The Alchemist, read from the crystal shop

Santiago has been in the country barely a day and his money is already gone. He walks around until he finds a crystal shop, and he offers the owner the only thing he has left: he will clean the windows in exchange for something to eat. He cleans them for a whole day. That evening, over the food he has earned, the two of them start swapping what is going on in their lives, and Santiago says he came here to get to Egypt and see the pyramids. The owner does the arithmetic out loud. Working properly, in this shop, it will take about a year.

A year. He had sold every sheep he owned several chapters earlier, on the clear understanding that selling them was the hard part.

That is why I made this video. I read The Alchemist expecting to end up somewhere near the pyramids, and finished it working out that I am standing in the crystal shop with a rag in my hand.

I am not qualified to critique it

The first thing in the film is a disclaimer, before anything about the book at all.

This is not a book review, because I don't think I am capable enough or have wisdom enough to critique such a great book like Alchemist, or any other books I will be reading in the future.

What I did instead was put myself in Santiago's position. Every decision he takes, I stopped and asked what I would have done standing there. The book got a bit too personal for that reason, which is also why it was worth filming.

I split it into three parts: the dream, the reality, and the last stretch, which I called the enlightenment and then renamed inspiration halfway through the film.

The dream, and the man who has nothing at risk

The dream is set up early. Santiago wants to travel the world. He told his father that as a boy, and his father told him that the only people who travel are the shepherds, then handed over all the money he had so his son could buy sheep. The wanting is established before any treasure is.

Then he sleeps in a church in Spain and dreams of a pyramid with treasure in front of it. He does not know whether the treasure is real, or whether the dream is anything at all. His instinct says ask the gypsy, so he asks the gypsy, and she tells him she will take nothing in advance but one tenth of the treasure if he ever finds it. He walks out feeling he has protected himself from a scam.

In my reading, the gypsy is every motivational speaker on the internet.

There are so many people who tell you the story about what a big dream really is and how you should pursue your dream and you will find the success, but they don't succeed in making you act, because you haven't put anything at risk when listening to them.

She charges him nothing, so nothing happens. She also tells him the one thing he already knew from his own dream, go to the pyramids in Egypt, and he walks away thinking it is nonsense.

Never promise the thing you don't have

Then he meets the king of Salem, who also offers to tell him where the treasure is. Santiago offers the same deal he gave the gypsy, one tenth of the treasure once it is found, and the king refuses it.

At that moment the king advises Santiago to never promise the thing you don't have.

Instead the king asks for one tenth of the sheep. Not the future treasure, the animals standing in front of them.

This is the ice-breaking moment of the whole book for me. Up to that line Santiago had his sheep and his comfort zone, something solid to hold on to while he talked about pyramids. The king priced the dream in the only currency he actually had. So he sold the sheep, all of them, and handed over a tenth of the money.

Wanting is not a mechanism. You can want anything you like, and if you are not ready to sell your sheep, it converts into nothing.

The marble and the spoon

Before Santiago leaves, the king gives him one more piece of advice in the form of a story, and it is the part of the book I keep going back to.

A boy climbs a mountain to meet a wise rich man and ask how he got rich. The man says he has no idea what the boy is talking about, but since he has walked all that way he should not go home with nothing. So he offers a tour of the villa, with one condition: carry a spoon in your mouth with a marble balanced in it, and do not let the marble fall.

The boy walks the whole villa and comes back. The man asks excitedly whether he saw the fountain, the great painting, the other wonders of the place. The boy is baffled. He saw nothing at all. He had been watching the spoon.

So the man sends him round again, and this time the boy comes back having seen every wonder in the villa, with the marble gone.

No matter how big your responsibilities are, take time to enjoy what is around you, and never enjoy it so much that you forget the responsibility. That is the last thing Santiago hears before he leaves for Arab.

Reality, which is where the book turns unpleasant

Santiago crosses over full of himself. He has, in his own head, already found the treasure, and the walk to the pyramids is a formality. The most disturbing part of the story is that life does not work that way.

When we say you have to sell your sheep to achieve your dream, that doesn't mean you will achieve your dream by selling the sheep. It is just the first step, and there are so many other steps you need to take.

The first thing that happens to him is that he gets robbed, and every coin the sheep turned into is gone. He is in the middle of a country whose language he cannot speak, with no money to go back to the life he sold. He spends the night cursing himself, and the comparison he makes is the painful one: yesterday he had his sheep, they loved him, and he knew exactly what to do with his life. Today he is somewhere strange, in a language he cannot use, with no friends and no idea what happens to him next.

What gets him up the next morning is an audit. The dream he actually had was to travel the world, and by being robbed in a foreign country he has already lived a life he could never have lived standing in a Spanish field with his sheep. So he goes looking for a way to the pyramids, and he finds the crystal shop.

A dream that takes a year

This is the second reality check, and I think it is harder than the robbery. Being robbed is dramatic; being told it will take a year is arithmetic.

He had never considered that the path could be that long, or that it would ask for that much persistence. By the end of the chapter he has made a smaller plan: work here for one year, earn enough to go back to Spain, and go back to being a shepherd. The pyramids have quietly dropped out of it.

Everything he wanted, and then leaving it

He does get out of the shop. He crosses the desert, reaches the oasis, meets Fatima, and is given a respected job as an adviser there, earning more money than he ever had. By any metric you like, Santiago at the oasis has made it, so whether he found success was never the open question.

The journey was not about being successful. The journey was to reach the pyramid.

So he leaves all of it behind and walks back into the desert.

Three days to become the wind

He and the alchemist are captured by bandits. Santiago loses all his gold a second time, buys three days with it, and in those three days he has to become the wind.

He asks the desert first, telling it that he loves Fatima and has to get back to her alive, so please, you are everywhere, make me the wind. The desert sends him to the wind, the wind sends him to the sun, and the sun says that if this is already written, if it is maktub, he should ask the hand that wrote it.

So he stops talking. He goes silent, starts looking for that hand inside himself, and becomes the wind. That is the moment he has learned the language of the world.

The treasure was in the church the whole time

He reaches the pyramids. They are as beautiful and as enormous as the dream promised. He digs all night and finds nothing.

In the morning a few thugs turn up and start beating him, and he decides the truth is the only thing that might save his life, so he tells them he came from Spain to dig here. They laugh at him. One of them had the same dream, in the same spot, about treasure buried in a church in Spain: the church Santiago was sleeping in when this started. He goes home and digs it up where the story began.

You must always follow your dream, but the conclusion you are thinking is not the same thing that will happen in your life.

He never imagined the crystal shop, or the desert, and I do not think he ever imagined leaving Fatima at the oasis to dig for something that was not buried. The dream was to travel and see the beauty of the world, and the gold held no real value to him. He had to stand at the pyramid because he had to see the pyramid.

Where this actually leaves me

I am currently in Arab, completely lost. I don't know what I am doing, and you can already see me struggling with the language itself.

That is the end of the film, and it is the only claim in it I am sure about. I quit my job at 28 and moved back to my village in Nepal, which is the sheep being sold. What followed is the crystal shop: the window, the food, the arithmetic, the year.

I should say what made the risk affordable, because leaving it out turns a position into advice. My parents had already built the house. Living out here is cheap. I had savings. That is why I could afford to sell the sheep, and without those I would still be holding them.

The guitar experiment starts five days after this film, and the story of walking away from the job sits beside it. Both are window-cleaning. The reading shelf and the running experiments are the rest of the shop.

What this was actually testing

The hypothesis underneath the film is that a book can tell you where you are rather than where to go. I was trying to use this one backwards, as a way of locating myself on a timeline, and the answer it gave was unflattering and useful. Not the pyramids, and not the oasis. The shop, year one, with the plan already shrinking towards going home and being a shepherd again.

Whether that reading holds, I do not know yet, and I cannot know from inside it. Santiago's year ends well, but Santiago is a character in a book written by somebody who knew the ending before he started. Mine is being filmed as it happens and counted, including the parts that do not work, which means this page is dated on purpose. In a year it will read either as an accurate self-diagnosis or as a man in a shop talking himself into being patient.

The one thing the book makes me watch for is the smaller plan. Santiago's dream did not die at the robbery. It died quietly over dinner, when a year sounded reasonable and Spain started sounding like a destination.