Part 1 Here:
One of the greatest fiction books of all-time almost wasn’t…
This is part of the foreword to The Alchemist, 25th Anniversary Edition:
When The Alchemist was first published twenty-five years ago in my native Brazil, no one noticed. A bookseller in the northeast corner of the country told me that only one person purchased a copy the first week of its release. It took another six months for the bookseller to unload a second copy and that was to the same person who bought the first! And who knows how long it took to sell the third.
By the end of the year, it was clear to everyone that The Alchemist wasn't working. My original publisher decided to cut me loose and cancelled our contract. They wiped their hands of the project and let me take the book with me. I was forty-one and desperate.
But I never lost faith in the book or ever wavered in my vision. Why? Because it was me in there, all of me, heart and soul. I was living my own metaphor. A man sets out on a journey, dreaming of a beautiful or magical place, in pursuit of some unknown treasure. At the end of his journey, the man realizes the treasure was with him the entire time. I was following my Personal Legend, and my treasure was my capacity to write. And I wanted to share this treasure with the world.
As I wrote in The Alchemist, when you want some-thing, the whole universe conspires to help you. I started knocking on the doors of other publishers. One opened, and the publisher on the other side believed in me and my book and agreed to give The Alchemist a second chance. Slowly, through word of mouth, it finally started to sell three thousand, then six thousand, ten thousand--book by book, gradually throughout the year.
Eight months later, an American visiting Brazil picked up a copy of The Alchemist in a local bookstore.
He wanted to translate the book and help me find a publisher in the United States. HarperCollins agreed to bring it to an American audience, publishing it with great fanfare: ads in the New York Times and influential news magazines, radio and television interviews. But it still took some time to sell, slowly finding its audience in the United States by word of mouth, just as it did in Brazil. And then one day, Bill Clinton was photographed leaving the White House with a copy. Then Madonna raved about the book to Vanity Fair, and people from different walks of life from Rush Limbaugh and Will Smith to college students and soccer moms-were suddenly talking about it.
The Alchemist became a spontaneous and organic-phenomenon.
A ton of themes I’ve written about are at play here:
I want to talk a bit more about #3 today regarding The Alchemist tie-in.
Our Obligation is Positive-Sum
Recently the newsletter has seen an uptick in subscribers. And like I mentioned when my course blew up last summer, it wasn’t because ‘I’ did something…
Someone else did something for me.
author, Fabrice began recommending me in his recommendation section on Substack and my subscribers have doubled in 2 months.It reminds me of this quote by Sahil Lavingna, the founder of Gumroad:
For Paulo Coelho, the American visiting Brazil was the guy with asymmetric pull and helped the author 1000x.
For me, I grow on Twitter not by writing banger tweets, I only grow when accounts like you hit the like button or retweet them. I grow on Substack when you share my post or when bigger accounts recommend me to their audience.
It takes a lot of balls to call out people who are smaller but ‘have something’.
It’s our obligation as humans to do things like this…
And I’m not just screaming into a megaphone, I’m doing it too…
PASSING it Forward
A week ago as I’m writing this, a coach with 11 followers hopped on a tweet of mine.
I’m currently unemployed in the coaching game, so I can’t take any steps toward hiring him, but I was stonewalled via email by 98% of the hockey world when I was looking to ‘break-in’ so instead of ignoring him because he has 11 followers and coaches minor hockey in Salmon Arm… I tried to build a platform like others have for me:
Still waiting for his post to hit my email, but if it does, look for it in your inbox because I’ll put him on. If anyone else wants to write a guest post, my email is right there.
We can do more to be more positive-sum in our field.
A Level 1 Coach needs you to take an unreasonable bet on them.
The question is…
How will you help?