The Alchemist  is an allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho first published in 1988. It follows Santiago, a young Spanish shepherd, on a journey to fulfill his Personal Legend. It has been hailed as a modern classic.[1][2] The plot is inspired from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story: Tale of two dreamers.[3]

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good…