Book Review: Monk who sold his Ferrari - The usual platitudes!

One of the highly recommended books, I wanted to read this book for over three years now. I read it half way through two years ago, and never got around to completing it. I finally blocked some time on a recent Sunday to read this book, and finished it in one sitting.

This book belongs to the “self-help” genre, in which the author, Robin Sharma, provides a set of techniques to follow that will improve your quality of life – more purpose, more energy, more happiness, etc. When applied, these techniques are supposed to solve your life’s problems. The techniques are described with the help of a fable – in fact, two fables. In one fable, a hot-shot wealthy trial lawyer named Julian Mantle gives away all his material belongings, including his Ferrari, and sets off on a journey to the East – to find the mystic secrets of happy living. He meets a bunch of sages in the East, learns the secrets, and shares it with his friend back in the West. He explains these secrets through another fable. When I first started out reading this book, I was eagerly awaiting for the elusive elixir, but only to be disappointed in the end.

Though the “fable” idea is pretty slick, the book has nothing but banality. There is no great technique that you don’t know about already – it is just that the stuff you know is explained to you in a slightly convincing fashion. Some of the stuff makes sense, though it appears entirely obvious (example - “Write down your goals”, “Wake up early in the morning”, etc.). The book has some contradictions as well – some things the author says in the beginning are contradicted by him in the latter part of the book (if you manage to connect the dots). I also felt that the author’s narrative style a bit redundant – he seems to me like a person with limited expressiveness trying to talk about a lot of things – and ends up talking about all of them in the same vein.

If you have not read many “self-help” books, and are interested to read one, this may be a good read. If you have read some already, or are not interested in that genre, this book has very less to offer. You can read it to revisit some of the obvious techniques you might already know – but don’t expect to get any silver bullet out of this!