“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

In the summer after my freshman year of high school, one of my best friends recommended that I read this book. The story is an allegory, and follows the journey of an Andalusian farmer named Santiago who has a dream in a ruined church of great treasure, and goes on a quest to the Pyramids of Egypt in order to find it. The plot itself is quite simple, but the way the story is told makes it incredibly impactful. The Alchemist focuses on the idea of a Personal Legend, or destiny, that every single person has but usually fails to fulfill. It focuses on all the things that hold us back from achieving our dreams: Most significantly, the fear of failure.

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

I read The Alchemist for the first time that summer four years ago, and have re-read it numerous times since. No matter what I am going through, or even if I just find I need some positivity and inspiration, this book never fails to make me feel better. In its review of The Alchemist, The New York Times described it as being more self-help literature than an actual novel. I think it’s a wonderful mixture of both. I think most any novel you read is designed to teach the reader a lesson of some sort throughout the story; in The Alchemist, this design is just more emphasized. There are words of wisdom on every single page of the book, but it never feels as if you’re being preached at. The self-help is intertwined with the story itself, and I think it’s far more powerful that way. The plots and characters allow you to picture yourself within the story itself, learning all of the same lessons that Santiago is learning, rather than just reading them off a pamphlet. The motivational rhetoric feels less forced, and therefore more real.

I have learned so much over the years from this book. Every time I pick it up, I am able to get something new out of it. The last time I read it, I had recently been rejected from my dream university, the place I had planned to go since I was ten years old. My soul was crushed and I had lost a great deal of faith in myself, and in the idea of dreams coming true. I decided to pick up this book for some inspiration, since it had been so long since I’d last read it that I forgot what happened. In the ending, as Santiago is digging for the treasure outside of the Pyramids, he is robbed and attacked by a group of men. After they steal everything he has, one of the men mock him for searching for treasure, and saying he too once had a dream that he would find treasure in a ruined church, but knew it was ridiculous and gave up on it. Santiago then realizes that the treasure is buried in the church he had the dream in at the beginning of the novel.

Ever since I was ten years old, I thought I would find my place at a particular university. After reading this, I started to realize that my place could be somewhere else, somewhere that I completely did not expect. The Alchemist helped me to realize that in life, we end up where we are supposed to be, even if we do not think so at the time.