Robin Sharma

Robin Sharma was born in 1964 in Uganda to Indian parents and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada after his family emigrated. He followed an academic path — a bachelor’s degree from Dalhousie, two law degrees (LL.B. and LL.M.) from Dalhousie and the University of Ottawa — and built a successful career as a litigation lawyer for the Ministry of the Attorney General in Canada.

From the outside, it was a life that worked. Inside, it wasn’t. In the early 1990s, burned out and looking for something deeper, Sharma began writing on the side — pulling together the reading he was doing in Eastern philosophy, Western leadership texts, and personal-development classics into a single fable about a high-powered lawyer who collapses from a heart attack, sells his Ferrari, and goes to India seeking wisdom.

He self-published The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari in 1997 after every major publisher rejected it. He printed it at a local Kinko’s. He sold copies from the trunk of his car at speaking events. Within a year HarperCollins had picked it up. Within five years it was a worldwide phenomenon — more than 5 million copies sold, translated into 70+ languages, adapted into plays and documentaries around the world.

Sharma left law and built a leadership training business that would eventually coach Nike, NASA, Microsoft, FedEx, IBM, Yale, and Oracle. He advised the Ritz-Carlton on service culture. He was hired as a personal performance coach by Fortune 500 CEOs, NBA and NFL teams, and — according to confidentiality agreements that have since become public — at least one member of a European royal family.

In 2018 he published The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life. Built around the same fable structure as The Monk — a cynical entrepreneur, a mysterious billionaire, a spartan mentor — it systematized what Sharma had been teaching for twenty-five years: that the quiet, protected hours before 6am are the single most powerful productivity tool available to anyone. The book’s 20/20/20 Formula (20 minutes of intense exercise, 20 minutes of journaling/planning, 20 minutes of reading/learning) became one of the most-shared personal-development frameworks of the past decade. It sold millions of copies globally and catapulted the phrase “5AM Club” into the mainstream vocabulary.

Sharma’s other major works include The Leader Who Had No Title (2010), The Greatness Guide (2006), and Who Will Cry When You Die? (1999) — each developed the same underlying philosophy: leadership is a set of daily practices, not a title. His Instagram (@robinsharma) has over 2 million followers and serves as a daily-meditation stream for his community.

His central teaching, stripped down: ordinary people become extraordinary by winning the first hour of their day, every day, for a long time. Mastery is the cumulative interest on a thousand quiet mornings nobody else is awake for.