January 2, 2023

There is no greater recipe for disaster than following your heart.

We know that following your heart leads to utter failure in at least 50% of marriages whether it’s the following your heart into a bad marriage or out of a good one.

We also know that following your heart is not what makes the other half of relationships work over the long term.

However, people depending on their hearts for major life decisions is a big money maker. Say you’re passionate about an undergraduate degree program, you get one, and you never use it. Cha-ching! You’ve just paid huge gobs of money to the higher learning industry. Alternately, let’s say that you do something with a degree you love. Bam! Now you’re earning a big paycheck and spending it on a house/car/vacation or all of the above.

The fact is that there are simply far fewer things to be fabulously passionate about in the world than there are people who can conceivably be both passionate and successful in them. I’ll put that another way. Very few people follow their hearts into happiness and success. The truth of this is self evident.

Unfortunately very few of us are taught to deal with these realities. More often than not we are conditioned by biology and culture to follow our hearts repeatedly even when we have hard evidence that it’s a failing formula. Even those of us who have good personal and professional role models are likely to fall prey to this truth because we pursue our hearts’ desires with people or in careers that aren’t wired the same.

And equally concerning, following our hearts can lead to collateral damage. Sometimes that damage is generational, leading to repetitive patterns of divorce or dissatisfaction with parents and children or bosses and employees.

And sometimes if a person doesn’t learn this early enough, they follow their hearts to enough dead ends over enough time that the odds are no longer in their favor.

The solution is simple but harder, as you might imagine, than following our hearts. Happiness is a delicate balance between passion and practicality, between care and commitment.

Simply following our hearts is rarely enough.