Who Will Cry When You Die?: Life Lessons From The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

by Robin Sharma

Little did I know that Colby was about to teach his father yet another lesson in the art of living. Rather than eating the bread whole as most adults do, Colby took a different, far more creative approach. He began to scoop out the warm, soft part of the bread and left the crust intact.

In other words, he had the wisdom to focus on the best part of the bread and leave the rest. Someone once said to me at a seminar, “Children come to us more highly evolved than adults to teach us the lessons we need to learn.”

What we focus on will determine our destiny and so we must start focusing on the good stuff.

If your level of inspiration is lower than you know it should be, read a good self-help book or listen to a motivating audiocassette program. Attend a public lecture by someone you admire or spend a few hours studying the biography of one of your heroes. Start spending time with people who are passionate about what they are doing in their lives and dedicated to making the best out of life. With a healthy dose of inspiration, you will quickly raise your life to a whole new plane of living.

“Those who don’t make time for exercise must eventually make time for illness.”

Learn to Be Silent

When was the last time you made the time to be silent and still? When was the last time you carved out a chunk of time to enjoy the power of solitude to restore, refocus and revitalize your mind, body and spirit?

All of the great wisdom traditions of the world have arrived at the same conclusion: to reconnect with who you really are as a person and to come to know the glory that rests within you,

you must find the time to be silent on a regular basis. Sure, you are busy. But as Thoreau said: “It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The...

Many ships ran aground and many lives were lost because the lighthouse keeper forgot to focus on his priority. He neglected his primary duty and paid a high price.

Experiencing solitude, for even a few minutes a day, will keep you centered on your highest life priorities and help you avoid the neglect that pervades the lives of so many of us.

And saying that you don’t have enough time to be silent on a regular basis is a lot like saying you are too busy driving to stop for gas ...

Think About Your Ideal Neighborhood One of the things I have done along my quest for self-knowledge is to make a list of all the people I wished lived next door to me.

These are men and women from both the past and present who I would love to be able to drop in on for a quick cup of tea every once in a while and share a laugh with from time to time.

The very act of listing your “ideal neighbors” will connect you to many of the values and traits you respect the most in people and, in doing so, help you to discover more about yourself as a person. ...

Here are some of the people on my list: Norman Vincent Peale, the famed author of The Power of Positive Thinking Henry David Thoreau, the great American philosopher and the author of Walden, one of my favorite books Baltasar Gracian, the Jesuit scholar who became one of Spain’s greatest writers Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer Nelson Mandela, the freedom fighter Og Mandino, self-help author of such classics as A Better Way to Live and University of Success Mother Teresa, the respected humanitarian Richard Branson, the British tycoon and adventurer Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the...

Take a moment right now to jot down some of the people whom you wished lived on your street. Then think about the qualities that make these men and women so admirable and how y...

The first step to realizing your life vision is defining it. And the first step to becoming the person you want to be is identifying th...

Get Up Early Getting up early is a gift you give to yourself. Few disciplines have the power to transform your life as does the habit of early rising.

rising early will provide you with at least one quiet hour for yourself during the most crucial part of your day: the beginning. If spent wisely, the rest of your day will unfold in a wonderful way.

One reader of The Monk, a marketing executive, wrote that her stress level fell so dramatically once she started rising early that her team at the office presented her with a paperweight bearing the following inscription: “To our MIP (Most Improved Player). Whatever you are doing, keep doing it. You are an inspiration to us all.”

A consummate late riser, she vowed to stop sleeping in and spending her days making up for time lost while under the blanket. So while her family (and the world around her) slept, she began to get up first at 6 A.M., then at 5:30 A.M. and finally at 5 A.M.

During the free time that she found she had created, she would do all the things she loved to do but had...

Listening carefully to classical music, writing letters, reading the classics and walking were just some of the activities that she used to rekindle her spirit and reconnect ...

See Your Troubles as Blessings During the life leadership seminars I give, I often ask the participants this question: “Who would agree with me that we learn the most from our most difficult experiences?” Inevitably, nearly every hand in the room goes up. Given this, I often wonder why we, as human beings, spend so much of our lives focusing on the negative aspects of our most difficult experiences rather than seeing them for what they truly are: our greatest teachers.

You would not have the wisdom and knowledge you now possess were it not for the setbacks you have faced, the mistakes you have made and the suffering you have endured.

Once and for all, come to realize that pain is a teacher and failure is t...

I respectfully offer the following words of Rainer Maria Rilke, which have helped me greatly when life throws one of its curves my way: … have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present, you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Laugh More According to one study, the average four-year-old laughs three hundred times a day while the average adult laughs about fifteen times a day.

Laughter therapy has even been used to cure illnesses and heal those with serious ailments. As William James, the father of modern psychology, observed, “We don’t laugh because we are happy. We are happy because we laugh.”

21. Spend a Day Without Your Watch Last fall, I did something I have not done for many years: I left my watch at home and spent an entire day without looking at the time. Rather than living by the clock and planning everything I was going to do that day, I simply lived for the moment and did whatever I felt like doing. I became a true human being rather than merely a human doing.

Take More Risks I’ll make you this promise: on your deathbed, in the twilight of your life, it will not be all the risks you took that you will regret the most. Rather, what will fill your heart with the greatest amount of regret and sadness will be all those risks that you did not take, all those opportunities you did not seize and all those fears you did not face.

André Gide observed, “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

The real secret to a life of abundance is to stop spending your days searching for security and to start spending your time pursuing opportunity.

I have posted the following words of Theodore Roosevelt in the study where I write: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Live a Life On being asked about the ups and downs of his career, movie star Kevin Costner responded with these words, “I’m living a life.” I found this reply to be profound. Rather than spending his days judging the events and experiences of his life as either good or bad, he adopted a neutral stance and simply decided to accept them for what they are: a natural part of the path he is on.

We all travel different roads to our ultimate destinations. For some of us, the path is rockier than for others. But no one reaches the end without facing some form of adversity. So rather than fight it, why not accept it as the way of life? Why not detach yourself from the outcomes and simply experience every circumstance that enters your life to the fullest? Feel the pain and savor the happiness. If you have never visited the valleys, the view from the mountaintop is not as breathtaking.

Remember, there are no real failures in life, only results. There are no true tragedies, only lessons. And there really are no problems, only opportunities waiting to be r...

Recently, I saw an Italian movie called Life Is Beautiful. Though it was subtitled, it kept me riveted for nearly three hours and moved me like no film I have seen in quite some time. Much of the story centers on a loving father and his relationship with his young son. Early on, the two are inseparable and share many great times. Suddenly, one afternoon, the two are taken away from their home and placed on a train bound for Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi concentration camp. The rest of the movie shows the incredible lengths the father goes to, not only to keep his son alive, but to actually keep him happy through their horrifying ordeal. Though the father ultimately sacrifices his own life at the end, Life Is Beautiful is a powerful reminder that living is a gift and we must make the best of it, every day of our lives.

A good movie can restore your perspective, reconnect you to the things you value most and keep you enthusiastic about all the things in your life. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

Focus on the Worthy

So on that flight, sitting 35,000 feet above the world below, I promised myself that I would commit myself to eliminating the multitude of distractions in my life and concentrate on only the fundamentals, those few activities that really had the power to make a difference in the way I worked and lived.

I promised to stop reading six newspapers a day, handling every piece of mail that appeared in my in-basket and accepting every dinner invitation that came my way. I even had the title of your chapter on personal effectiveness, which you aptly called

‘Focus on the Worthy,’ made into a plaque that I keep on my desk to remind me that ‘the person who tries to do everyt...

Time is your most precious commodity and yet most of us live our lives as if we have all the time in the world. The real secret to getting control of your life is to restore a sense of focus in your days.

The real secret to getting things done is knowing what things need to be left undone.

Once you start spending the hours of your days only on those high-leverage activities and priorities that will advance your life’s missi...

Many of history’s greatest thinkers have arrived at the same conclusion. The sage Confucius put it this way, “The person who ...

Management guru Peter Drucker made the point of wisdom in yet another way when he wrote, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Write Thank-You Notes The things that are easy to do are also the things that are easy not to do.