The Alchemist - by Paulo Coelho

Date Read: 2026-7-16 · Rating: 5.5/7

I just finished this book a few minutes ago. It was an easy to read and wonderful little book. It’s made me think about some of the themes within despite not agreeing with all of the choices. I’m glad I read it and I liked its optimism.

My reaction:

I liked the overall message of the book—that following one’s dreams is valuable—but I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. It seems kind of strange to me that his Personal Legend or biggest dream was to just find treasure. I almost would have liked the ending more if he really didn’t find any treasure at the Pyramids and if the journey was more about what he learned and encountered along the way. I believe that the true payoff in following a dream is not the achievement at the end, but the journey to get there. I just think that the fact that his dream was to find treasure seems pretty shallow. Obviously he got a lot more from his journey, but focusing on the treasure at the end seemed to take away from everything he got on the trip. It strikes me that the lessons he learned, the cultural context he gathered, and Fatima were the greatest treasure from the trip.

I also felt like there was some tension in the book between blind trust in omens and using rationality to find the best solution to problems. Maybe it was intentional that Coelho didn’t come to a conclusion with the action depending on the situation. At times, Santiago only relied on his intuition and omens, but at other times, the Alchemist cautioned against blindly trusting in the omens and still taking rational steps to avoid danger.

I’m not sure I agree with some of the simplifications about the old sayings of beginner’s luck and being challenged most at the end of one’s journey. They seem to be oversimplifications of actual phenomena. I feel like beginners luck can be best explained by the theories of mastery—unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. I think the beginners luck often slots in before unconscious incompetence. Often initially, relying purely on intuition leads to more success than relying

I just had another thought about the ending. After reading the Wikipedia page, apparently the outline of a person going far away to look for treasure, only to discover that it was where they came from is a common story. I think this clarifies my problem with the treasure because the personal legend was ultimately about the journey not the treasure. Still, I kind of wish that he hadn’t found the treasure at all. I think a much more honest ending would be for the personal legend to have been the journey and the people he met along the way. The treasure itself seems to kind of take away from all of that

I don’t know that I believe that the universe conspires to help you achieve your personal legend. It doesn’t explain the concept of bad things happening to good people. I feel like the book tried to explain that phenomenon as being outside the power of the universe—the universe does what it can, but sometimes it can’t fix everything.

Messages in the book:

Everyone has an inherent dream that it is their life’s purpose to follow
If someone postpones their dream long enough, it eventually ceases to call to them
Intuition, what your heart says, following omens, are
Beginner’s luck—the universe conspires to help people achieve their personal legends at first (to ease them into the process)
Night is darkest just before dawn—universe puts the ultimate test right before you’re about to achieve your goal
Death happens to everyone—at least die along the quest to achieve your personal legend

My takeaways:

I think that trusting your intuition/heart to tell you if you’re on the right path to your own personal legend is valuable advice. I think that rationality is less helpful in finding the right direction to achieve one’s goals. For me, when I try to rely too much on logical thinking to determine what to do, I end up covering up the real signals underneath. Often the strongest signal that you’re on the right path is just a feeling of rightness. Apart from logically thinking about my actions, I also just have a feeling sometimes of wrongness, when I know that my actions are not lining up with my goals. This is probably my main takeaway from the book.
My other takeaway is that postponing your dream or not choosing to pursue it causes more suffering than trying and failing. Santiago comes across many people who don’t have the courage to pursue their dreams out of fear of failure and change. The best example was the crystal salesman who liked the idea of his dream more than he wanted to actually achieve it. I think that simply giving everything up to pursue your dream can be foolish. Plenty of people fully fail and lose everything, but I think that often people are more scared about what happens when they fail than they should be. This connects nicely with Tim Ferriss’ advice about actually living the life that could happen if everything goes wrong so you see that it’s not actually that bad. The crystal salesman was so used to consistency that he didn’t have the courage to look to anything bigger. I think mitigating risk is smart regardless. Santiago may have been a little bit too reckless, but I do agree that the consequences of pursuing your dreams are often larger in people’s minds than in reality.