Who Will Cry When You Die?

Who Will Cry When You Die? – Book Review

When I was born, I cried while the world rejoiced, but if I die, will the world cry while I rejoice?

     — Book Reviewer: David Oletu

Book Title: Who Will Cry When You Die?

Author: Robin Sharma

Page Count: 108

Publisher: Jaico Books

Year: 1999

Website: www.robinsharma.com

Reviewer: David Oletu

Robin Sharma’s book poses a series of thought-provoking questions, beginning with the title itself: “Who will cry when you die?”

How many lives will you touch while you have the privilege to walk this planet? What impact will your life have on the generation that follows you? What legacy will you leave behind after you have taken your last breath?

Coincidentally, Robin Sharma’s ‘Who will cry when you die’ was published in the year I was born. It took me down memory lane to my ‘bloody birth bed.’ I can’t recall how cute and tender my cry sounded at birth, for I was still a baby.

But I can imagine how excited everyone felt at my arrival on earth. Now that I am grown, is the excitement still in the air? Are my family still happy and proud to have me here on earth? Am I even excited about the kind of life I am living in the first place?

Sharma’s book makes me reflect on how far I have come and if I am truly living a purposeful and meaningful life that will make people not just celebrate me when I was born but also appreciate and gloriously immortalize my legacy in their hearts and works when I am gone. And that when I am gone, I can boldly face the judgment seat in heaven, breathe in and out, with a golden smile of relief on my face, expressing the joy of fulfilment.

Are you that person who can’t find greater meaning in your life? Or are you that person who is probably wondering how you can make a lasting contribution to life through your work and how you can enjoy the journey of life before it is too late? If you are at this table, then this book will also be of great help to you.

Robin Sharma gives 101 ways we can lead a better and more fulfilled life; however, in this review, I will be kind enough to share 10 with you and leave you with your curiosity to find out more.

1. Discover Your Calling: Sharma believes that we all have special talents that are just waiting to be engaged in worthy pursuits; thus, he teaches that we should find our calling, i.e., we should bring more of ourselves into our work and focus on the things we do best.
2. Every day, be kind to a stranger: Sharma remarks that everyone who enters our life has a lesson to teach and a story to tell, and if we make even one person smile during our day or brighten the mood of one stranger, our day has been a worthwhile one. According to Sharma, kindness is the price we must pay for the space we occupy on this planet.
3. Practice Tough Love: Sharma calls the habit of self-discipline ‘Tough Love’. He believes that we will begin to live life more deliberately when we become stricter with ourselves, rather than simply reacting to life the way a leaf floating in a stream drifts according to the flow of the current on a particular day.

Sharma states that the quality of our lives is ultimately shaped by the quality of our choices and decisions, and if we constantly flex our willpower by making those choices that we know are the right ones (rather than the easy ones), we will take back control of our lives.

4. Keep a Journal: Sharma claims that maintaining a daily journal is one of the best personal growth initiatives we will ever take. He posits that writing down our daily experiences along with the lessons we have drawn from them will make us wiser with each passing day, and it will help us clarify our intentions so that we will remain focused on the things that truly count.
5. Develop an Honesty Philosophy: According to Sharma, saying things we don’t really mean becomes a habit when we practice it long enough. Sharma reveals that the real problem is that when we don’t keep our word, we lose credibility. When we lose credibility, we break the bonds of trust. And breaking the bonds of trust ultimately leads to a string of broken relationships. Sharma further teaches that we should be people of our words rather than being ‘all talk and no action’.
6. Honour Your Past: Sharma contends that every second we dwell on the past, we steal from our future—every minute we spend focusing on our problems, we take away from finding our solutions, and thinking about those things that we wish never happened to us is blocking all the things we want to happen from entering our lives.

Sharma goes on to opine that rather than spend all our time worrying about our past events and mistakes, we should use the lessons we have learned from our past to rise to a whole new level of awareness and enlightenment.

7. Learn to say NO gracefully: According to Sharma, the most effective people concentrate on their ‘areas of excellence’ i.e., on the things they do best and on those high-impact activities that will advance their lives. Sharma claims that those sets of people find it easy to say no to distractions that clamour for their attention when they are consumed by the most important things.

Sharma teaches that learning to say NO to the non-essentials will give us more time to devote to the things that have the power to truly improve the way we live and help us leave the legacy we know in our hearts we are destined to leave.

8. Talk to Yourself: Sharma describes this technique as one that involves nothing more than selecting a phrase (mantra or words of affirmation) that we will train our mind to focus on at different times throughout the day until it begins to dominate our awareness and reshape the person we are. Sharma goes further to give examples of the kinds of affirmations we can use in different situations and encourages us to say and repeat those positive affirmations to fill otherwise unproductive times of our days with a powerful life-improvement force.
9. Remember, genius is 99 percent inspiration. Sharma thinks that being filled with a deep sense of inspiration and commitment to making a difference in the world is an even more important attribute to a real life of success and fulfilment. Sharma quotes Woodrow Wilson, who said, “You are not here to merely make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”
10. See Your Troubles as Blessings: Robin Sharma believes that we would not have the wisdom and knowledge we now possess if not for the setbacks we faced, the mistakes we have made, and the suffering we have endured.

He makes us realize that pain is a teacher and failure is the highway to success.

He goes on to illustrate that we cannot learn how to play the guitar without hitting a few wrong notes, and we will never learn how to sail if we are not willing to tip the boat over a few times.

Sharma encourages us to begin to see our troubles as blessings, to resolve to transform our stumbling blocks into steppingstones and to vow to turn our wounds into wisdom.

I see Robin Sharma’s “Who Will Cry When You Die?” as a big box full of insightful sayings that provide us concise 101 solutions to the life puzzles that seem challenging and leave us wondering how we can live the greatest life possible.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I know you will learn.