The Importance Of Fear In The Alchemist

The Importance Of Not Letting Fear Hold You From Taking Action
In The novel The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Santiago shows throughout the story the importance of not letting your fears affect your goals and how if he would’ve let his fear get the best of him he wouldn’t have accompanied everything he did. Santiago proves in the novel that fear is the only thing that holds people back from taking action.
In the novel, Santiago had a very curious mind but he was very closed about taking action about everything that he thought about. Santiago finally decided that it was time to put those dreams, hopes and goals into a reality.“When you can’t go back, you have to worry only about the best way of moving forward,” (Coelho 70). The Englishman, who

This development that Santiago had was very simple; it was because he decided to take action. In the novel, The Alchemist told Santiago “‘There’s only one way to learn…it’s through action.’,” (Coelho 129). The alchemist told Santiago everything he needed to learn; he waslearn he was able to do so because of his journey and because he decided to take action. The journey impacted Santiago since it changed him as a person. He went from being a normal person living in Andalusia, Spain to an individual who decided to take on a journey through all of north Africa with no previous knowledge of what he would have to do to finally get to his treasure. Throughout the journey, Santiago learned many valuable lessons like the importance of identifying your legend. Santiago also learned the importance of living in the moment and how the present was as equally as important as the future. Most importantly Santiago learned that Fear is a bigger obstacle than the obstacle itself. Santiago went from a person who hated having any contact with any individual and having little knowledge of the outside world to someone who learned so much in a short amount of time because he decided not to let his fear stop him from accomplishing his goals and letting him grow as a person. Many fear that we are going to lose everything that we have in our life because of the risks that we take. In the Alchemist a risk that Santiago had taken was leaving everything behind in Spain, all the little things he knew about life to chase a dream that had a high probability of not succeeding. In the novel, Santiago is told “We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it’s our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.” (Coelho 76). Santiago starts to realize that everything in life has already been