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

by Robin Sharma

Everyone loves getting mail — it’s a fact of human nature. We all have a deep-seated need to feel important.

But few acts have the power to build and cement relationships like a heartfelt letter of thanks. It shows you care and that you are considerate and human.

So this week, go out and buy a package of the blank thank-you cards that are now available in bulk at your local office supply warehouse and start writing. You — and all the people that you deal with — will be glad you did.

In these times of rapid change, ideas are the commodity of success. All it takes is one idea from the right book to reshape your character or to transform your relationships or to revolutionize your life. A good book can change the way you live as the philosopher Henry David Thoreau observed in Walden, “There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.

How high you will rise in your life will be determined not by how hard you work but by how well you think.

As I say in my leadership speeches, “The greatest leaders in this new economy will be the greatest thinkers.”

And the person you will be five years from now will come down to two primary influences: the people you associ...

I often joke with my seminar audiences that I play “Cinderella Tennis”: I try hard but I never quite make it to the ball. Yet when I play tennis with someone better than I am, something almost magical happens to my game. I make shots that I have never made before, gracefully floating through the air with an ease that would make even the best player blush. Reading good books creates much the same phenomenon. When you expose your mind to the thoughts of the greatest people who have walk...

Deep reading allows you to connect with the world’s most creative, intelligent and inspiring people, twenty-four hours a day. Aristotle, Emerson, Seneca, Gandhi, Thoreau, Dorothea Brande, and many of the wisest women and men who grace our planet today are just waiting to share their knowledge with you through their books. Why wouldn’t you seize such an op...

Create a Love Account Mother Teresa once said, “There are no great acts. There are only small acts done with great love.” What small acts can you do today to deepen the bonds between you and the people you value the most?

Buying your partner fresh cut flowers for no reason at all, sending your best friend a copy of your favorite book or taking the time to tell your children in no uncertain terms how you feel about them are all good places to start.

If there is one thing that I have learned in life, it is that the little things are the big things.

Get Behind People’s Eyeballs One of the deepest of all the human hungers is the need to be understood, cherished and honored.

List Your Problems “A problem well stated is a problem half solved,” said Charles Kettering.

There is something very special that happens when you take out a piece of paper and list every single one of your problems on it. It is very much like the peaceful feeling you get after telling your best friend about something that has been troubling you for weeks. A weight somehow falls from your shoulders. You feel lighter, calmer and freer.

I have discovered that while our minds can be our best friends, they can also be our worst enemies. If you keep thinking about your problems, pretty soon...

The mind is a strange creature in this regard: the things you want it to remember it forgets, but all those things yo...

Among the many successful people who have used this technique are martial arts master Bruce Lee and Winston Churchill, who once said, “It helps to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear; about two, nothing can be done, so it’s no use worrying; and two perhaps can be settled.”