NYU Stern professor Suzy Welch says the career aspiration to follow your passion is ‘dumb advice’

“The very worst career advice my students get all the time, and I certainly got, was to do what you’re passionate about,” Welch said in a recent interview with the WSJ. “What dumb, dumb advice.”

It’s natural for workers to want to buy into their career fantasies—and there are a litany of success stories of people who have done it. 

But the management professor rationalizes that there are too many stipulations at play for some aspirations to hold up in the real world. In some cases, people simply aren’t built for the careers they yearn to follow; without the right talent or temperament to make it in the industry, it’s hard to turn a passion into a full-time career. 

“I hate it because you have to be good at it also. You have to be good at it, otherwise it should be a hobby,” Welch continued. “There’s also your emotional wiring. Some jobs require different kinds of personalities. Your personality is actually how the world experiences you. And the sooner you face into that, and know how the world experiences you, the better.”

Welch reveals the type of students who launch successfully 

Throughout Welch’s decades-long career as a journalist, professor, and public speaker, she’s developed a keen eye for the tell-tale signs of success and failure. She even recognizes the same patterns in her business students at the New York college; those who lean into their skills and align their jobs with their authentic selves will make it out the other side. 

“The people who launch have got a couple different things going on,” Welch said in the WSJ interview. “They know themselves well. They are trying to do work that’s at the intersection of their values and their aptitudes and their interests.”

The college students who perform well after graduating are also willing to take bigger swings, even with failure on the line. 

“The ones who launch well have a higher appetite for risk, and they have more comfort with failure,” Welch added. “The young people [who] start out and say, ‘I’m going to swing big now before I have the mortgage’ are the ones that tend to keep on picking themselves up, and then people start to bet on them.” Welch admitted that taking bold risks is “scary advice,” but it’s a character trait that could result in bigger long-term returns.

She said the graduates who fall short follow career paths that don’t align with their true strengths: “They’re doing it because it looks good, or their parents told them to do it.” 

The leaders who agree: following your passion is bad advice

Welch isn’t the only one pushing back against the pleasantry that passions can always lead to viable careers. Oscar award-winning actress Reese Witherspoon doesn’t sugarcoat it when it comes to giving professional advice: talent is more important than dreams. The Legally Blonde star says it’s on workers to figure out which skills match their aspirations and go after the job that fits the bill.

“This is very, very important. You don’t chase your dreams, you chase your talents. Everybody has dreams,” Witherspoon said in an Instagram reel posted earlier this year. “It doesn’t mean you’re gonna be that thing. You are supposed to do what you’re talented at.”

Founding Shark Tank member Robert Herjavec also learned from his former co-star, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, that life doesn’t care about your passion. 

Instead of chasing a career daydream, the entrepreneur advises professionals to pour all their energy into one thing they can’t get enough of. It’s a lesson he learned early in his career, and warns others of when charting the rest of their professional lives. 

“I don’t care that you love golf or basketball or AI or cyber, I don’t give a shit about any of that. What I want to know is, what are you obsessed with?” Herjavec told Fortune last year. “Passion is easy, because passion is a wish, but obsession is an action. Passion doesn’t demand anything of you. Obsession requires everything of you.”

Plus, as professionals grapple with an uncertain economy, the notion itself might not be achievable. The American Dream is fast fading out of view for most workers; hiring has stalled, living costs are skyrocketing, and wages are stagnating. However, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla believes that AI could change that. He predicts that any and all career aspirations—regardless of financial viability or stability—will be on the table once the tech reaches its full potential. 

“Fifteen years from now, you will say—what is bad advice today or used to be…‘Follow your passion,’” Khosla said on Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast earlier this year. “‘Follow your passion’ comes second to surviving. I think that surviving part will go away, and you’ll tell every 5-year-old kid, ‘Follow your passion.’”