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

by Robin Sharma

While almost any reading will improve your mind, in a world where there is too much to do, you must be selective in the books you read. And so, I suggest you spend much of your time reading what Thoreau called “The Heroic Books” — those books that contain “the noblest recorded thoughts of man.” Let your mind drink deeply from the works of the great philosophers, such as Epictetus and Confucius. Study the poems of the wisest poets, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Dickinson and John Keats, and the novels of Leo Tolstoy, Hermann Hesse and the Brontës. Read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa. Connecting with such works for even a few minutes a day will keep you centered on what life is really about and will ultimately profoundly affect your character. Asked in an interview what his biggest regret in life was, talk show superstar Larry King replied, “I should have been better rooted in the great books.”