Prince Rahul's Key Ideas from The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny
by Robin Sharma

We need to cultivate our minds like a gardener cultivates a magnificent garden. Sowing good seeds will eventually produce tasty fruits and beautiful flowers. Improve your quality of life by improving your quality of thoughts. It’s impossible to remove negative thoughts from your mind completely. Letting your negative thoughts take over is equivalent to under-watering your plants and leaving all your trash in your garden.

• A lighthouse aims to show people the right direction. Similarly, we need to choose the right path in our lives. But you can only find the right path if you know your destination. Your destination is your purpose.

• Sharma believes that unwritten goals are not actually goals.

Kaizen is the Japanese method for improvement and optimization. It directly translates into continuous learning and improvement. This idea is most commonly applied to sumo wrestlers, who have to be very disciplined to maintain their large size and skill set. It’s a process that involves optimization and incrementally improving in the crucial areas of your life, business, and work. 

• The notion of discipline encourages you to consistently perform small acts of courage.

• Wage war against the weaker thoughts that have crept into the palace of your mind. These thoughts will then see that they are unwanted and leave like unwelcome visitors.

• Time is the most precious commodity. We all have twenty-four hours a day, but effective time management separates the successful and mediocre. Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return. Time mastery leads to life mastery. So, focus on your priorities and maintain balance. Procrastination is a habit many of us have that just wastes time. 

• Respecting and paying full attention to your time will allow you to live your life to the fullest.

• The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your contributions to the world. To achieve wholeness, you should practice daily acts of kindness, give generously, and focus on your relationships with others. To cultivate the sacredness of each day, live to give. By elevating the lives of others, you elevate your own life.

• The satisfaction of helping others is priceless. So, give to those who ask and cultivate richer relationships. Always be kind and compassionate toward others. 

• Live in the “now”. Savor the gift of the present.

• Never sacrifice happiness for achievement.

• Savor the journey and live each day as your last.

• We are all here for some special reason. Stop being a prisoner of your past. Become the architect of your future. Our human brains are designed so that we tend to get disturbed when thinking of our past and worry about the future. We rarely enjoy the small positive moments that we have in the present. These moments are the real diamonds in your life.

1. Have a clear vision of your outcome.

2. Create positive pressure to keep you inspired.

3. Never set a goal without attaching a timeline to it. 

4. Stay with your goal for 21 days.

5. Enjoy the process.

The Ancient Rule of 20

This ancient rule is like the 80/20 principle that says our 20% activities give 80% of the result. You must try to incorporate more 20% activities into your life to fully respect your time.

The Deathbed Mentality

To make full use of your time, you must have the courage to say no to requests. One way to increase your chances of doing so is to adopt the deathbed mentality. Live every day as if it were your last.