Juan David

I remember I felt a sensation of freedom and hope after reading this. I was still a child but probably I understood the meaning hidden in the story. When I think about the alchemist I imagine a big eagle flying above rocky mountains, in a shiny and glorious day, a new beginning after all.

One of the measures of how valuable is an experience is to count the ways in which it changed you, or at least whether you learned something new after the event. I learned several new bits of wisdom from this book. At some point I even realized how wrong I have done things in the past. It turns out, relationships are a huge part of our lives and it is worth to learn how to build meaningful ones (relationship wise). The lessons have been listened to and read. Next step is to adapt them as a series of habits in my daily life.

This is an extremely useful book with science backed ideas and enjoyable narrative. It was a pleasure to follow James teachings and understand the different stages from which one can study habit formation and take action to create more consistency, less friction and more joy in my daily routine.

The fundamental idea of the book states the four elements of a habit: cue, craving, responde and reward. All these elements loop sequentiatly from the first to the last and in the repetition of a habit starts all over again from beginning. Associated to each element, there is a basic principle to increase the likelihood of a habit to stick: make it obvious/visible (cue), make it attractive (craving), make it easy (response) and make it satisfying (reward). If what we need is to avoid a negative behavior, we might try to follow the opposite advice: make it invisible (cue), make it unattractive (craving), make it difficult (response) and make it unsatisfying (reward). Then James expands on these ideas.

During the last three months, I have been creating several habits: meditating, reading, studying programming (data structures and algorithms), studying french, exercising and learning touch typing. All of this has been happening before and during the reading of this book. I have to say this book is such a treasure in my situation, I feel equipped with all I need to stick to my good habits in the long term. I will revisit this book in the future.

What I didn't like about this book is in my opinion its strength and weakness at the same time. In some sections of the book the story pace is slow and the author describes too many details of the scenario and the state of consciousness of the main character. It felt like going around the same thing over and over again, a fractal, turtles all the way down.

Great ideas here. Some of them are part of my life now, adapted to my mindset one by one throughout the years. There is still much to learn though. All these ideas contained in this book are described in a straightforward way, in a few words and pages. In reality, the assimilation, interiorization and daily practice of each one of those take years, sometimes decades. Personal growth is a long and bumpy road indeed.