Neil Pasricha has a lot to be happy about, but come on. This guy hopes that people cutting him off on the highway make it to the hospital in time to witness the birth of their child. He writes about something awesome every weekday on his blog (1000 Awesome Things), which is now a book (The Book of Awesome) and may be the inspiration for a TV show. Pasricha seems to have boundless positive energy.

“I don’t try to. I really don’t try to stay positive. I have good days and I have bad days,” says Pasricha as he helps me eat an M&M cookie at Higher Ground.

“I’ve had my wife leave me and I’ve had my best friend pass away, so when I stub my toe or drop a hammer on it, can’t match up the laundry, walk into a spider web and forgot my umbrella at a restaurant, it just doesn’t matter as much.”

This wide-eyed way of looking at the world was instilled by Pasricha’s parents, young immigrants in a fascinating new country.

“They looked at the world like three-year olds, because they were seeing a lot of things for the first time too,” he says. “My dad would take me to the grocery store and marvel at mangoes from Mexico and dates from Morocco.”

“They were eating their first hamburger when I was eating my first hamburger, so they were just as excited as I was about these things.”

If Pasricha wasn’t so awesome himself, it’d be pretty easy to resent him for all the success stemming from a simple blog idea: write down an awesome thing every weekday for 1,000 days. Easier still to resent him for reprinting those posts in a lucrative book. But he has remained grounded and still can’t believe that all of this is actually happening. He still works his day job for God’s sake.

“I started the website as one of 45,000 blogs that are started every day,” he says. “My mom forwarded it to my dad and traffic doubled. Friends sent it to friends. I was really excited when I got 50 hits. I was really excited when I got 100 hits. I was really excited when I got 1,000 hits.”

Pasricha’s blog now gets about 15 million hits a year and has won three Webby Awards — the unimaginatively named honour for top websites.

So what’s all the fuss? Pasricha has stumbled on a simple strategy, devoid of any grand pronouncements on the human condition, that resonates with people. On this day, when he sits down for an interview, the post on his site (No. 486) reads: “Getting through right away when you call a big company.”

So, what inspired that particular post? “I probably called a big company and got through right away,” he says.

After losing his best friend and his wife, Pasricha started documenting the little things in life that gave him pleasure. But it took awhile before he found his voice. As a matter of fact, he can track his success to one popular post celebrating the joys of burning metal on flesh, mouthfuls of gravel and all around childhood danger — No. 980, “Old dangerous playground equipment.”

“I was writing about broccoflower and fat baseball players and airplane toilet flushes — things that I thought were funny and light,” he says. “Over time, when I hit one like finding money in your coat pocket or when the cashier opens up your lane at the grocery store, I started realizing it was the simple little free pleasures that I enjoyed the most that I could expand on the best.”

But those simple pleasures can only go on for so long, and recounting them has a built-in end — when his blog posts hit zero from 1,000. So, what’s next for Pasricha? It’s simple. “I’ll kind of leave it up in the air, I think, until it hits,” he says. “Maybe I’ll take up volleyball or run a marathon or, you know, move to Alaska. I don’t know what I’ll do.”