The Habit of Success

Become The Leader You Were Meant To Be

When it came time for Robin Sharma to carve out a life for himself, becoming a lawyer seemed right. Although he had loving parents, there was never abundance during his childhood, and he was determined to find a way to prosper as an adult. His life as a litigation lawyer provided money, status and all the trappings of the success he envisioned. But Sharma felt something was missing—that a vital part of him was silently starving to death.

After serious thought, he discovered that in achieving his picture-perfect life, he had sacrificed authenticity. “I had lost a clear sense of the vision and values instilled in me as a child and was no longer driven by any mission or passion,” he says. “I made the difficult decision to pull back from the noise of my life and reinvent the way I was living and leading.”

Sharma became a student of authentic leadership. He realized his own success had been skin-deep, prompting a closer examination of his inner motivations. “Dismayed by what I found, I chose to redefine my core values, bringing them in line with what I knew to be right,” he says. “I then started to understand the secrets of true happiness and success.”

With Sharma’s own transformation came an urgency to share his discoveries with others. His resulting work was an intriguing fable titled The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. But as an ordinary guy from a small town, the only way Sharma could become a published author was to self-publish his book. “My mother was my editor, I printed copies of the book at Kinko’s, and my father sold the finished product out of the trunk of his car to anyone who would buy a copy.”