An excerpt from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
author's note. I remember receiving a letter from the American publisher. HarperCollins with said that reading the Alchemist was like getting up at dawn and seeing the sun dries while the rest of the world still slept. I went outside, looked up at the sky and thought to myself, So the book is going to be translated. At the time, I was struggling to establish myself as a writer and to follow my path. Despite all the voices studying me, it was impossible. A little by little, my dream was becoming reality. 10 100 1000 A 1,000,000 copies were sold in America. One day, a Brazilian journalist phoned to say that President Clinton had been photographed reading the book. Sometime leader. When I was in Turkey, I opened the magazine Vanity Fair, and there was Julia Roberts declaring that she adored the book. Walking alone down the street in Miami, I heard a goal, telling her mother, You must read the Alchemist. The book has been translated into 61 languages, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and people are beginning to us. What's the secret behind such a huge success? The only honest responses that I don't know. All I know is that, like Santiago, the shepherd boy, we all need to be aware of her personal calling. What is a personal calling? It is God's blessing. It is the part that God chose for you here on earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with into the as we are following our legend, however, we don't all have the courage to confront our own dream. Why therefore obstacles? First, we are told from childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible. We grew up with this idea and as the years accumulate so to do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt, there comes a time when her personal calling is so deeply buried in her soul as to be invisible. But it's still there. If you have the courage to dissenter a dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle love. We know what we want to do but are afraid of holding those around us, abandoning everything in order to pursue or dream. We did not realize that love is just a further in Paris, not something that will prevent us going forward and that those who genuinely wish us well. Want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey. Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle. Fear off the defeats. We will meet on the bar. Women who fight for dream suffer far more when it doesn't work out. Because we cannot fall back on the old excuse. Oh, well, I didn't really want it anyway. We do want it unknown that we have staked everything on it and that the part off the personal calling is no easier than any other part except that her whole heart is in this journey. Very warriors of flight must be prepared to have patients in difficult times. And to know the universe is conspiring in her favor. Even though we may not understand how I asked myself, Are defeats an accessory? Well, accessory or not, they happen when we first begin fighting for a dream. We have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. So why is it so important? Deliver personal calling If you're only going to suffer more than other people because once we have overcome the defeats on, we always do, we are filled with the creator sense of euphoria and confidence and the silence of her heart's. We know that we're providing ourselves worthy of the miracle off life. Each day each our is part of the good fight. We started live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly, then suffering that is apparently curable. The ladder goes on for ears and without our noticing, eats away at our soul until one day we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness, and it stays with us for the rest of her lights. Having this entered a dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with scars, we suddenly noticed that what we always wanted to is the're waiting for us, perhaps the wear the next day. Then comes the Fort Obstacle, the fear of realizing the dream for which we have been fighting all our lives, Oscar Wilde said. Each man kills the thing he loves, and it's true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul off the ordinary person will get killed. We look around all those who have failed to get what they wanted, feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. You forget about old obstacles. We overcame all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when their personal calling was within the grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes. I never reached the goal when it was only a step away. This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly or about it renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of thing you fought so hard to get and you become an instrument of God, you had the soul of the world and you understand why you are here.