The Algorithm in Your Chest
Do what your heart says. You must have heard it a thousand times by now. But nobody explains what it means. So each of us fills in the meaning. For some, the heart stands for instinct. For others, it means doing what you love. Intuition versus emotion.
The brain naturally emerges as the rational candidate. Almost too rational, because nobody enjoys what the brain has to say. It is more pragmatic. More outcome-driven. Less swayed by feeling. Or so the interpretation goes. So should you follow your heart or your gut? Or should you lean on the pragmatism of your mind?
The answer lies in your experience. Someone who hasn't explored the world enough shouldn't rely too heavily on what the heart says. A kid fresh out of college, for instance, shouldn't place too much weight on what his heart says. That intuition hasn't developed yet. It can develop, but only through broad enough exposure.
For your gut or your heart to know what is right, it needs a reference. It needs enough data to draw a pattern-matching intuition for you. Because intuition is ultimately your pattern-matching algorithm returning the most probable outcome. This part of your thinking is driven entirely by evolution. It is ancient. It has no fixed rules. But it works. It has worked for thousands of years.
It is through the analytical mind that you override this intuition. You fit it into a probabilistic graph, locating each outcome along the distribution. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but if you are poor at analysis, you will most likely arrive at the wrong answer, and that can lead to your ruin.
This is the precise cycle that makes people wonder whether they should have trusted their intuition, their heart. Because that part of the mind does not require precise mathematics. It knows something on its own, based on all the data it has absorbed.
That is also why it is important to do more things, take more actions, and keep moving. You will likely arrive somewhere. Even if it requires course correction, you will get there. The answer to whether you should follow your heart depends on what you have given your heart to work with. How does it determine what you want? Does it have enough data? This reduces to a simpler question: do you know yourself well enough?