[Book Summary] “The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO” by Robin Sharma

Reading the book “The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO” by Robin Sharma was among those actions which were procrastinated by Vikash multiple times over a span of about 5-6 years.

This book, being a repetitive recommendation from his mentor, elder sister, and even a friend, made it to his reading list and he never picked this book for others.

Three months ago, Vikash, i.e. me, got another push from my sister to read it, and I decided to read it.

This is a summary to the book “The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO”, where I am sharing my understanding of the book along with a few quotes/excerpts from it.

I see this book as an experiential journey through the lead character named Jack, who is bound to meet three different teachers(the Saint, the Surfer, and the CEO) across the globe while staying with each of them for a month.

Keynote

The book “The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO” reflects on ideas that make our routine lives easy, peaceful and flourishing. Three different teachers with three different journeys are sharing knowledge they have earned so that we can open our hearts towards life, we learn to respect and love ourselves, and discover ourselves in relationships with other people.

When we lose our connection to our hearts, we essentially lose the connection to that spiritual child within us.

The first lesson from the book I learnt is to “Stop struggling and start being”.  In being myself there is no struggle or trying, it just happens 🙂

Summary

The storyline starts with a conversation between Jack and the Saint, father Mike, of the Catholic Church in Rome, where we learn about Self Discovery and experience Life as a personal growth school. We leave Rome, stronger and wiser, to meet our second teacher.

We visited our second teacher, Mr. Moe, the Surfer in Hawaii.  Moe discusses the Illusion of Happiness we all live with. He insists on self-love, living in the present and Out Picturing(What we think is what we get). We leave Hawaii, compassionate and joyful, to meet our next teacher.

Thereafter, we get an opportunity to meet our third and last teacher of the Story, Tess, the CEO in New York City. Tess shared insights on Abundance Mentality, the importance of human connections to create a long-lasting business and relationships.

Life – A Personal Growth School

The book reminded me of a rudimentary lesson that “everything happens for a reason”. Life represents a personal growth school where we are destined to learn lessons and move forward. It made me reflect on life events. Be it a person, a behavior, a  moment or an emotion, it has a lesson for me to learn. The quicker I learn the lesson, the quicker I grow and move forward to the next event.

We often find ourselves stuck in a situation or pain because life has presented a lesson for us to learn from it, If we don’t learn it at the first attempt, life repeats the situation for us until we learn the lesson and move forward. We are entitled to learn from situations based on our experiences and not suffer.  It’s about developing wisdom and lifestyle from the experiences we get across.

Self Discovery – Stop Struggling and Start Being

Struggle breeds stress, and stress is a great barrier to living in a state of grace, ease and flow – the kind of state we need to be in to attract our best life to us.

We see ourselves struggling, pushing and trying to do something we aspire to, which is too much of doing, and lack enough being. We don’t respect the laws of nature. 

Growing a flower isn’t a struggle or trying, it just happens by itself, and pushing it to grow rather kills the thing. Similarly, we should stop pushing our lives and let it flow like an ocean which can’t be pushed in general. It’s against the rules of nature.

Illusion of Happiness & Out Picturing

Moe explained that the biggest illusion of happiness is to connect our happiness to materialistic accomplishments. Happiness is opening our hearts like a child and living in the moment. One of the most effective ways to get out of our head and away from all of that mental chatter that prevents us from living in the present moment is to spend more time in our body.

Out Picturing – It establishes that the internal will always become our external because all things are created twice: First in our mind and then in reality.

From my past experiences, for me It is easy to understand that the thoughts we think are actually like magnets, attracting into our life, people and events that harmonize with them. So we need to be thoughtful about what we are attracting in our lives 🙂

Abundance Mentality

The conversation with the CEO, Tess, enables us to inclusiveness to spread love and happiness in our vicinity. I can see a really important point here. Every time we do something good for another person, we not only improve their lives, we also improve our own self-worth. The more we serve other people, the better we feel about ourselves at a root level. Our self-esteem rises and we feel better about ourselves as human beings.

Ultimately, “our self respect, the amount of love we have for ourselves” will grow. We will be happy in our lives in direct proportion to the degree to which we will be helpful to the world.

Tess shared a little advice which may look insignificant initially, and is magical when practiced. Whenever we meet someone, we perceive and make hundreds of opinions about the person driven by our internal thoughts, their appearance, behavior, gestures etc.

What we need to do instead is just to take a second and remind ourselves to honor the goodness within them.

Locking in an appreciation for them as the magnificent human creatures that they are. It will make a profound difference in the way they respond to us. And we’ll feel more fulfilled in our work and in our life as a whole.

Being loving doesn’t mean being weak. A wise human being blends compassion with courage.

Importance of Human Connections

Tess says, “We maintain a ‘Trust Account’ with every person in our life. Whenever we interact with someone, we’re either making deposits into the account or withdrawing from it. Every time we follow through on a commitment we’ve made, every time we take a moment to say ‘thank you’, every time we show real interest in someone, and every time we authentically help others is a deposit.”

And every time I put myself first.

It is a withdrawal.

Each time we fail to do what we said we would do, neglect to return a phone call, speak about someone behind their back, or fail to deliver a high-quality product, we make withdrawals. Daily deposits deepen the relationships, while daily withdrawals diminish it. And the interesting thing is that when we have a lot invested in that trust account, we can make a few withdrawals without too much of a problem.

Manifesting our Desires

We are humans and we have aspirations too. It is important to be thoughtful about what our best life looks like and what we want in our ideal future. We break that vision down into a strategy to execute it. It leads us to our aspirations. Author has suggested these 5 Steps as a guideline to manifest our heart’s desires:

1. Articulate a Vision: We must name what we desire in our life.
2. Develop our Strategy: Always be thinking about what our best life looks like and what we want in our ideal future. Then break that vision down into a strategy to execute it under.
3. Set-up a Self-Contract: Make an agreement with ourselves stating what we plan to do and when you plan to do it. It puts in place an all-important accountability structure. Without a structure to ensure that we remain accountable to keeping the promises we’ve made around manifesting the desire, It’s easy to let things slip.
4. Measurement: Retrospect daily, measure day’s achievement against the goal. Improve or make changes as required.
5. Celebrate your wins 🙂

Wrap Up

I found this book a good read which offers a collection of lessons to make our lives happier, easy going and productive if followed. This has worked as a reminder to me so as to keep my inner child alive and have a mindset of learning and growing forever throughout life.

It is easy to be in a state of being and not in a state of trying or doing something which isn’t in harmony. Probably this is the same reason we keep hearing about having a profession which aligns well with passion! 🙂

Click here to buy “The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO” by Robin Sharma from Amazon.in

Have you already read the book? I’ll be happy to know about your views about the book in the comments section.

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