Lessons From The Alchemist: Go in Search of Your Dreams
The Alchemist came highly recommended to me, one of Joel's favorite books and one that my Buffer teammates often reference. From Joel:
The Alchemist conveys a powerful idea: that the world will help you if you just choose to follow your dream.
Definitely agree, with both Joel's recommendation and with the message of the book. Lots of inspiring advice, wrapped in an allegory, useful for anyone who might like to chase a dream.
THE ALCHEMIST by Paulo Coelho
The following are excerpts taken from Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Bold, italics, and notes are mine. Everything else is Paulo's.
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What is a personal calling? It is God’s blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend.--There are four obstacles.
- First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible.
- If we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream.
- Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path.
- We suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.
--If you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.--"At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”--Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.--... the signs and omens left by God along his path. God placed them along my path. He had surprised himself with the thought. Until then, he had considered the omens to be things of this world. Like eating or sleeping, or like seeking love or finding a job. He had never thought of them in terms of a language used by God to indicate what he should do.--The future belongs to God, and it is only he who reveals it, under extraordinary circumstances.How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.--
“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
--"People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”--"When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”--You can buy the book here. :)
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— Not the Real Kevan (@fakekevan) September 4, 2015