Ancient wisdom in modern book

Finally, after, like, 3 months or thereabouts, I have finished Robin Sharma's The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.

I guess the book would be classified as 'new age' and 'self help'. There's a lot of practical 'wisdom' but I didn't find it all that engaging.

Much of the 'wisdom' is ancient wisdom, which my friend, a Sai Baba follower, told me about some 20 years or so ago. Ha, she could have written a book like that. No doubt, in this book, the 'wisdom' was learnt from 'sages' but I just found it so weird that the guy had never heard of all this. Plus, I'm really not into re-hashing 'old' wisdom into new form, a la 'seek first to understand, then to be understood' from 7 Habits fame, which, as far as I know, came from St Francis of Assisi.

And what about the re-telling of Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant as part of the sage's wisdom? (Of course it is possible that Wilde got inspiration from some ancient tale. I don't know...)

But the book is good for collecting quotes. One I like is, 'She (one of the sages) told me the best time to plant a tree was forty years ago. The second best time is today.'

You can check out the 'wisdom' in summarised form here.

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