The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream - A Brief Overview

Simple, profound, and filled with lessons would describe my experience with The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. This book is a classic work of fiction and apparently the world thinks so too as it's sold over twenty million copies and has been translated into fifty-six languages.

Coelho weaves a story about a boy, Santiago, who sets out in search of a treasure. The treasure he is to find is what Coelho calls a Personal Legend. Everyone has one, he says, but not everyone finds the courage to go after it. Coelho's hero, Santiago finds this bravery within himself.

Santiago is a shepherd who is urged by the King of Salem, Melchizedek to set out on a journey that takes him from his home in Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa, through the Saharan desert to the Egyptian Pyramids. On his way he runs into challenges that would send most people packing. Each of the challenges he faces has a lesson for him to learn. It's curiously like real life in that Santiago usually thinks one thing about his current predicament only to find out through the lesson that it's not what he thinks.

Due to Santiago's choice to be flexible in his thought and to believe in Omens (signs that the Universe is conspiring to help him), Santiago learns that the course of life is happiest when one is pursuing one's dream. He learns that when a person is open to the journey of following his/her dream, the process of finding the dream and living it out is the ultimate fulfillment in life.

More: Read My Review of The Alchemist