Crossroads: What If You Follow Your Heart?

At the crossroads of your life, you inevitably need to make a decision that can affect the course of your life. What if you follow your heart?
“Follow your heart” means pursue your dream, and you alone can discover it. You need to think about it.
“Follow your heart” means pursue your innermost desire – that desire that you think will make you happy, not what others tell you that will make you happy.
Your own happiness is your first purpose for living. The happiness of others, your second purpose, is automatically attained after fulfilling the first.

Have you ever stood at the crossroads between what you want to do and what you have to do? What if you want to go but you have to stay? What if you have to let go but you want to hold on? What if you have come at the crossroads where you have to make a choice?

In Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie spoke about the tension of opposites: “Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't? You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.”

At the crossroads of your life, you inevitably need to make a decision that can affect the course of your life. What if you follow your heart?

What does the advice “follow your heart” mean? I believe that “follow your heart” means pursue your innermost desire that will make you happy and fulfilled. “Heart” refers to feelings or emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and hatred. Human desires are emotions – a feeling of wanting to have, to accomplish, or to experience.

One of my Facebook friends posted on her wall: “Follow your heart, but take your brain with you.” The common belief is that when you follow your heart, when you yield to your emotions, you allow yourself to act irrationally. Steve Jobs, widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution and as an entrepreneur in the high tech industry spearheading the advent of the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, had the qualities of a very rational person yet he said: “There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

In his online article Emotion, Rationality, and Human Potential in Fathom, John T. Cacioppo (University of Chicago) noted the classic assumption that “rationality, foresight and decision-making can be hijacked by the pirates of emotion” and that “emotion wreaks havoc on human rationality.” However, he cited the case of Elliot, reported by Antonio Damasio in Descartes' Error (1994). Elliot lost his ability to experience emotion when he developed a brain tumor that damaged his prefrontal cortex. Though Elliot's intelligence, attention and memory were unaffected, he began behaving irrationally. Without emotion, rationality was lost. Cacioppo explained that “Elliot had no emotional guidance based on a lifetime of accumulated experiences to help him select among alternatives in his life. He had no emotional response to good decisions or to bad ones with which to foster learning or decision-making. The case of Elliot suggests that emotions are fundamental building blocks out of which an intelligent and fulfilling life can be constructed.” He recommended that instead of the “casting off of one's emotions,” efforts should be taken “to a disciplining of the emotions through self-knowledge and self-control.” He stressed the importance not only of “an ability to think and build,” but also of “a heightened ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them and to use the information to guide one's thinking and action to the benefit of all.”

“Follow your heart” means pursue your dream, and you alone can discover it. You need to think about it. “Follow your heart” means act on the fulfillment of your innermost desire. Your innermost desire is rational because it is the result of what you know, understand, and value. “Follow your heart” does not mean submitting to emotional whims and irrational wishes. If you do, you will not be happy. In John Galt’s Speech in For the New Intellectual, the author Ayn Rand, a Russian-American philosopher and novelist, wrote: “You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it.” She clarified that “If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don’t deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence – you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.”

Steve Jobs said: “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” “Follow your heart” means pursue your innermost desire – that desire that you think will make you happy, not what others tell you that will make you happy. It is safer to conform to what the rest of the world are doing. It is easier to embrace family traditions. It is simpler to follow what others have started. It takes less effort to just relinquish the control of your life to others – to your spouse, to your parents, to your employer, or perhaps, to the encumbrances of your daily struggles. However, “follow your heart” means shaping your own destiny. This may mean taking a daring adventure in your life, defying the expectations of the people around you, deviating from the patterns the world has laid out, and taking risks to achieve the life that makes you happy. Letting others control your life is as wrong as controlling the lives of others. In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, wrote: “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”

Your own happiness is your first purpose for living. The happiness of others, your second purpose, is automatically attained after fulfilling the first.