February’s Good Read: “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” – Robin Sharma

By writing this review, I am outing myself as a reader of self-improvement and personal development books written by motivational writers, but hey let’s face it who doesn’t need a little self-reflection every other month to reevaluate one’s life and learn more about its purpose and essence? As this genre of books is being promoted by publishers and have hit all bookstores amid a storm of hype, we should be very selective about what we put into the lush garden of our mind.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, written by Robin Sharma, first published in 1996, is a fable more like an inspiring tale on how to build a life with greater meaning, courage, balance, abundance and joy. It is a wonderfully crafted story about Julian Mantle, a successful young lawyer trying to recover from a spiritual crisis in his unbalanced life. The monk’s odyssey provides its readers with practical lessons which personally hit home for me, such as:
Developing Joyful Thoughts, Following Our Life’s Mission and Calling, Cultivating Self-Discipline and Acting Courageously, Valuing Time as Our Most Important Commodity, Nourishing Our Relationships, and Living Fully, One Day at a Time.

Maybe it is my prejudice but I am honestly not a huge fan of “fables” as I find them a little boring, childish and in most cases the writers tend to deliver the message in a condescending way when straight-forward non-fiction would have done the job. However, since I happened to have read this book at a time where I was living abroad and alone trying to figure out my career path and what I really wanted from this life, I applied myself to push through and I am so glad I did. My advice for you is to open your mind to the ideas in the books so you would find them life-altering, otherwise, you will tend to feel bored and never actually complete it.

This book may not be of great literary value, but I can assure you it will bring into your life spiritual discipline and mindfulness to your daily life experiences. February is the perfect timing for you to read it in order to put things into context at the beginning of the year. And if you would like to push your thirst for reading you could also pick up “Life Lessons from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”, a simplified version of the original book which will help you backtrack on 101 valuable and inspirational daily life lessons.

We live in an era where we have to read an “actual book” in order to remember that we have to smile to each other every day, bless the money that we pass on, be humble, focus on the worthy, stop complaining and start living and so on… I mean shouldn’t we anyway be doing these things more unconsciously?