An Awesome Book of Thanks, basically what happened is after I wrote An Awesome Book, I started touring and I would travel around the country and I would read at schools and hospitals and book stores and libraries and all kinds of places, you know. And I would go to these places and I would talk to these kids about their dreams. You know, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And one kid would say, “I want to be a basketball player when I grow up.” And one kid would say like, “I dream of ice cream falling from the sky.”
“I want to invent the machine that can fly around the world in one minute,” or whatever. And then one kid would be like, “I want to go to college.” And you don’t want to say, “Hey, that’s not a crazy enough dream. This kid’s dreaming about ice cream falling from the sky and you’re only dreaming about going to college ‘cause for him dreaming about going to college is as crazy as ice cream falling from the sky. And so what I realized after touring a lot was like oh, there’s a complement to this idea. The idea is dream big, but be thankful for everything that happens on the way to achieving those dreams, you know.
Every single day there’s something amazing that happens to you that you overlook that we as a society take for granted. And when you’re a kid, a lot of those things you don’t take for granted yet, you know. Like you’re a kid, you’re two or three years old, you don’t even know what a table feels like. You don’t even know what this ice cream tastes like. What, you know, what’s going to happen if I go through that door? What happens if I pour sand on my head? What happens if I walk around with my shoes on the wrong feet, you know? What if I wear my clothes inside out?
What if I sleep at the bottom of the bed instead of at the head of the bed? Like these are things that as adults we know the answer to even if we’ve never done them, you know. Like you start thinking like all the things you don’t like. I don’t like mustard. I don’t like the taste of tomatoes. I don’t like lettuce. You know, you build up these walls around yourself and so I wrote An Awesome Book of Thanks to kind of talk about that idea of like stop putting up these walls and start appreciating all these small things, all these small opportunities to happen in your day.
All these like little instances where you look at something and think like, “I take that for granted,” or, “I don’t like that,” or, “That’s here for this reason and that doesn’t involve me.” Instead of being like, [unint.] What? I’m in an airplane? What? Like instead of sitting in an airplane complaining about the fact that you don’t have wireless service or whatever, you know. Instead of like being in traffic and being miserable because you have to wait five minutes to get off on your exit thinking about like the fact that you’re in a car that you didn’t even make yourself.
Like you had nothing to do with the manufacture of that car. You don’t even know how it works, you know. I don’t know anything about an internal combustion engine. And it’s amazing like I can drive anywhere I want. I can do anything I want. And I’m so grateful for that and I want kids to feel that way too, you know, like and not just, “I’m dreaming big. I want to be a basketball player and every day until I’m a basketball player, I’m miserable because that’s my goal.” You know, instead of that being like, “I want to be a basketball player, but I’m going to enjoy every game that I play until I get to the place where I feel like I’m really fully playing basketball.”
Or, you know, “Until the ice cream is falling from the sky, I’m going to enjoy every single thing that happens until that point,” you know. So that’s what that book was about.
