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

by Robin Sharma

One of the lessons I have learned in my own life is that if you don’t act on life, life has a habit of acting on you. The days slip into weeks, the weeks slip into months and the months slip into years. Pretty soon it’s all over and you are left with nothing more than a heart filled with regret over a life half lived.

Every second you dwell on the past you steal from your future. Every minute you spend focusing on your problems you take away from finding your solutions.

If you have suffered more than your fair share of difficulties in life, perhaps you are being prepared to serve some greater purpose that will require you to be equipped with the wisdom you have acquired through your trials.

“if your priorities don’t get scheduled into your planner, other people’s priorities will get put into your planner.”

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.

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.”

If you are speaking and the person you are having a conversation with has not said something within the past sixty seconds, there is a good chance you have lost her and it’s time to stop talking so much.

“I wept because I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet.” It is so easy to magnify our problems and lose sight of the many blessings we all have to be so very grateful for. Giving the gift of your time by volunteering to serve those who have less than you is an excellent way to remind yourself on a regular basis of the abundance that exists in your life.

“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Stop complaining about having no time for yourself and get up an hour earlier. You have the option, why not exercise it? Stop complaining about not being able to exercise given all that is on your plate these days. If you sleep seven hours a night and work eight hours every day, you still have more than sixty-three hours of free time every week to do all the things you want to do. This amounts to 252 hours every month and 3,024 hours every single year to spend on life’s pursuits.

“When my son was growing up, he constantly asked me to give him piggyback rides. Though I knew how much he loved them, I was always too busy to play with him. I had reports to read or meetings to attend or calls to make. Now that he has grown up and left our home, I have realized one thing: I would give anything in the world to give that little boy a piggyback ride.”

it is easy to fall into the habit of condemning others, even those we love most. We criticize the way someone eats or the manner in which she speaks. We focus on the most minute details and find fault with the smallest of issues. But what we focus on grows. And if we keep focusing on a small weakness in someone, it will continue to grow in our minds until we perceive it to be a big problem in that person.