Lessons from The Alchemist: Pursue your personal legend. Will you pursue your personal legend? The universe will conspire to help you pursue your personal legend. Learn the language of the world. Learn to recognize signs.

I listened to Oprah’s podcast Super Soul Sundays, and once she interviewed Paulo Coelho. I came to find out that his fable is partly based on his own life experiences. There are actually at least two notable experiences that he talks about. The first experience was when he decided to become a writer. Paulo Coelho is originally from Brazil, and growing up, his parents wanted him to follow a traditional path to success, becoming something like a lawyer or an engineer. However, he had other ideas for his life. He wanted to be an artist; he wanted to be a writer. When he kept expressing this to his parents, not only did they dismiss him, but they even went so far as to have him admitted to a mental institution three times because they thought he was crazy for wanting to be a writer.

He did eventually attempt to become a lawyer, but eventually, he decided to follow his own dream and pursue his own personal legend of becoming a writer. I think maybe even before that, he became what he called a self-described hippie, traveling around the world, taking Greyhound buses, and washing himself at YMCAs in America, among other things. Then, at the age of 40, he wrote his first book, The Pilgrimage, which was, I guess, a reflection of his travels as a hippie.

His first book did pretty well, and then it came time for him to write his book The Alchemist. Long story short, the book was not successful at all; his publisher even dropped the book, stopping its publication after maybe a couple of years. But deciding to take lessons from his own book and believing that his book was actually worth something, he decided to pursue other publishers, going door to door until he found someone willing to publish it. He found a publisher, but even then, it took something like 10 or 15 years before the book began to really sell. Eventually, it hit the New York Times bestseller list, I think after 15 years, and it has remained on the bestsellers list for at least 400 weeks since then. Coelho describes this as an instance of the world or the universe conspiring to help you when you seek to pursue your own personal legend. In total, he’s written 31 or 32 books. Fortunately for him, he understands that The Alchemist is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, and he continues to publish books because he enjoys it, and fortunately, they have done well.

Original draft written in September 2019