True Self-Improvement Rests on Only 3 Things

Lessons from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Niklas Göke
Four Minute Books
Published in
5 min readAug 9, 2020

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Photo by Nicolas Häns on Unsplash

“Your ‘I can’ is more important than your ‘IQ.’”

That’s one of the lessons Julian Mantle learned from the Himalayan sages he sought out after selling his Ferrari and quitting his seven-figure career as a lawyer post stress-induced heart attack.

Mantle isn’t real — but Robin Sharma is. Sharma worked as a litigation lawyer until he was 25. He was wealthy, successful, and miserable. In an attempt to free himself from society’s shackles of power and status, he wrote a book about a fictional character who came back from the Himalayas to teach the real Robin what he’d learned about life.

That book became The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari — a million-copy bestseller. It’s written as a conversation between Mantle and Sharma — and the former has plenty of advice on happiness and purpose for the latter.

Here are 3 lessons about what really matters in life.

1. Learn to guard your mind with basic meditation.

When Mantle gets to the Himalayan mountains, a yogi named Raman tells him a fable. The fable takes place in a garden full of beautiful, fantastic-smelling flowers. It’s a calm, restorative oasis — a place you can go to in…

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Niklas Göke
Four Minute Books

I write for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. Read my daily blog here: https://nik.art/