Let me just lead with the disclaimer that The Alchemist is my favorite book. My experience with this book is almost the opposite of that with Man’s Search for Meaning. I first read The Alchemist during a one-week family trip to Costa Rica and I loved it immediately, perhaps another example of how timing and context really matter. I remember finishing the book in just a couple of days and being truly inspired by the story. In some ways, it was just a simple tale of a shepherd that set off on an adventure to find treasure - a timeless version of the Heroes Journey. But something about it really spoke to me. Over the next year or two, i recommended The Alchemist to anybody that would listen and probably sent out 30-40 copies to friends and colleagues. So what was it that I found so compelling? THIS:

“Hmm…” said the old man, looking at all sides of the book, as if it were some strange object. “This is an important book, but it’s really irritating…”

…”It’s a book that says the same thing almost all other books in the world say.” continued the old man. “It describes people’s inability to choose their own Personal Legends. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world’s greatest lie.”

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.

“It’s this: that 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.”

That was such a powerful thing to read and it resonated with me deeply. The world definitely has a way of selling us, and continually reinforcing this lie. It is so easy for us to feel that, at some point, we are just swept up by the current and totally resigned to our fate. We give up our agency and just turn it over to the momentum. One morning we wake up and realize that our daily activities consist almost entirely of things that manage and maintain a long list of responsibilities that we may or may not have consciously chosen. For many, this feels like being stuck. Stuck with a bunch of student loans. Stuck with a big mortgage. Stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the student loans and the mortgage. Everyone has their own version, but most of us reach a place in our lives when we think, “Damn, I guess being an astronaut really is out of the question at this point.”

At these moments when we feel stuck, it is nice to be reminded that we do still hold the steering wheel to our lives. We just have to be careful not to replace the World’s Greatest Lie with the modern World’s Greatest False Dilemma - that we must either:

A) Accept our fate and just learn to live with it; OR

B) Make radical changes to our lives and figure out a way to start fresh (quit job, leave relationship, sell all worldly possessions, etc.)

The truth is, there is a ton of reasonable middle-ground between total resignation and total re-boot. There’s got to be a way to own our Personal Legend, and pursue it without completely upending our lives. The path is probably difficult. It will almost certainly require some tough decisions and tradeoffs, but the path is available to us if we truly want it. As the king tells the shepherd boy, “when you are living your Personal Legend and you truly want something, the whole universe conspires to help you achieve it.” I love this line, but I’d like to parse it out a bit because I think it is often misinterpreted.

The king isn’t talking about manifesting and vision boards here. He isn’t saying that simply wanting something will cause the universe to drop it in your lap. No, he is telling the boy that he has to act, that it is his responsibility to live within his integrity, to do what he knows he is supposed to do; and only when he does that, the universe will conspire to help him. He also warns him that he must be committed and that he will be tested, but that ultimately, he will be rewarded for following his heart. To me, this is the crux of the book, and why I keep coming back to it.

During my most recent reading of The Alchemist, this valuable lesson presented itself to me in three clear components: Decide, Commit, Persist. These components help me to take this concept and actually put it in to practice. I hope they’ll help you too.

Decide

The first component of living your personal legend is to choose it for yourself. For most of us, this is probably the hardest part, and hard for reasons that we don’t often acknowledge. When we struggle to decide on a direction in life, we tend to attribute it to difficulty in discovering our passion, mission, or purpose. There are hundreds of books and courses dedicated to helping people ‘find their why’. I recognize this is an important part of the process and am not totally dismissing it, but I’d submit that we are actually pretty good at knowing what we want, and what we really suck at is choosing it.

In the early pages of the book, the young shepherd meets a beautiful girl, a merchant’s daughter. He is taken by her and wants very much to impress her. She notices the book he’s carrying and asks him where he learned to read. “Like everyone learns to read,” he said. “In school.” To which she says, “Well if you know how to read, why are you just a shepherd.” Ouch. See what happened there? This gets at the root at what makes deciding so hard. A few pages later, the boy has a similar exchange with the king, and the king’s response sums it all up for us.

“Why do you tend a flock of sheep?”

“Because I like to travel.” said the boy.

The old man pointed to the baker standing in his shop window at one corner of the plaza. “When he was a child, that man wanted to travel, too….”

“He should have decided to become a shepherd.” the boy said.

“Well, he thought about that.” the old man said. “But bakers are more important people than shepherds. Bakers have homes while shepherds sleep out in the open. Parents would rather see their children marry bakers than shepherds.”

The boy felt a pang in his heart, thinking about the merchant’s daughter. There was surely a baker in her town.

The old man continued, “In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than living their own Personal Legends.”

This has nothing to do with actual bakers or shepherds or accountants or investment bankers. All of those are fine professions and are surely the Personal Legend of somebody. It is just this story’s way of asking a very important question: How are you making these decisions for yourself?

Commit

Deciding is difficult, but it is just the first step. Committing to that decision is even tougher because this is the part where we have to make some real tradeoffs. This is where we have to demonstrate to the universe that we are serious - that we are prepared to take action, even if it’s hard. Committing will look different for each of us, but it will always test us. Maybe it’s declining that acceptance letter to law school. Maybe it’s giving up the benefits of a full time job. Maybe it is having the hard conversation with your business partner. Again, The Alchemist provides a nice metaphor.

“If you want to learn about your own treasure, you will have to give me one-tenth of your flock.”

“What about one-tenth of my treasure?”

The old man looked disappointed. “If you start out by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire to work toward getting it.”

We call this, ‘having some skin in the game’. The shepherd had to demonstrate that he was committed to the effort and was willing to invest in his own Personal Legend. Reluctantly, he agrees. Next, he heads over to the travel office to buy himself a ticket to Africa, and again he has doubts.

“Can I help you?” asked the man behind the window. “Maybe tomorrow.” said the boy, moving away…the idea frightened him. While standing at the ticket window, the boy had remembered his flock, and decided he should go back to being a shepherd. In two years he had learned everything about shepherding…and he knew all the fields and pastures of Andalusia.

The levanter increased in intensity. The boy had to chose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have. The wind brought with it the sweat and the dreams of men who had once left to search for the unknown, and for gold and adventure—and for the Pyramids…There was nothing to hold him back except himself. The sheep, the merchant’s daughter, and the fields of Andalusia were only steps along the way to his Personal Legend.

The boy had a hard time pulling the trigger, and understandably so. He’d carved out a pretty nice existence for himself in Spain. He was comfortable with his life as a shepherd. There wasn’t really anything wrong with it, so why give it up? Still the wind called his name and pulled him toward Africa and he knew that he had to answer the call. He’d already decided what he wanted to do. Now it was just time to do it.

The next day, the boy met the old man at noon. He brought six sheep with him. “Where is the treasure?” he asked.

“It’s in Egypt, near the Pyramids.” said the king. The boy was startled. The gypsy had said the same thing. But she hadn’t charged him anything. “The treasure is at the Pyramids; that you already knew. But I had to insist on the payment of six sheep because I helped you to make your decision.”

The old man had given him something more important than a treasure map. He’d given him the opportunity to test his decision, and ultimately to commit to it. At his point, the old man encourages the boy to make all of his own decisions and offers him some parting advice.

“Don’t forget that everything you deal with is only one thing and nothing else. And, above all, don’t forget to follow your own Personal Legend through to its conclusion.”

To follow this advice, the shepherd would have to do much more than sell his flock and buy a ticket to Tangiers. He would have to Persist.

Persist

So off the boy goes to pursue his Personal Legend and (spoiler alert) it doesn’t go well. He’s made the hard decision. He’s committed to the journey. And what does he get as a reward? He’s robbed of all of his money within the first two hours of being in Africa. What happened to the universe conspiring to help? Fortunately for the shepherd, he was robbed of ALL of his money, so he couldn’t even buy a ticket home. Forced to figure it out, he gets creative (desperate) and convinces a shopkeeper to let him help out. At first, he’s just trying to find a meal and place to sleep, but over time he turns the shop into a bustling destination for tea and crystal. After a year, he’s earned enough money to return home, buy an even bigger flock of sheep…or not.

But the old king hadn’t said anything about being robbed, or about endless deserts, or about people who know what their dreams are but don’t want to realize them…He left without saying good-bye to the crystal merchant….He was going to miss the place and all the good things he had learned. He was more confident in himself, though, and felt as though he could conquer the world. “But I’m going back to the fields that I know, to take care of my flock again.” He said that to himself with certainty, but he was no longer happy with his decision. He had worked for an entire year to make a dream come true…I can always go back to being a shepherd the boy thought. I learned how to care for sheep, and I haven’t forgotten how that’s done. But maybe I’ll never have another chance to get to the Pyramids in Egypt….I know why I want to get back to my flock, he thought. I understand sheep; they’re no longer a problem, and they can be good friends. On the other hand, I don’t know if the desert can be a friend, and it’s in the desert that I have to search for my treasure. If I don’t find it, I can always go home. I finally have money, and all the time I need. Why not?

I love this passage because I think it illuminates a very common situation and sheds light on the real meaning of perseverance. Our world is littered with memes and posters and Instagram posts that encourage us to persist and persevere. They generally involve finishing a race or overcoming some kind of physical obstacle, but that is a very narrow depiction. When faced with a clear task or goal and only one way to get there, we are all pretty good about powering through the tough spots and getting it done. But this is different. The shepherd has worked to survive and save some money. That part was hard, but pretty straightforward. It is now, when he is back to having options, that he must truly persist in the pursuit of his Personal Legend. He can still turn back. He can take this exit and be home in a couple of hours. Or he can set out across the desert and continue his journey.

The hills of Andalusia were only two hours away, but here was an entire desert between him and the Pyramids. yet the boy felt that there was another way to regard his situation: he was actually two hours closer to this treasure…the fact that the two hours had stretched into an entire year didn’t matter.

I’ll leave the story here and invite you read it for yourself. It is absolutely worth your time. There are caravans and bandits and warlords and even an Alchemist.

Without a doubt, you will get something different from this book. That’s what makes it so great. To summarize my big lessons, I’ll offer one more metaphor of my own. Imagine you want to get somewhere far away, across an ocean. It seems impossible, but one day you decide that you’re going for it. So you buy some maps and study the charts and you even build a boat. At some point, you have to commit to shoving off and getting underway. You’ve got to untie from the dock and leave something behind. Of course then, you’re going to run into a storm. Your resolve will be tested, but not just to get through the first storm. You’ll have to persist - to keep sailing into the unknown, when you could still turn back and make it safely to the harbor. Regardless of what you choose. Just remember, you’re never stuck.