Turning Metal Into Gold – The Alchemist
May 23 2010

One of my favorite fables is written by Paulo Coehlo.   It’s called  The Alchemist  (Amazon Link) A Fable about Following Your Dream and it was required reading in my class when I taught entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.  It is about a shepherd boy who has a dream one night of finding a chest full of treasure.  After meeting a gypsy and a king, he decides to trade in his sheep and follow his dream.  Along the way he faces many challenges, gets in a rut, meets interesting people, never gives up, meets the love his life who waits for him, and eventually finds his treasure.  When I first read the story the parallels to entrepreneurship struck me.   Entrepreneurs often have to blindly follow their vision when others around them think they might be a little off their rocker.  Entrepreneurship requires a lot of faith, hard work, and luck.

The reason I’m re-reading and writing about the book now (in an airport; finishing up in a hotel) is because I was on my way to Portugal for a business trip.  It happens to be Entrepreneurship week in Portugal this week, and I was selected to go as part of a team to give a workshop on entrepreneurship to Portuguese technology transfer and incubator officers.   I have traveled to many places but not Portugal and I’m excited about the opportunity.  So far Porto seems to be a very beautiful city.  On the way back, I’ll be spending a few days in Spain to visit my cousin Ashan Pillai (wikipedia link), a prominent viola player.  Not only does he have his own wikipedia page, he also has a great website.  The shepherd boy named Santiago (which also happens to be my son’s middle name) is from Spain and he travels to Egypt to find his treasure and discovers it’s not there!?  It’s somewhere else and the book describes his journey where he does eventually find it.

Do you feel like you are on a journey…an impossible one sometimes?  I sometimes do….an interesting journey to find my treasure whether it be riches, love, or the tangible/intangible impact I can leave on the world.

One of the biggest takeaways from this book that I always hoped my students would think about is when you take a chance to follow your dreams “the world conspires to help you.”  Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you are making a hard decision or pursuing a dream, a project, or a task and you feel ‘in the zone’ that things seem to become easier and people seem to show up at the right time to help you out?  Some people call it coincidence or luck…which it is but it also makes you wonder.  A few quotes/statements I like from the book are:

About the world’s greatest lie:  “It’s this: that 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.”

“The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon [that you are holding].”

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. “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.”

Of course like anything in this world the heart must be balanced with the head to keep things in order and to make progress but a company (or a person) without a heart, a dream, or a vision will not go very far.  This is why I believe the Founder of a company should stay with the company as long as possible because they often represent the heart, which we all know is necessary for a human to survive.

For the skeptics out there (myself included), The Alchemist is after all just a fable and Santiago didn’t have a wife or kids while galavanting across the desert.  Those are pretty big responsibilities.  However, many famous fables, Biblical or otherwise, have inspired people to do many great things!  So take it with a grain of sand…like the ones in the vast desert that lay between you and your treasure.

Author: Aruni | Filed under: entrepreneurship | Tags: ashan pillai, paulo coehlo, portugal, spain, the alchemist | 1 Comment »

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