Business Book Review: The Everyday Hero Manifesto by Robin Sharma
The Everyday Hero Manifesto will inspire you to turn everyday moments into everyday triumphs. And maximise your potential to serve the world.
My Rating: ★★★★
Length: 400 pages
Publisher: Thorsons/Element GB
Released: 2021
Key Takeaways for Personal Branding
Leadership legend, Robin Sharma, writes The Everyday Hero Manifesto as if it were his last book. The International bestselling author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and The 5am Club understands life is fragile. So, he has meticulously curated his most significant learnings. Learnings he’s shared with business titans, sporting superstars and A-listers.
The book is part manifesto and part manual. It aims to help build positivity, maximise productivity, and encourage service to the world.
Deliberate Practice
Several other authors have previously helped popularise the ‘10,000-hour Rule’. It proposes that it takes at least 10,000 hours to start to develop mastery in your field. It is based on the research of Anders Ericsson. Ericsson studied athletes, chess players, musicians and more. But, Sharma uniquely highlights a term Ericsson also pioneered - ‘deliberate practice’.
In a chapter titled ‘The Hard Worker Who Never Got Any Better’, Sharma highlights that mere training over a long period doesn’t necessarily lead to mastery. What makes someone great is a particular type of practice. It is intentional and deliberate, rather than random or accidental.
Become a ‘Creative Athlete’
In poetic positioning, Sharma proposes to become a ‘Creative Athlete’. Building your body, so you can serve the world and your craft as strongly as possible:
‘Don’t just get fit to look really good. Get strong to lift the world.’
His attention to physical and spiritual health throughout the book dares to go to the depths that his counterparts don’t.
Sharma proposes ‘The 4 interior Empires’ are:
Mindset
Heartiest
Healthiest
Soulset
Re-wiring Your Self-identity
Sharma highlights a fascinating piece of social psychology research. It involved eight men in their seventies. They were brought into a monastery set up that looked exactly as things would have looked 22 years earlier. Some were hunched with canes. Music, books, magazines and other artefacts helped build the time warp.
The research was conducted by Harvard Professor Ellen Langer, now known as the ‘Mother of Positive Psychology’.
After five days, a series of biomarkers of age were tested. In just days, the men looked younger, were physically more supple, had improved manual dexterity and had better eyesight.
Langer concluded that stepping into their younger selves caused rewiring of perceptions and reworking of self-identities. Sharma concludes it’s a life-changing example of how re-ordering your self-identity can transform your capacity for mastery.
Favourite Quotes
“When no one believes in you, it is when you most need to believe in yourself.”
“Life really does favour the obsessed.”
“Small, consistent and regular always beats all fire and bravado at the beginning with a gigantic flameout at the end.”
“Sometimes silence is the loudest reply you can give.”
“Feeding the trolls is a waste of your time. Most critics are jealous because you did what they couldn’t do. Ignore them. And allow mastery to be your response.”
“Supreme artists, architects, inventors and leaders are not born into their skill. Their mastery truly is self-made.”
“Education truly is inoculation against disruption. And the leader who learns the most wins.”
The Everyday Hero Manifesto is raw vulnerability at its best. With intricate attention to detail, Sharma shares his behind-the-scenes life and learnings. Despite his magnificent success, Sharma writes with pure humility. Delivering an act of service for anyone who even just offers a pearl of wisdom may help. Especially the next generation.
Sharma skilfully uses personal stories and photography to build a personal connection with you. He takes you behind the scenes in the writing of many chapters. Painting pictures of his unique writing locations and encounters with those around him.
The Everyday Hero Manifesto shows you how to rise from the ordinary to maximise your ability to serve the world.
The Everyday Hero Manifesto by Robin Sharma: Available on Amazon.
