moving forward and to keep trying something new.

This book is part life story, part research and part self-help offering ideas to help reframe challenges and tips to help you move through any challenging times.  It is useful to talk about failures, shame, mistakes, struggle and loss.  This book helps us to explore what it is to be human and how we can support ourselves on the journey of life.

“I have been through struggle. I have been through loss. And I have had to get stronger. Resilience is a muscle that hurts to build. What would have made it easier? Neil’s words. This book. A recipe for thickening our skin in thin-skinned times.” ~ James Frey, author of ‘Katerina’

“No one knows ‘awesome’ like Neil Pasricha, and here he explores how we can make our very lives more awesome. With real-life stories and a conversational style, he shows how we can move forward in the face of challenge to make our days more intentional and joyful.”~ Gretchen Rubin, author of ‘The Happiness Project and Outer Order, Inner Calm’

“With Neil’s signature style of humor, research, whimsy and insight, You Are Awesome touches a chord and shows us the power of combining optimism and resilience to create more meaning at work, school and home…” ~ Shawn Achor, New York Times best-selling author of ‘Big Potential’

Neil Pasricha thinks, writes, and speaks about intentional living. He is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including ‘The Book of Awesome’ and ‘The Happiness Equation’.  He hosts the award-winning podcast ‘3 Books’ where he’s on a fifteen-year-long quest to uncover the thousand most formative books in the world. You can visit him at GlobalHappiness.org, Neil.blog, 3books.co, and 1000awesomethings.com.

‘You Are Awesome – How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure and Live an Intentional Life’ by Neil Pasricha is published on 5th November 2019.