INSPIRING LIFE SCHOOL PODCAST
EPISODE 13
LESSONS FROM THE ALCHEMIST
INSPIRING LIFE SCHOOL PODCAST
EPISODE 13
TRANSCRIPT LESSONS FROM THE ALCHEMIST
WELCOME TO THIS EPISODE WHICH IS ALL ABOUT 5 LESSONS I LEARNED FROM THE ALCHEMIST.
So in the episode I will be sharing with you 5 lessons I learned from one of my favorite books The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.
Now if you have never read this book before I encourage you to run not walk to the nearest bookstore to grab yourself a copy or download it as an eBook to read on your iPad because it really is amazing.
I was given this book to read as a teenager, back in 1993 when the book was first translated into English.
The original book was published in Porteguese back in 1988 and it has gone on to sell over 100 million copies.
In fact, on the list of best-selling individual books, the Alchemist comes in third behind The Lord of the Rings and The Little Prince even though all three are quoted as having approximately 150 million sales.
This is obviously after the Bible, Qu’ran and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book which have all sold over 1 billion copies.
But still…this is up there at the top of the list and with very good reason why.
Now I am hoping to share with you five lessons from The Alchemist without giving away too much of the story.
There’s also a good chance that you have already the book yourself but forgotten some of the wisdom that it contained.
If that is the case for you, I promise this episode will be a beautiful trip down memory lane for you because this book really does have so much wisdom to offer us.
As I mentioned before I read this book as an 18 year old, very randomly one Friday night when my sister’s friend came over and said “You have to read this!”
I can still remember lying down on the carpet in the living room, with my face buried in the book, unable to stop.
I had opened it intending only to read a few pages before moving on to whatever else I had planned that night, but hours ended up passing and suddenly I was on this adventure alongside this young shepherd named Santiago who learns over time to follow his heart.
What you soon discover in The Alchemist is that every obstacle and hurdle that Santiago encounters in the book happens for a reason.
There is some important lesson to be learned.
Just the same you too will encounter obstacles that you didn’t plan for or expect in life but nonetheless each obstacle is a stepping stone that takes you one step closer to your dreams.
So without giving too much of the story away, let’s start with the first of five lessons I learned from The Alchemist.
LESSON 1 – EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON
This book teaches us that when a person really desires something, the whole universe will conspire to help that person realise his dream.
To realise one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation. And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
The whole premise of the book is that everything that happens, happens for a reason.
Every experience you have in life is there to guide you where you need to go.
So many people freak out when something they deem to be terrible happens.
They spend so much time and energy fighting it without ever stopping to ask:
- What is the lesson here for me to learn?
- What do I have to learn from this experience?
- Why am I being given this challenge?
- What can this challenge teach me?
- What if this is the exact experience I need to have right now to move forward in life?
This book has encouraged me to think differently about every experience I have in my life.
Maybe you didn’t get that job because another better one is waiting for you in the future.
Maybe you got stuck in traffic because you were supposed to be ten minutes late so that your path crosses with some stranger you were supposed to meet.
Maybe you fell sick in order to better appreciate your health in the future.
Maybe you lost your money so that you could learn to think differently about it and it would spur you to work harder than ever to create different income streams in the future that wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t lose your money in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, everything is happening exactly the way it was supposed to happen and if you quit fighting life’s challenges, if you relaxed into them instead and decided this is exactly what I need right now to grow into the human I am supposed to become, your journey would be so much easier.
When you read this book, you understand that some of the terrible things that happened to Santiago were the exact same catalysts that spurred him to achieve greater success in the future.
And when you can’t go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward.
LESSON 2: FAILURE IS A NECESSARY PART OF THE JOURNEY
Another lesson I learned from The Alchemist is that failure is a necessary part of the journey.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.
You need to be prepared to take risks. Failure is also part of the process. It is failure that makes it possible for you to grow.
Now some people hear the word failure and think it is something to fear, avoid or run away from.
They think that failing means THEY ARE A FAILURE, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Don’t believe me?
Well stick with me while I go through my explanation.
Here’s the truth: We have all made mistakes in our life – we all have.
That’s because mistakes are a natural consequence of trying.
The only thing is nobody tells you failure is to be expected and embraced.
There’s no special announcement at school that tells you mistakes are how we learn, how we work out what does and doesn’t work.
So when we are young, we constantly beat ourselves up over our mistakes.
We label ourselves as a failure, goose, hopeless case or something else negative when the shame of a mistake falls over us.
Then one day we learn that hey, MAKING MISTAKES ISN’T EMBARRASSING OR ANYTHING TO BE ANXIOUS OR NERVOUS ABOUT.
If you haven’t learned this before listen up because it is such an amazing, freeing moment when you finally discover that Shock, horror – you don’t need to be angry or upset when you make a mistake! Instead it’s another lesson and opportunity for you to learn something new.
Here’s the thing: something good comes out of every experience and every mistake.
YES IT IS. EVEN IF IT ISN’T IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS TO YOU, even if you don’t always get exactly what you hoped, it doesn’t matter because ultimately there is a gem hiding for you inside that crappy experience and you just need to find it.
As Napoleon Hill once said: Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success – if you are willing to learn from it.
The greater the failure, the greater the lesson.
The truth is you need to embrace failure instead of doing whatever you can to avoid it.
Because that is how we learn – from making errors and discovering what does and doesn’t work. Mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before.
Mistakes are proof that you are trying.
In a nutshell, it is much better to fail and learn but do nothing at all.
So don’t stress next time you make an error because mistakes are always lessons in disguise.
LESSON 3: THE ACT OF WORRYING CAUSES US TO SUFFER MORE THAN THE SUFFERING ITSELF
Okay this is a massive lesson for us to learn.
Take note of this quote from The Alchemist which goes as follows:
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.
My favorite part of that quote is this: THE FEAR OF SUFFERING IS WORSE THAN THE SUFFERING ITSELF.
I can’t tell you how deep I think that one line is.
All the terrible things you constantly imagine happening, all the worry, anxiety and stress that comes from your fear of suffering or you simply IMAGINING the worst rather than the best is WORSE than experiencing that emotion will be be.
I mean what’s the worst thing that can ever happen?
You experience a negative emotion.
Maybe it’s the temporary feeling of embarrassment if you do something wrong or temporary feeling of discomfort as you step outside your comfort zone.
But that’s all it is – a fleeting negative emotion that passes by in a moment which is very different from constantly imagining and visualizing an event that hasn’t yet come to pass.
Humans often forget they are way more resilient than they realise they are.
You can cope with any negative emotion that occurs in real life probably far better than you can the constantly imagined negative visualizations you create in your head.
If you are scared of public speaking, the moment of fear might last two or three minutes while you are doing your speech and then after that it’s over and you will realize that because you faced your fears head on you now feel a little LESS scared of doing it again.
Compare this to the hours and hours of grief you cause yourself when actively avoiding the task or refusing to take action.
How is that negative emotion you imagine in your head any better than the negative emotion you experience in real life? One is real and the other is imagined.
And if you are going to go to the effort of imagining how a scenario will play out why not imagine a positive version of those events?
Why not imagine yourself doing things with confidence and enthusiasm and simply trying your best?
Why not imagine the best rather than the worst scenario taking place?
You are the director of those stories you make up in your head so why not make yourself the HERO of that story instead of a hopeless victim who can’t do anything right?
Why not imagine the best for yourself – picking yourself up even if you fall down, whispering words of reassurance just like we would for our best friend?
There’s also another part of this quote that is important to note:
And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams
What that means to me is that even if you do experience some negative emotion or discomfort chasing your dreams, that emotion is experienced differently when you are doing it for a greater good.
That feeling of embarrassment you experience when you do something new, even if you don’t it well, actually feels good at the same time because you are secretly proud of yourself for taking action.
You know that the temporary negative emotion you experienced was a necessary stepping stone to get you where you need to go and in the end, it wasn’t ever so terrible as you initially imagined it would be.
Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.
LESSON 4: YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO YOUR HEART
Another lesson I learned from The Alchemist is that you need to listen to your heart.
Have you ever actually stopped to hear what it has to say?
I promise you, if you are silent enough and stop to pay it some attention, it will whisper what it really, really wants in your ear.
“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked, when they had made camp that day.
“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.” “But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman of the dessert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights when I’m thinking about her.”
“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”
Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.
You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.
So what does your heart have to say to you?
Do you pay attention to it?
Is there anything you are ignoring?
Do you understand your purpose in this world?
If not, think about yourself in the far off future and ask yourself, what is it that you will have hoped to achieved during your life?
For some people it is chasing a big business dream, for others it is nurturing a loving family.
We all have different things that our hearts want out of life.
The treasure we are hoping to find will look different to every individual in this world.
But that’s okay.
All we need to know if what OUR OWN treasure looks like and the answer will come straight from your heart.
Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It’s your mission on earth.
Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him.
Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.
“The boy didn’t know what a Personal Legend was. ’It’s what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their Personal Legend.”
LESSON 5: LIFE WILL TEST YOU
Another lesson I learned from The Alchemist is that thinking isn’t enough.
You need to commit to a decision and take action and be prepared that life will test you along the way.
Making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
There is only one way to learn. It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.
Before a dream is realized, the Soul of The World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream.
That’s the point at which most people give up. It’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, “one dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.”
Life is so much easier when you know that there will be tests, that there will be challenges.
Most of us give up too soon.
Or as Paulo Coelho said: Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.
People aren’t aware that they are capable of, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.
They aren’t always aware that when they are stuck standing still that that is a choice they are making.
Indecision is a choice you make to NOT DECIDE to take action rather than taking action.
They give up too early because things are tough without realising how close they are to achieving their dreams.
Now consider two more of the following quotes:
Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.
The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.
As Paulo Coelho so wisely said: when each day is the same as the next it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day the sunrises.
They fail to see the things that they could be doing and instead are so focused on what they don’t want to do.
They are focused on their fears, on their excuses and hold tight to that victim mentality where they convince themselves that everything is simply too hard without realizing it is they that is making it too hard on themselves by refusing to let go of that belief that it is impossible rather than realising anything is possible when you:
A – Realise that everything happens for a reason
B – Understand that failure is a necessary part of the journey
C – Accept that the act of worrying about suffering is worse than the act of suffering itself
D – They forget to listen to their heart
E – And accept that life is full of tests that you need to face head on before you can take the next step on your journey in life.
Consider Paulo Coelho’s journey in life.
He is a living example of how never giving up on your dream is what makes that dream come to life. Coelho was born in 1947 and he wrote The Alchemist when he was 40 years old.
Back then he was a little-known Brazilian author who published this simple but oh so wise book called The Alchemist, a fable about a young shepherd in search of his treasure.
He wrote this book in just two weeks and believed in his heart of hearts that it was destined to be a massive success.
His first publisher dropped the book after one year and released the rights back to him but he didn’t allow this fact to signal the end of his writing career.
Instead he told Oprah in his first-ever interview on American television, that the author tells Oprah on “Super Soul Sunday” how one sentence from his book changed the course of his life.
“There is a sentence in the book that says, ‘When you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you,’” he says. “I said, ‘I wrote this. I have to live by these words.’”
So, Coelho refused to give up on his dreams.
He kept knocking on the doors of publishers and as he said himself: “The first door that I knocked, the guy opened. A very important publishing house in Brazil. And I said, ‘I have a book that was published and did not sell. But I trust this book is going to sell. The guy said, ‘OK, I’m going to publish it.’”
And now look at how that book has grown.
The Alchemist has sold around 150 million copies.
Back in 2016 the Alchemist had spent four hundred continuous weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
It has also been translated into 80 different languages and holds the Guinness World Record for the most translated book by any living author.
Coelho believed in his words.
He believed it was the universe conspiring to help him.
In the interview he goes on to say: “Three years later when the book was already a half a million copies in Brazil, I asked him, ‘Why did you accept a book that was already published and it was a flop?’ “And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ You understand?”
That is the beauty of The Alchemist.
The fact that we can all apply the same lessons to our life and make amazing things happen when we hold strong to our truth, like that young shepherd Santiago who learned to follow the signs and omens of his life and is finally able to find treasure beyond his wildest dreams.
Once again if you haven’t read this book go out and read it and if you have read it, consider reading it again and allowing these incredible lessons to guide your life today.
As always thank you so much for joining me today on this episode.
I love and appreciate you all and can’t wait to have you here with me again on the next episode.
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Hey, I’m Frances Vidakovic! I help you live a richer, lighter life while pursuing dreamy goals – without sacrificing your soul, sanity or family life. 🫶🏻 Author. Coach. Course Creator. DON’T DIE UNHAPPY! → Wake up. Do what matters. Savour it all 🌷