MERCHANT OF HAPPINESS

Twenty-five years after The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma is older and wiser in his latest book

- ANJULY MATHAI

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact reason why The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, a fable about how to live your dreams, became such a big hit when it was released in 1996. Perhaps because it addressed the innate discontent in the human condition. Or perhaps because it promised to satiate what Sharma calls “the appetite to know the next mountaintop. To see how far we can go.” Whatever the reason, the world lapped it up. The book went on to sell more than four million copies, catapulting Sharma into the world of leadership and personal mastery. He would go on to write a dozen books and hold workshops for millions of people, including billionaires, titans of industry and clients like NASA, Microsoft and Yale.

Twenty-five years after The Monk…, Sharma is older and wiser. Gone is the idealism of his youth. One could perhaps say that he has come down from the rarefied stratosphere of eastern mysticism to the plains of the ‘everyday hero’. “I used to talk a lot about changing the world in my books, but now I am much more about the idea of an everyday hero,” he tells THE WEEK. “Some people can live big lives in small ways. Not everybody has to be a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa or a Nelson Mandela. If you are a gardener, a taxi driver or a baker, or if you are working in a shop on a busy street, that is as important as someone who evangelises the world. So, we can all be everyday heroes.”