The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is the book published in 1999, written by Robin Sharma. In this read, you will get a summary of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari book.
This book is unfolding story of a lawyer Julian Mantle and helps us understand a simple yet meaningful path to live life.
Table of Contents
Book statistics:
- Author: Robin Sharma
- Sales : More than 15 million copies
- Languages: Available on Amazon in many languages
- Book genre: Self-help book
- Achievements: International bestselling author
- Page count: 198
- Reading length: ~230 minutes (at speed of 250 WPM (words per minute))
Mock book image created for blog.
The actual book cover is different.
The author takes us through a story of Julian Mantle who is a successful lawyer, lives in a big luxurious house and travels in his Ferrari. He was rich and successful however he often finds himself frustrated because of stressful work. One sudden day while working in the courtroom, this stress pressure results in a cardiac heart attack.
He was directly taken to the hospital for treatment. After his recovery, he just vanished from the hospital. No one knows where is Julian.
After three years, he reached out to his friend John in his office to tell him the story about the past three years. When John looked at his friend Julian, he was looking 10 years younger than his actual age. Julian has reduced weight and looking very calm and peaceful.
After flying away from the hospital, he sold his home and Ferrari. He went to India to travel. He met many monks in the Himalayas(Northern part of India) and learned many things from them.
He met a monk named “Yogi Raman” who told him a story of seven virtues. This story holds seven lessons which you can apply to your life.
Story of seven virtues
This story starts with a very beautiful garden. Everything is calm and pleasant there. You can hear bird whispering and smell the floral scent. It’s the most beautiful garden you have ever experienced.
There is a big lighthouse in the middle of this garden. It’s very high and looks odd in the middle of the garden. You hear the sound of the door opening from the bottom of the lighthouse.
Guess what is coming out of it? A giant sumo wrestler comes out of the lighthouse. He is taking steps slowly towards you. He is almost naked and wearing only wire cable underwear. After roaming in the garden for some time, this sumo finds something.
Sumo finds a gold wristwatch lying somewhere in the garden. He picks it up and starts steering at it. He wore it on his wrist. After some time, he fills unconscious and falls on the floor. When you go to check this fainted sumo whether he is alright or not. He starts opening his eyes slowly and wakes up.
You realize that he wakes up because of the aroma coming from roses. Sumo is now feeling energetic and happy.
All of sudden he sees a path in front of him which is full of diamonds. He feels that he should follow this path. Along with him, you also realize and decide to walk on this path.
This was the story told by yogi Raman to Julian. This story holds small hidden lessons. Let’s unfold it.
Garden
Garden is a symbol of your mind. This is the basic thing that you should have control of your mind to become successful and happy in your life.
Consider your subconscious as a garden and your conscious thoughts are the gardener/caretaker of your garden. The gardener has to keep garden clean, take care of it and need to keep it safe from insects and animals. These insects and animals are like negative thoughts.
Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
– Robin Sharma
To do it properly as a gardener, you should know how you can keep negative thoughts away and focus more positive attitude. Yoga and meditation would help you be a good gardener for your garden.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a symbol for your purpose of life. What is the purpose of life? If I try to put it in simple words, it’s the biggest goal of your life.
Purpose of a lighthouse is to show the correct way to ships. The same task is performed by your purpose. It shows you a way towards your goals.
Many people don’t know their purpose in life. They just spend their lives running here and there without knowing their end goals. They are doing it because someone else has instructed them to do those tasks.
Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life. – Robin Sharma
This is not the right way of spending life. If you don’t have a purpose, you don’t know the direction to make your footsteps towards a meaningful life.
Give out what you most want to come back. – Robin Sharma
In this book, the author has shared 5 tips to find, work and meet our purpose in life.
1. Visualize the outcome
You should create an image in your mind for your goals, results and expectations from your life.
2. Put light pressure on yourself
I’m not asking to make yourself depressed by applying bad pressure. I’m referring to good pressure here which will encourage you to take actions towards your goals and dreams.
3. Create a timeline
You should define a timeline for your goals. You should set a date for your goals so that you will know what steps you need to take in time you have defined to achieve your goals.
4. Form a habit
It takes 21 days to form a habit. If you are new to something that is going to help you meet your goals then you should follow the same pattern at least for 3 consecutive weeks. Your body and mind will become habitual to it and it would be easy for you to take actions towards your purpose.
There are 12 brain rules which will help you to know how you can leverage your brain powers to form habits for you.
5. Enjoy yourself
If you have formed a purpose which is not contributing happiness and joy in your life then it’s not worth focusing towards it. Rather find out the purpose which will make you feel happy.
Sumo wrestler
Sumo wrestler is a symbol for continuous improvements.
Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make. it will not only improve your life, it will improve the lives of all those around you.
– Robin Sharma
In Japan, Sumo wrestlers are following one philosophy called “Kaizen“.
Kaizen means improvements in small batches. This helps you to keep on improving day by day, process by process. By taking small steps frequently you can achieve big results.
Underwear of sumo explains us discipline. This is something, we have to set for ourselves. It doesn’t matter how much and what, what matters whether it’s solving purpose or not.
The more frequency of discipline you follow in a particular task, the more you will become habitual to it.
For example, If you have decided to wake up at 6 AM daily. You need to have the discipline to achieve that task. You need to sleep on time without spending unnecessary time watching Netflix or videos. Once if a person wears this underwear of discipline, it will be easy for him to wake at 6 AM.
To understand this, I want you to make one promise with yourself for discipline. You need to follow this promise every day with discipline. That is why I just asked for only ONE. It could be waking up at 6 AM daily or taking 30 minutes morning walk or could be reading 10 pages a day.
Pick any ONE, just ONE but make sure you are not going to break this promise. If you follow it, you will realize, your self-discipline is increasing day by day.
Gold watch
This gold watch in the story represents the time. It tells us that we should respect our time since it’s limited.
Everyone has a limited set of time to live. If you don’t remember this thing, you will be sleeping for the entire life and won’t be able to do anything.
To plan and manage your time, what you can do is to make a small, rough schedule of your day in the day before. Just write it down, what you are going to do and at what time? You don’t have to strictly follow it but you have to strickly consider it to manage your time better.
You just have to remember one brutal fact, you have limited time and thus you spend your time wisely. Focus and spend more time on things that are making you happy and taking you towards your goals.
Roses
You remember, the smell of gold roses helped sumo to wake up. Roses are representing kindness and selflessness.
This trying to tell us that we should keep a kind and good nature while behaving with others. You should help others without thinking about your benefits like roses. Roses don’t care that they are not getting anything in return for the help. They help Sumo to wake up and feel energetic but for roses, it is their character to spread aroma in the air.
Helping others is something that will make you happy from inside and fill you with a lot of energy.
Diamond road
This road signifies the importance of present moments of your life.
We are all here for some special reason. Stop being a prisoner of your past. Become the architect of your future.
– Robin Sharma
You don’t have to worry too much about things that happened or things which are going to happen. Things that you can change or can take action on is from the present moment.
Thinking about the past is not going to change anything for you and worrying about unknown future events is a roadblock for your creative thinking which eventually blocking you from taking any actions in present.
The present is the only phase you are living into and you will find all diamond (opportunities) of your life on this path.
Conclusion
If you think of Julian’s story, it will be showcasing the story of our society nowadays. Very much high value is given to status and money. People spend most time of their lives running behind these two things.
But like Julian, at some period, people do realize that Money or status is not going to be the purpose of their life.
What society thinks is of no interest to me. All that’s important is how I see myself. I know who I am. I know the value of my work.
– Robin Sharma
That is why I think, we all need to sell our Ferrari one day.
I know, we don’t have Ferrari to sell but Ferrari is the symbolic representation of things which are not worth providing attention too. Like Money and status.
You can sell these things from your life, I’m sure you will work more towards your purpose of life and may find yourself filled with happiness on the road of a meaningful life.
The point here is not that you sell everything and go invisible in life, the point here is to identify and focus on things which matters to you and your purpose.
If you take my example, I’m a working professional earns more than six figures in a month but this is not something that makes me complete. I don’t want to run behind money, I’m behind the happiness of giving. By reading, I’m finding some inspirations for myself and thus I spend my time to spread this awareness by the medium of Reading Monk so that others can make benefits of it too. My purpose is to add values to someone’s life who are also going through struggles like me.
If you wish to purchase this awesome book from Amazon, click here to order it.
I would love to know what is your lighthouse showing and what discipline is your sumo wearing. Please share your experiences on “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” in comments and make sure to share this blog in your social media circle for someone who can make a benefit out of it.
Until next time, never stop reading…
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Thank you
I should have known you’re a burner. Never been to the playa myself, but hubby has. I’m an art car artist in Houston and have been to flipside, which is more conveniently located. Oona Marijn Domenic