Robin Sharma - Life Lessons from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

I know how dramatically the worry habit can reduce one’s quality of life from personal experience. While in my late twenties, I was on the so-called fast track to success. I had received two law degrees from one of the country’s most prestigious law schools, served as the law clerk for a Chief Justice and was handling highly complex cases as a litigation lawyer. But I was often working too hard and worrying too much. I was waking up on Monday morning with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and a deep sense that I was wasting my talents on work that was not aligned with the person I was. So I began to search for ways to improve my life, turning first to the self-help and life leadership literature, where I found a wealth of lessons for a more balanced, peace-filled and meaningful existence.

One of the simple strategies I learned to conquer the worry habit was to schedule specific times to worry – what I now call ‘worry breaks’. If we are facing a difficulty, it is easy to spend all our waking hours focusing on it. Instead, I recommend that you schedule fixed times to worry, say, thirty minutes every evening. During this worry session, you may wallow in your problems and brood over your difficulties. But after that period ends, you must train yourself to leave your troubles behind and do something more productive, such as going for a walk in natural surroundings or reading an inspirational book or having a heart-to-heart conversation with someone you love. If during other times of the day you feel the need to worry, jot down what you want to worry about in a notebook which you can then bring to your next worry break. This simple but powerful technique will help you gradually reduce the amount of time you spend worrying and eventually serve to eliminate this habit forever.

A while ago, I took my four-year-old son Colby to an Italian restaurant for lunch. It was a beautiful autumn day and, as usual, my young son was full of energy and joy. We both ordered pasta for our main course and then started to enjoy the freshly baked bread our waiter had brought. 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.’ And on that fine day, my little boy reminded me that as so-called grown-ups, we spend too much time focusing on the ‘crust of life’ rather than on all the good things that flow in and out of our days. We focus on our challenges at work, the pile of bills we have to pay and the lack of time to do all those things we need to do. But our thoughts do form our world and what we think about does grow in our lives. What we focus on will determine our destiny and so we must start focusing on the good stuff.

In the weeks ahead, make the time to connect to your more playful side, the child within you. Take the time to study the positive qualities of children and model their ability to stay energized, imaginative and completely in the moment no matter what might be going on around them. And as you do, remember the powerful words of Leo Rosten, who observed:

You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them – no matter how impressive they may be – as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much – we simply grow taller. Oh, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

The celebrated inventor Thomas Edison is well known for his statement: ‘Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.’ While I believe that hard work is essential to a life of real success and fulfillment, I think that being filled with a deep sense of inspiration and commitment to making a difference in the world is an even more important attribute.

All of the great geniuses of the world were inspired and driven by their desire to enrich the lives of others. When you study their lives, you will discover that this desire became almost an obsession for most of them. It consumed them and occupied every cell of their minds. Edison was inspired to manifest the visions he saw on the picture screen of his imagination into reality. Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine, was inspired to help others from suffering from this dreaded affliction. And Marie Curie, the great Nobel Prize-winning scientist, was inspired to serve humanity through her discovery of radium. As Woodrow Wilson said, ‘You are not here to merely make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.’

How inspired are you in your own life? Do you jump out of bed on Monday mornings or do you simply lie there with a sense of emptiness flooding through your body? 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.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a colleague in the speaking profession. As we discussed the things we did in our lives to stay focused, balanced and at our peak amid the demands of our busy schedules, he made a powerful point. ‘Robin,’ he said, ‘many people regularly go to a church or temple to stay grounded and centered. I’m a little different. I go to the gym – that’s my temple.’ He added that no matter how busy he is, at 5:30 p.m. he closes his office and makes the ‘daily pilgrimage’ to his gym to run a few miles on the treadmill. Nothing can stop him from taking this time to ensure his health and happiness.

My friend’s observation made me think of a saying of the ancient Romans that I quoted in my first book MegaLiving , ‘mens sana in corpore sano,’ which is Latin for ‘in a sound body rests a sound mind.’ It also made me realize that our bodies need to be treated like temples and considered sacred if we hope to live life fully and completely. Regular exercise will not only improve your health, it will help you think more clearly, boost creativity and manage the relentless stress that seems to dominate our days. And research has proven that exercise will not only add life to your years, it could add years to your life. One study of 18,000 Harvard alumni found that every hour spent on exercise added three hours to the participants’ lives. Few investments will yield a better return than time spent on physical fitness. And remember: ‘Those who don’t make time for exercise must eventually make time for illness.’

In my own life, I have set the goal of swimming five times a week. There is something special about the renewing power of swimming that I cannot begin to describe. I wish I could say I achieve this goal every single week, but I can’t. Yet, having such a lofty objective keeps me focused on how important staying in peak physical condition is for my overall well-being and to the quality of my life. Without fail, every workout in the swimming pool brings the same results: I feel energized, serene, balanced and happy. And my exercise sessions also bring me something that I feel is truly priceless: perspective. After my forty-minute swims, any challenges I might be struggling with seem smaller, any worries I have become trivial and I find myself living fully in the present moment. The act of caring for my physical temple reminds me that life’s greatest pleasures are often life’s simplest ones.