Wisdom from Paulo Coelho
I first discovered the Brazilian author, Paulo Coelho, decades ago when I read The Alchemist—a mesmerizing story about a young boy who learns to listen to his heart and find the courage to follow his dreams. “You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say,” is wisdom I will always remember from this short, inspiration-packed novel.
Coelho’s life story is itself a remarkable hero’s journey tale. As a young man, he initially abandoned his dream of becoming a writer to enroll in law school in deference to his parents’ wishes. A year later, he dropped out to travel the world. In 1986, when he was just shy of forty, Coelho made a 500-mile walking pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella in Northern Spain, where he had a spiritual awakening. He wrote about this experience in The Pilgrimage, and a year later published The Alchemist, which had such slow sales, it was dropped by his Brazilian publisher. In 1994, HarperCollins decided to publish the book, which quickly became an astonishing international best-seller. To date, Coelho’s thirty books have been translated into 83 languages and sold over 320 million copies.
Coelho gives us eloquent reminders to stay committed to following our hearts and to being our unique selves. He assures us that mistakes and failure are inevitable, so we should never let them stop us from taking risks, and that the troubles we experience are filled with essential life lessons. He wrote, “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
Myra
