Author Author

by Bob MacKenzie

Robin Sharma is a pleasant surprise. From a man who is neither a physician nor a priest yet who published at his own expense a book offering a perfect life within a month, one might expect at least a little arrogance. When I meet him, Robin Sharma is unassuming and even modest about himself and his book. He strikes me as remarkably relaxed for a man who has just spent a hot Sunday morning driving from Toronto to meet me in Kingston.

It is clear this is a man who is comfortable with where his own life has taken him. His biography reads as a litany of successes.

As a law student, Robin Sharma made Canadian judicial history by becoming the first judicial Law Clerk to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. He was awarded a full scholarship to Dalhousie Law School, which awarded him his Master of Laws degree. He is now employed as a lawyer with the federal government. He regularly publishes scholarly articles on the law and has been a featured speaker at legal seminars and conferences. He lives in a happy home with his wife and son. Robin Sharma indeed seems to have discovered the secret to the perfect life he offers his readers.

In a world overpopulated by talk show self-help experts, Robin Sharma's scholarly interest in self improvement led him on a ten year quest through the ancient philosophies of the Eastern religions to modern gurus of the West from Norman Vincent Peale to Wayne Dyer.

"I have read and appreciated the writings of Norman Vincent Peale and others but I have my own ideas. These ideas go back to ancient times, to ancient India and China. I've clearly been influenced by many other writers who are out there, but I have my own ideas, my own approach.

"I had a desire to find ideas, to develop ideas, to look at techniques and tools people have used to become happy and successful. This is not a medical book. It's a book that contains the best strategies that I could find for living a successful life or becoming happier and for achieving that tremendous potential that we all have inside of us.

"My primary goal in writing this book was to provide an

accessible piece of work for anybody to read. I tried to lay it out in a way that people could read it quickly and easily. The first part of the book is much like a standard textbook, while the third part outlines the thirty day program to a perfect life. The second part contains the 200 powerful master secrets for MegaLiving. You can sit down before you go to bed and read ten tips a night. That's pretty easy reading.

According to Sharma, his thirty day program is not quite so easy, especially in the beginning.

"It's like a muscle when you're doing pushups or arm curls. The first day or two is difficult and your first tendency is to say 'I don't want to go any further'. Once you get to the tenth or fifteenth day, there's a lot less pain and you start enjoying improving your muscles. You start seeing improvements in your health. You develop the habit of fitness and you are rewarded by the changes that you see.

"The mind is no different than a muscle. You improve your mind, your body, and your character and it's like a snowball, improving and improving. Over time, you get more concentration and energy.

"I believe we all have perfect lives. It's a paradigm shift we must take, but an easy one. There's no such thing as a negative experience. There's only an experience from which we can learn, grow, and further blossom."

I was curious why anyone would make the great investment of time, energy, and money involved in self-publishing in a market where there are literally hundreds of books available by acknowledged experts. According to Robin Sharma, over his ten years' research he had discovered methods that worked in his own life and he was eager to share these methods with the world.

"I never once sent the manuscript out to a publisher. Early on, I decided self-publishing was the quickest, best way to do it and ensure the final product was exactly what I hoped it would be and would benefit the readers exposed to it.

"I had a vision of what the book would look like. By publishing MegaLiving! myself, I could come up with the title, control the content, and lay the book out as I wanted. In the process, I had a lot of wonderful learning experiences.

"I'm very happy with the finished product, but I would not recommend self-publishing to others. It is a difficult process."

Ten years seems a long time to research materials for a book of just 157 pages. While an act of scholarship, this decade of research is described by Robin Sharma as more an obsession for personal excellence.

"It was really a focused study with a view to do this book. I was reading, reading, reading, everything I could find. I attended seminars. I was speaking to everyone possible. I travelled extensively and consulted with top people in the field.

"This is really East meets West. Here in the West, we have tools, we have strategies for peak performance. These are not always the same as in the East. Very few people are focusing on the strategies of the East.

"There are people in India who control their heartbeat, who control the mind at levels hard to believe. We all have these potentials. In China there is so much we can learn about diet and longevity.

"There's very little out there that deals with that marriage between the East and the West. That's what makes this book unique. This book compiles the best of both worlds and it's holistic in nature; it is equally for the mind, the body and the character."

I comment that, for a work based largely in Eastern philosophy, "the mind, the body, and the character" resembles very much a parallel to the classic Judeo-Christian trilogy.

Robin Sharma laughs good-naturedly and tells me that it was never his intention to follow one philosophy or the other but to meld the best parts of them all and to make their methods accessible to the average reader.

There is an almost missionary zeal to Robin Sharma's efforts to reach as broad a public as possible. In addition to marketing MegaLiving! through the mail and at book stores, he is booking a series of seminars at health clubs and for groups across Canada. In every aspect, the man in control is Robin Sharma. He tells me, "There is one fundamental principal: run your own race in life.

"Too many people spend their lives achieving in order to be happy at some later date. I believe we should be happy at the same time as we achieve. We should happily achieve. Happiness is not a destination; it's a journey."