The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho: The Price of Success Essay

Have you ever encountered problems while trying to fulfill a goal in your life? In the book The Alchemist, written by Paulo Coelho, a shepherd boy named Santiago overcomes obstacles to reach his personal legend. Throughout the book Santiago encounters many friends to help him fulfill his destiny. Santiago encounters many problems throughout the story. He overcomes them with the help of his friends and his wife-to-be. These problems shape Santiago into a dignified man of many traits.

“You can always turn a bad kisser into a good one,” Laura Prepon. Santiago, the main character of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist leads a modest and ordinary life as a shepherd. Santiago travelled constantly, exploring the Andalusian terrain. In his travels, Santiago met a woman who interpreted his dreams, and told him his treasure would lie in Egypt at the pyramids. However, Santiago believed that the dream interpreter was a phony, and he continued to herd his sheep. Soon after, he exchanged words with the King of Salem, and Santiago was once again told to venture to Egypt in order to find his treasure. After careful consideration, Santiago sells his precious sheep and begins his journey. An alchemist, somebody who turns lead

The book I read is called The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. The Alchemist is about a boy from Spain, whose name is Santiago and is a shepherd. The book tells how he gets around countries, and how he deals with his problems and how he solves them. It shows how he follows his dreams, and who helps him along the way.

The blazing hot spotlights flick on. The theatre is silent, allowing me to hear the pounding of my heart. Heat radiating off of the light panels warms my face. I grin from ear to ear and whisper to myself, “I will remember this.” It was the friday night show of the orchesis concert, Mrs. Good had sat us down to tell us a story about a past student. Her student, Margaret, loved performing and lived for the rush of adrenaline when she stepped foot on stage. During her senior show, she whispered to herself, “I will remember this.” Fast forward three years, Margaret was walking through the quad of her college campus, the sun peered out behind the clouds and the angle the the sun hit her face brought back a rush of emotions and memories. We were all told this because she wanted us to never forget the feeling we got when we performed. “If you are rushing through the dance moves or caught up in the moment, pause and breathe, remember why you are on the stage in the first

Imagine the impact of helping someone when they need it. When you help someone, it can make someone’s day, or make them want to help someone else, including you. Because of this, not only you feel better but others will want to help you to. Characters who help someone will receive a benefit, even if they do not know it at the start. In the novel, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, Santiago learns, “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.” First, good came after bad. Next, Santiago helps people who eventually help him. Last, important lessons make Santiago become a better person.

The alchemist is a well written book that accurately describes every concept about life and explains it through a story. The Alchemist is a book about a shepherd named Santiago, who discovers his personal legend and receives help from others to help achieve his Personal Legend and learns many major life lessons along the way. Santiago gets advice that when life puts him down, keep getting back up and to focus on the task at hand, which is Santiago’s own personal legend. Along the the journey, Santiago receives help from many different characters but only three characters who helped him the most throughout his quest for his Personal legend is the alchemist, the Old King and the Englishman. The best advice a reader is able to gain from this story is the advice the the Old King taught Santiago, which is” there is only one thing that makes achieving a dream impossible to achieve, the fear of failure” which means is to never be afraid of failures and to follow your own path God has laid out for you because if you are too afraid to pursue your personal legend, meaning if people are too afraid to take risks to make their own life better than it already is now, then they will not have the opportunity to accomplish their own goals. In Coelho's The Alchemist, Santiago learns the Soul of the World through experience, patience, time and help from the Old King, the Englishman and the alchemist.

The Alchemist is a journey of exploration and self-discovery as we follow the main character, Santiago, a young shepherd who lives in Spain, on a journey to fulfill his personal legend. The novel shows us wisdoms and gentle reminders of how to change our lives from what they may be today into the life we have always dreamed of.

In fact, the main reason to fear failure is how we imagine how others will view us when we fail. For example, if an individual keeps doing the same thing over and over, then the results will never change. As Albert Einstein stated, “a person, who never made a mistake, never tried anything new” (Brenner). Failure is not the enemy, but a life-changing experience. It is a human experience, and it prepares the way for us to grow and transform our lives. Mistakes are essential to the development of life, just as change is. Nevertheless, change is said to prepare us for life and without change, life would persistently be the same.

There are many obstacles in everyday life, but none as detrimental to ones future as fear. Fear can cause people to not only avoid achieving their goals in life but it also forces them to think about it throughout every day. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist shows that those who wallow in fear will never achieve their personal legend, and those who conquer fear will achieve anything they strive for. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is a commonly analyzed and criticized piece of literature. One of these articles is Rejendra Kumar Dash’s “Alchemy of the Soul: A Comparative Study of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist”. Dash’s article is a literary criticism of the different parts of the character’s journey in The Alchemist.

The Theme of “The Alchemist,” by Paulo Coelho is, always follow your dreams and listen to your heart. At the start of the novel Santiago does not know what he should do when he is confronted by his dream. But by the end of the novel Santiago completely trusts his heart to guide him though life. Santiago’s story shows him learning and living out the theme of the novel.

The Alchemist, a novel written by Paulo Coelho teaches us about the importance of self-discovery and exploration by taking us through the journey of a young Andalusian shepherd, Santiago. Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 24th 1947, to Pedro Quiema Coelho de Souza, an engineer, and his wife, Lygia, a homemaker. Paulo early on had dreamed of an artistic career and then after his surroundings in Jesuit school, he discovered his true vocation was to be a writer (Coelho 195). Upon telling his mom, she told him that his father was an engineer, a reasonable and logical man and had a clear view of the world. At the age of 16, Paulo’s opposition against following a traditional path led to his parents committing him into a mental institution (Paulo Coelho). To satisfy his parents, he enrolled in law school. However, it led him to mental illness and failing his career. After many years, he gave a shot at his dream profession and started to write. Paulo wrote The Pilgrimage: Diary of Magus which described his experiences and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. He was the recipient of numerous international awards, amongst them the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. The Pilgrimage was published in 1987 and The Alchemist was published in 1988, a year after. Both novels appeared on the best sellers list but The Alchemist continued to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history. The Alchemist,

Everyone is born with a fear of failure. Failure is a part of our human nature, it is ingrained in us. Any successful person has achieved their success through failure. You can’t prevent it in any way, and it’s pointless to try and in the end, it will come. Some people have such a large fear of failure, they pass it onto their children, such as Morley Callaghan’s friend’s father. He gave his child only one chance, and lost all faith in him because of one failure. As a result of this, his friend lost all faith in himself and soon dropped out of school

The Alchemist is a novel written by the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, originally written in Portuguese in 1988 and later translated to English in 1993, which follows the journey of Santiago on his quest to not only follow his Personal Legend, but also to discover a world full of changes and transformations. Looking at this story at first glance might give you the feel that it will be about a boy on a quest filled with the expected trials that test his heart, strength, and character. Elements like this are present, however, the story makes the reader think deeply about the motif dealing with following the signs the universe gives. This is due to various symbols and motifs, one having to do with omens, that Santiago and many characters

Failure often times leads a person to feel helpless, disappointed and depressed. However,one should not allow this to set them back in trying to achieve the ultimate aim one has set out to do. Failure in the beginning can often be a powerful incentive to reassess one’s position in wanting to achieve the particular aims; to analyse whether the purpose is worth the trouble the person has to undergo and the whether the obstacles are surmountable.

Personal Perspective is how an individual view the world around them, different people perceives different things and that could shape their personality. In the novel, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a boy who is a shepherd tries to seek a treasure in which he sees it in his dream. There are many obstacles that he has to overcome, he met numerous individuals along the way and learned valuable life lessons. People may grow differently depends on how they perceive the world, and if the way they comprehend the world changed, they could also change who they are as a