Discover Your Destiny with The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: The 7 Stages of Self-Awakening. Robin Sharma
teacher I’ve mentioned is the wisest, most powerful and most noble person I know. He is an eccentric—a true original—and his ways are unorthodox, to put it mildly. Actually, he’s a bit of a wildman at times. You have never met anyone like him and you never will. But he is so very gifted in his ability to impart life-altering knowledge in a way that speaks to your soul and causes you to experience changes that will open up a beautiful life for you. His lessons will be very helpful as you seek to discover your destiny and live the gorgeous life that is your birthright.
I guess there are no accidents. I met my teacher the day after my epiphany in the motel room. I went to work that day for a meeting with my team, and my human resources manager, Evan Janssen, walked into my office with two tickets to a motivational seminar later that evening. Evan loved these kinds of events and was a huge fan of the whole personal growth movement. I, on the other hand, was a skeptic. To be honest with you, I don’t like motivational speakers at all. I’ve always found them to be a bit like cotton candy—sweet for a few moments but you soon discover that nothing lasts.
Evan’s little boy had his first piano recital that night, so Evan couldn’t attend the seminar. He wanted me to go. He thought the event would lift my spirits and perhaps inspire me to make the changes in my life he knew I needed to get back on track, not only professionally but personally. I told him I didn’t want to go and just couldn’t stomach the trite aphorisms and clichéd homilies commonly recited by motivators. I mentioned that I was still struggling with a lot of things and felt it best to be alone that evening. Then something interesting happened. My colleague, a highly intuitive man, looked deep into my eyes and said, “Dar, trust me on this one. I feel there is a reason you need to go to this seminar. It’s just a feeling I have in my gut. Please go.”
I have always been a man who lived mostly in his head. Reason rather than passion drove me. If something didn’t make sense at an intellectual level, I’d usually discount it. But I’d lived that way my whole life and my life still wasn’t working. I love Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same things and expecting different results.” If I wanted new results in my life I knew I had to behave in new ways. Otherwise my life would look the same, until I died.
Something deep within me suggested that there just might be another way to operate as a human being. I had recently read my very first book of philosophy, though I had never touched that kind of thing before. I don’t know what compelled me to pick it up but I did. Maybe, being in so much pain, I was ready to look anywhere for salvation. It is a truth that in our darkest times we are willing to go the deepest. When life is good, we live superficially; we are not very reflective. But when the seas get rough, we step out of ourselves and ponder why things have unfolded as they have. Adversity tends to make us more philosophical. During times of challenge, we begin to ask ourselves the bigger questions of life, such as why does suffering happen, why do our best-laid plans not work out as we expect, and is life ruled by the silent hand of chance or the powerful fist of choice.
In this book I picked up, the author wrote that the mind is limited while the heart is limitless. The mind can be cruel, causing you to spend the best years of your life living in the past or squandering the present worrying over things that will never happen. The mind craves external power, the kind based on worldly—rather than spiritual—things such as money, position and possessions. The problem with external power is that it is fleeting: when you lose the money, position and possessions, you lose the power. If you have tied your identity to those things, you will also lose a sense of who you are when they fall away. The only power worth anything is authentic power—that which comes from within.
The heart, according to this book, has no desire for these minor pursuits. The heart lives in the present moment, knowing that is where life is to be lived. The heart is concerned with healing into wholeness, love, compassion and service to other human beings. It is aware that each of us is connected at an unseen level, that we are all brothers and sisters of the same family and that happiness comes from giving and supporting the growth of others into their greatest selves. “Give up the drop, become the ocean,” said the brilliant Sufi poet Rumi. The heart knows this truth. Yes, the mind, with all its ability to reason and reflect, is a great tool that the heart should use to support its work, a tool that can be used for things like planning, learning and thinking. But these functions must be done in concert with the heart, and under its guidance. The head and heart must forge a lifetime partnership if one wants to live a beautiful life, the book informed me. They must work in harmony. Live completely in the head and you cannot feel the breath and rhythm of life. Live completely in the heart and you may find yourself acting like a love-struck fool, with poor judgment and no discipline. It’s all a fine balance, one that takes time, energy and understanding to get right.
Standing there, with Evan waiting patiently, I felt a pull to explore something new. Taking a moment to pay attention to what was happening below the surface, I decided to let go of the limitations of reason for a while and trust my deeper feelings. I agreed to go and took the tickets.
Evan reached over and gave me a hug. “We love you, you know.”
I was quiet as emotion welled up inside me on hearing this statement of profound kindness from my long-time colleague. Tears began to flow, partly over the sadness I felt from the way my life had unfolded in recent times and partly from the unconditional love I felt from another human being.
“Thanks, Evan,” I replied. “You’re a good man. I appreciate you.”
“Trust me, Dar, this seminar’s going to be really important for you. And who knows who you’ll meet there?”
Little did I know, I was about to meet the man who would lead me to my greatest life.
We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
That night found me sitting in a room with five thousand other people seeking the answers to life’s biggest questions. Rock music blared from the speakers and a dazzling light show lit up the otherwise dark and cavernous room. There was a palpable energy in the room. Then the speaker emerged. He was handsome, articulate and extremely charismatic. He spoke eloquently and kept the audience’s rapt attention for nearly two hours as he took us on an emotional roller coaster that made us laugh, cry and think about why we lived as we did and how each one of us could make things better. He talked about his childhood growing up without a father. He discussed his brush with cancer and how it helped connect him to the simpler, yet commonly neglected things in life. And he made us laugh at some of his insights, such as “the only thing you can expect in life is the unexpected” and “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” I also appreciated his humility. He said he was not a guru but simply a student of life and joked that his morning prayer involved the request: “God, please help me to become the person my dog thinks I am.”
“Your wounds must be turned into your wisdom,” he repeated throughout the presentation. “Your stumbling blocks can become your stepping stones if you choose. Do not miss the remarkable opportunity that adversity and even tragedy presents. Your life can be made even better by the things that break your heart.”
By the end of his speech, the speaker had each of his listeners spellbound. There was utter silence as we hung on his every word. He closed his presentation with the following statement: “Most people don’t discover how to live until it’s time to die—and that’s a shame. Most people spend the best years of their lives watching television in a subdivision. Most people die at twenty and are buried at eighty. Please, don’t let that happen to you.”
After receiving a thunderous