The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho - 1

This book focuses on pursuing the purpose of life in the simplest possible way. It’s a story of a boy named Santiago, who travels in search of a worldly treasure. The book is all about this journey and his understanding of the recurring dream, meeting mentors on the way, falling in love, and finally learning the true importance of personal legend. 

My Takeaways from this book  

• Follow What Your Heart Desires - People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of. If you want to reach your biggest goals and feel fulfilled, you must follow your Personal Legend. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is. Courageously pursue your personal legend, it’s your thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path. When we love our personal legend, we strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.  

• Know That You Will Fail – There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure. Fear is the only thing that is holding you back, Stop being afraid if you want to remove the barriers that keep you from progressing. 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. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.  

• Learning is through actions - There is only one way to learn, It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey. The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them. If you start by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work towards getting it. Everything that happens once can never happen again, but everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.