The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

The Collapse

A fifty-three-year-old trial lawyer collapses in the middle of a packed courtroom. The bailiff performs CPR on a man wearing a three-thousand-dollar Italian suit. His name is Julian Mantle. He is one of the most distinguished litigators in the country, earns seven figures a year, owns a private jet and a tropical island, and parks a red Ferrari in the center of his driveway. He went to Harvard Law. His father is a federal judge. His grandfather was a senator. By every external measure that this culture knows how to count, Julian Mantle has won.

He looks like he is in his late seventies. He has been telling anyone who will listen that he is sick and tired of being sick and tired, and saying it for years now. The man who used to deliver closing arguments that left juries breathless now rambles. He cites the wrong cases. He resorts to sarcasm where he used to be eloquent. His marriage failed years ago. He doesn't speak with his father. He sleeps a few hours a night because anything more triggers guilt about not working, and every winter he promises himself a vacation in the Caymans that never happens.

This is the wake-up call. Robin Sharma's "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" begins with a man who has the Ferrari and is dying from it. The whole fable that follows is an answer to a question Sharma wants you to feel in your body before he hands you any tools: what good is the life you are building if you are not alive to enjoy it?

The narrator is John, a junior lawyer Julian once picked out of a pile of interns because he liked the kid's hunger. They won the Mother of All Murder Trials together. Julian had a Churchill quote framed on his oak desk about being masters of our fate and having unconquerable will. He believed it. It worked. It also nearly killed him.