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I finally read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho recently (way behind the trend on this one), and it lived up to the hype. The story follows a shepherd chasing what Coelho calls a “Personal Legend”, his answer to the slippery question of what you’re actually meant to do with your life. What stuck with me wasn’t the romance of chasing the dream, which is the part entrepreneurial circles love to romanticize. It was how easy it is to ignore that calling and never even notice it slipping away.
Most people I meet aren’t short on ideas. If anything, they have too many. Bubbling with excitement, they will describe the entire business plan over coffee, and then go home and never touch any of it. The idea was never the issue. They just never decided it was theirs to actually build.
Paulo’s philosophy is that the universe doesn’t punish you for playing it safe; it just stops helping. Life’s hints toward your Personal Legend get harder to read, your days blur together, and one morning you wake up with a perfectly reasonable life that doesn’t feel like yours. Nothing significant goes wrong, you just stopped listening to the signs.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this year, mostly because I’ve been trying to do the opposite. In the past, it felt like I had 16 different Personal Legends. So in 2026, I made a commitment to “excellence”: to build the best M&A firm in the world and help business owners make the most important decision of their professional lives.
In the book, the main character encounters multiple struggles in his journey. I find many people view obstacles as a barrier to their goals, when it really indicates you’re on the right path. Achieving anything meaningful requires struggle, it’s why finishing a marathon is more fulfilling than walking a mile.
Despite Breakwater being only a year old, we’ve already had our share of struggles. Deals have died at the 11th hour of diligence, a client back-tracked on a signed agreement (fun times), and we’ve had stretches where nothing seemed to go right. The shepherd in The Alchemist hits the same kind of walls. He gets robbed, loses everything more than once, and questions whether his Personal Legend is even worth chasing, right up until he realizes that every one of those setbacks was quietly teaching him something he needed for the next leg of the journey.
That’s the part that stuck with me most as an entrepreneur. The barriers weren’t the universe telling him to quit. They were the universe nudging him in the right direction, one painful lesson at a time. Building anything worthwhile works the same way. The dead deals, the broken agreements, the months from hell, none of them are detours away from your Personal Legend. They’re the road to it.
So if you’re deep in the messy part right now, take it as proof you’re actually on the path, and keep walking.
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idea of the week 💡
Credit: ideabrowser.com
Problem: Week two after knee surgery. Pain is a 7 out of 10. Discharge papers call some discomfort normal but never define normal. Online searches swing between best-case timelines and horror stories. Surgeon offices field the same anxious call every morning. One benchmark would settle it, and it sits unbuilt.
Idea: Mendcurv is a mobile app that tracks pain levels, range of motion, and functional milestones after orthopedic surgery, then maps progress against anonymized recovery curves from patients who had the same procedure. Knee replacement patients logging daily pain scores see where they fall relative to thousands of similar recoveries by week. Ambiguous healing turns into a percentile. Week three pain at a 5 out of 10 lands in the 60th percentile. One number answers the question the discharge papers leave open.
How it makes money: Subscriptions run $10 to $20 a month per patient for the duration of recovery. Orthopedic practices become the distribution channel because recommending Mendcurv at discharge reduces unnecessary follow-up visits and lowers inbound anxiety calls. Once the benchmark library covers knee procedures, hip replacements and spinal surgeries use the same tracking infrastructure with procedure-specific curves. Insurance partners pay to reduce complication rates. Each logged recovery sharpens the benchmarks behind it.
Why it might fail: Health data compliance is the first architecture decision and determines the launch timeline. If early recovery curves feel generic, trust breaks. The wedge is partnering with 3 to 5 orthopedic surgeons to pilot with post-op patients, then validating benchmarks against real recovery trajectories. Collect 200 journeys in 90 days and earn the right to scale.
workouts this week
at-home
12-minute AMRAP:
10 push-ups
15 air squats
10 sit-ups
8 burpees
gym
Strength + conditioning. 4 rounds:
Trap bar deadlift: 6 reps (moderate-heavy)
Dumbbell incline press: 10 reps
Chest-supported row: 10 reps
Assault bike: 45 seconds hard
Rest 90 seconds between rounds.
outdoors
10-minute easy jog (warm-up)
5 rounds: 2-minute run (hard), 1-minute walk (recover)
5-minute walk (cool-down)
tweet of the week
😂 😂 😂
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