The Alchemist | Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward

The insufficient dire need for will

In this world, there is no sure recipe to succeed. But making sure we fail is quite easy and we can do it ourselves, without help from anyone.

A few years ago I read the book “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. I did not like it at all. The basic philosophy can be summed up in that “when a person really wants something, the whole universe conspires so she/he can realize her/his dream.” It is, in short, the prototypical “you can”, carried to the extreme.

This week I wrote a post on the impact of the financial crisis. In a comment, with great diplomacy Ines (which by one of those coincidences happens to be my mom!) objected to my vision of the crisis as an opportunity, assimilating it to that kind of philosophy.

I acknowledge I may have sounded like that, but nothing is further from my way of thinking. This is a world that in general conspires so that most people do not have what we want. It is almost never true that “if you want to, you can”.

Both the “if you want, you can” and its logically equivalent “If you can not is because you do not want to” are cruel oversimplifications. They generate false expectations, then put the blame on us when we fail.
In my view there is, however, a very important rule that is almost universal: “If you DO NOT want, you can NOT”.

What this rule says is quite different from the other two. It states that something good never occurs without the power of the will to make it happen. The will is not enough, but it is essential.