There may be no single piece of advice more cliché or overstated than “follow your passions.” It’s heard in some form by young people everywhere, especially those who are trying to find a career or decide on a college major.

What makes following your passions such poor advice? And should you take your own interests into consideration when deciding what to do with your life? If you want stability, it’s better to follow opportunities instead of passions.

The Many Problems with Following Your Passion

People love hearing about how they should follow their passions because it encourages them to do things they already wanted to do. When someone wants to be a movie star or get a teaching degree, they want people to encourage them about the pursuit. No one wants to hear that it’s a terrible idea and they should reconsider. But there are a few pitfalls when using passion alone to guide life choices.

Using the examples above, for example, we can see that there is a huge difference in the unemployment rates between acting and teaching. 1 in 3 actors are unemployed, whereas education has only a 6.3% unemployment rate, according to the bureau of labor statistics. Pursuing passion does not necessarily yield equivalent results. It might be more beneficial to think about pursuing opportunities, instead.

You May Not Be Good at What You’re Passionate About

Just because you really enjoy doing something doesn’t mean you should devote your life to it. The harsh reality is that many people don’t have the natural ability required to make money off their passions. If that’s the case, “follow your passion” is just about the worst possible advice, because it will only encourage the person to waste more time on something that’s destined to fail.

You can get better at many things with practice, but that isn’t always enough. Let’s say you want to be a professional athlete. You’ll need a certain level of natural talent to do so, and if you’re not there, you’ll need to follow another path.

You Could Miss Opportunities to Succeed at Something Else

When you’re thinking about pursuing your passions, it’s important to consider whether you could realistically make money that way. If not, you’re chasing something that is unlikely to pay off when there are plenty of other opportunities to make a great living.

One consequence of people following their passions is the skills gap. That’s when employers have open jobs without the talent available to fill them. If you look for opportunities and see what kind of jobs are available, you’re more likely to find success than if you blindly follow passions.

Survivorship Bias

Of course, any time an actor, musician, athlete or other high-profile figure wins an award, they typically include a message about chasing your dreams in their speech. And this leads many people to believe that going after dreams is good advice, because it clearly worked out for the person who just won the award.

This is an error in logic known as survivorship bias. It refers to believing in something because you aren’t seeing or are ignoring the failures. Look at it like this – one actor who wins an Oscar may recommend following your dreams, but millions of others also took that approach and have little to show for it.

Finding Out What You Want in Life

This isn’t to say that you should never follow your passions, but you should think it through carefully first. Consider what you want out of life and how difficult it would be to make your dreams a reality. If you do chase those passions, will you be developing marketable skills, or will you be in an industry that already has too many people going after the same dream?

When in doubt, it’s always better to play it safe and go after opportunity. Passions change all the time, and although the safe route doesn’t sound as exciting, it’s far more likely to make you successful.