10 Life Lessons From Robin Sharma’s Who Will Cry When You Die? For a Better You

I got my hands on Robin Sharma’s Who Will Cry When You Die two weeks ago and I couldn’t quite willingly put it down. And as I completed the book yesterday, I really wanted to spread the word and share it with more people who haven’t soaked themselves in the wonderful wisdom that the author of the bestseller The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari generously shares with his readers through 101 life lessons in which he goes on to reminding us of the things that we have forgotten and teaching us the new ones that we have never quite thought about. 

This post may contain Amazon affiliate links. This just means that I receive a small commission if you purchase something through the links in this post at absolutely no extra cost to you. This is one of the ways I support my blog.

• DISCOVER YOUR CALLING 

We all have special talents that are just waiting to be engaged in a worthy pursuit. We all are here for some unique purpose, some noble objective that will allow us to manifest our highest human potential while we, at the same time, add value to the lives around us. Finding your calling means you need to bring more of yourself into your work and focus on the things you do best. 

• SCHEDULE WORRY BREAKS

If we are facing a difficulty, it is easy to spend all our working hours focusing on it. Instead, schedule fixed times to worry, say, thirty minutes every evening, and use this worry session to wallow in your problems and brood over your difficulties but after this period ends, you must train yourself to leave your troubles behind and do something productive. If during other times of the day you feel the need to worry, jot down what you want to worry about in a notebook which you can then bring to your next worry break. This will help you gradually reduce the amount of time you spend worrying and eventually serve to eliminate this habit forever. 

• LEARN TO BE SILENT

Experiencing solitude, for even a few minutes a day, will keep you centered on your highest life priorities and help you avoid the neglect that pervades the lives of many of us. Saying that you don’t have time to be silent on a regular basis is like saying you are too busy driving to stop for gas – eventually it will catch up with you. 

• THINK ABOUT YOUR IDEAL NEIGHBOURHOOD 

Take a moment right now to jot down some of the people whom you wished lived on your street. Then think about the qualities that make these men and women so admirable and how you might foster such qualities in your own life. The first step to realizing your life vision is defining it. And the first step to becoming the person you want to be is identifying the traits of the person you want to be. 

• CREATE A LOVE ACCOUNT 

Create a love account. Each day, make a few deposits in this very special reserve by doing something small to add joy to the life of someone around you. What random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty can you offer to someone to make his or her day just a little better? The irony of being more compassionate is that the very act of giving to others makes you feel better as well. The little things are the big things. Those tiny, daily deposits into your love account will give you far more happiness than any amount of money in your bank account.

• MASTER YOUR TIME 

Commit yourself to managing your time more effectively. Develop a keen sense of awareness about how important your time really is. Don’t let people waste this most precious of commodities and invest it only in those activities that truly count. 

• PRACTICE FORGIVENESS 

Forgiving someone who has wronged you is actually a selfish act rather than a selfless one. When you bear a grudge against someone, it is almost as if you are carrying that person around on your back with you. He drains you of your energy, enthusiasm, and peace of mind. But the moment you forgive him, you get him off your back and you can move on with the rest of your life. 

• CREATE A PURE ENVIRONMENT 

Take a good, hard look at your environment. Your thoughts are shaped by the people you associate with, by the books you read, by the words you speak, and by your daily physical surroundings. 

Are you spending time at work with negative people? If so, they will eventually make you negative and cynical. 

Are you watching violent TV shows and mindless videos at home? If so, your mind will grow restless and noisy. 

Over the coming weeks, take steps to make the environment you work and live in a better one. You will quickly detect improvements in the way you think, feel and act. 

• LEARN TO MEDITATE

Meditation is a method to train your mind to function the way it was designed to function. And here is the key benefit: the peace and tranquility you will feel after twenty minutes of daily meditation will infuse every remaining minute of the day. You will be more patient in your relationships, more serene at the office, and more happy when you are alone. You cannot afford not to discover the power of this five-thousand-year-old mind-training discipline.

• LIVE FULLY SO YOU CAN DIE PEACEFULLY

Do not wait until you are on your deathbed to realize the meaning of life and the precious role you have to play within it. All too often, people attempt to live their life backwards: they spend their days striving to get the things that will make them happy rather than having the wisdom to realize that happiness is not a place you reach but a state you create. When all the clutter is stripped away from your life, its true meaning will become clear: to live for something more than yourself. 

Review

I had a wonderful time reading Who Will Cry When You Die and I had genuinely not expected it to leave such a profound impact on me when I grabbed it from my bookshelf. In the very first lesson that this book offers, the author shares with us how one conversation with his father left him with an unforgettable awareness. His father said to him, “Son, when you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way that when you die the world cries while you rejoice.”

If you have never been into self-help books for whatever reasons but are planning to invest your time into these books that offer us the wisdom we might have never gotten to learn otherwise –Who Will Cry When You Die is a great one to start with.

It is comparatively smaller and includes 101 lessons or I would say solutions to life problems where each chapter is 2-3 pages. It makes it a very easy read. Just something you can keep up with and complete which will give you a sense of confidence to read more self-help books that will enlighten you with the knowledge and awareness that will help you live your life by choice rather than by chance, by design rather than by default as Robin Sharma mentions in the preface.