Review of The monk who sold his ferrari – By Robin Sharma
“The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny, by Robin Sharma, is an interesting book — as the subtitle suggests, it’s a fable, and it’s one that will certainly make you give some thought to your life, your goals, your dreams and how your daily habits help you reach those dreams. In other words, right up the Zen Habits alley.
The Fable
“As this sumo wrestler starts to move around the garden, he finds a shiny gold stopwatch which someone had left behind many years earlier. He slips it on, and falls to the ground with an enormous thud. The sumo wrestler is rendered unconscious and lies there, silent and still. Just
when you think he has taken his last breath, the wrestler awakens, perhaps stirred by the fragrance of some fresh yellow roses blooming nearby. Energized, the wrestler jumps swiftly to his feet and intuitively looks to his left. He is startled at what he sees. Through the bushes at the
very edge of the garden he observes a long winding path covered by millions of sparkling diamonds. Something seems to instruct the wrestler to take the path, and to his credit, he does. This path leads him down the road of everlasting joy and eternal bliss.”
The Concepts
The core of the book is the Seven Virtues of Enlightened Learning, which Julian Mantle reveals one by one. Now, although the book presents them as actual Virtues learned from Himalayan gurus, it’s important to remember as you read that these are made up by the author — actually, he pulled them from other sources and put them together:
1) Master of your Mind
— The garden from Yogi Raman’s fable represents the mind. A lot of people end up littering their mental gardens with waste – that is, negative thoughts or fears.
2) Follow your purpose
— The second virtue of the Sivana System is all about purpose. This principle is represented in the fable by the lighthouse.
3) Practice KAIZEN
— Remember the sumo wrestler? Well, he represents a virtue in the Sivana System, too. This virtue is called kaizen, a Japanese word that means constant, never-ending improvement. It’s all about unlocking your potential.
4) Live with Discipline
— There’s another quality to recall about the sumo wrestler in the fable. He was stark naked apart from the pink wire cable covering his privates!
5) Respect your time
— This fifth virtue is respect your time. we have to use our time very wisely. we have put proper hours into the work and proper hour into our personal growth. this virtue is based on work-life balance.
6) selfless serve to others
— the sixth virtue is based on to give back to the society what we have learn from this book. our quality of life is based on quaity of contribution to our society.
7) Embrace the present.
— the seventh and last virtue is based on “living in the now”. we cannot change our PAST but with the help of good habits we can make changes into our present and these little changes can lead us to good future. no matter how rough or low our present is but we have to embrace it and keep moving forward.
each of these Virtues is discussed in some detail in separate chapters, each of them with a number of concepts and habits to develop. Most of them are very inspiring and potentially very useful. After reading the book, I incorporated several of them into my life, including the ones that involve positive thinking, visualizing goals and more. Again, these are not new concepts, and have been discussed in many other books, but the book presents a great collection of useful concepts that you might want to try out.
The book is totally focus on self-realization. It also focuses on striking a work-life balance.
To quote: “Investing in yourself isthe best investment you will ever make”.
if you want to read this book you can purchase this book from
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