The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Read Online Free PDF Page A

deal with a family emergency overseas, he raised his head. His expressioncould only be described as “stunned.” As I launched into an explanation about my accumulated vacation days, he held up his hand.
    “Let me get this straight,” David said. “You want twenty-one days off in a row, without notice?”
    I couldn’t help myself. “Well, technically, Saturday and Sunday are called ‘the weekend,’ so no, not twenty-one straight days.”
    “Jonathan, you know damn well that no one is allowed to take more than two weeks’ vacation in a row,” he shot back.
    The conversation only got worse when I said that I didn’t know exactly when I would return.
    “Of all the people in this organization,” David said, “you’re the last person I would have thought would pull a stunt like this.”
    “I know,” I said. He was right.
    “You know, Jonathan, you’re considered a rising star around here. And before today, if you asked me to name one person who was going to come out of this sale or merger or whatever it is looking like the golden boy, I would have said it was you. But you take off like this, at this time…”
    He turned to look at the window. He was twirling a pen between his fingers, a frown stiffening his face.
    I didn’t need to hear this.
    “Look,” I said. “I talked to Nawang over the weekend. She has agreed to manage my projects during my absence. She knows what she’s doing. And she can always try me on my phone in an emergency. So—can I take my vacation, or do I have to resign?”
    “Take the vacation,” David said tersely. “But I’ll tell you one thing. If we can do without you for a month, we can probably do without you forever.”
    I got up from the chair and headed for the door. Before I crossed the threshold, I stopped and turned.
    “David, would you have said the same thing if I’d made this request because something was going on with my wife or son?”
    David continued to stare out the window. His expression was unreadable.
    The walk back to my office was a long one. It was chilling to think that David might not care about helping me if my child was ill or in need. But why did I expect anything different? This place did things to people. I had seen that with Juan.
    Juan. There wasn’t a day I didn’t think about my old boss, my old friend. As the months passed, I had found it increasingly difficult not to be distracted by his absence. I often found myself waking up in the night, unable to fall back to sleep, going over and over events in my mind, reliving my part in the whole disaster. But no matter how often I replayed it, I couldn’t put it behind me. Getting away from it all was probably the best thing I could do.
     
    T HE NEXT FEW DAYS were a maelstrom. I scrambled to resolve things at work. I let loose a tsunami of messages and phone calls. I blew around town, doing banking, picking up dry cleaning, attempting drive-by visits with my son. Even packing was chaotic—how did I know what to take if I didn’t even know all the places I would be heading to?
    And then I was sitting on the red-eye flight. To Turkey. On my way to meet a friend of Julian’s. My phone was turned off; there was no paperwork in my overhead luggage. I had many quiet hours by myself with nothing I had to do, nothing I could do. I was hoping to rest, but my mind was still racing. I took out a piece of paper from my jacket pocket. Julian had sent me a brief note with the airline tickets.
    “Thank you,” it said, “for taking time away from your family and your work to take this voyage. I know you had a dozen reasons not to go, but one of the best gifts we can give ourselves is to get rid of our excuses. Rudyard Kipling once wrote, ‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ And the dangerous thing about excuses is that if we recite them enough times, we actually come to believe they are true. This task I’ve asked you to do involves a lot of travel, but I hope that you