I heard this attention-grabbing phrase recently, uttered by an inspirational speaker saying these words on my car radio just after starting the engine. The words and their meanings continue to stick in my mind … so I feel a need to bring you into the conversation …
As you are pondering the phrase and its meaning in your own life, let me define the terms for you:
- Head is about using common sense and logical judgment, which usually comes after careful review of all the facts surrounding the matter, in deciding to say “yes” or “no” regarding the decision at hand.
- Heart is the other side of the coin … making a decision based fully on emotion, usually because it piques your interest, sounds exciting or like a “can’t lose” proposition. “There’s no need to do any research, gather any facts, or consider the reality of the situation — just from looking at it, I know it’s for me,” is the internal feedback you’re getting.
How about you? Do you lean to Head decisions? Heart decisions? Some combination of the two? For me, the safest position would be those decisions when one’s Head and Heart are in fairly close harmony.
Confession time: That sounds all well and good however … I’ve discovered that one of my personality weaknesses is allowing boredom to sometimes rule over logic. As I’ve written about more than once, I was always about start-ups … the excitement and challenges of building something new! The hard-earned lesson for me has been to factor in common sense, logic and meaningful information — as there’s no telling what pitfalls and dangers might lie ahead!
WHEN MY HEART RULED MY HEAD
When it comes to taking a step based solely on letting your emotions alone rule, here are two personal cases where I simply decided that I could handle, not even getting my wife’s opinion. Coincidentally, both were in response to a classified ad in Broadcasting magazine, the only two times I can remember answering such an ad about anything.
MY MOVE TO BOSTON
The first time was my move to Boston in 1966, which you can read about beginning on Page 74 in my RADIO … My Love, My Passion memoir. After being offered a new job, and without doing even a bit of research, I packed up my family, wife and three very young children, to head north from Philadelphia without realizing what I was getting into. Afterwards it became obvious that if I had done a little investigating, even made a couple of telephone calls, my head would have not let me do it. Between the time I accepted the job and arrived on the scene three weeks later, the game plan and my responsibilities had dramatically changed. Fortunately, I survived and came out on top even though the next 15 months were rather rough!
I JUST HAD TO OWN ONE
The second time was 20 years later, when an ad appeared for a station for sale (at a price I could afford) and it was airing a format that I related to. Its story begins in Chapter 12 of my memoir, on Page 168.
To begin with, I violated and ignored every principle that I, as a knowledgeable and experienced radio consultant, would have told a client to research. I felt I was ready and I simply had to own my own radio station. This sense of urgency on my part allowed the seller to convince me that all the station really needed was some additional funding, which he didn’t have. All he wanted was for me to allow him to stay on as manager.
I would quickly discover that we had challenges: It was not with the format (we had our share of dedicated listeners) nor that the station was on AM. It wasn’t even that the former owner, now my manager, wasn’t really working very hard at building revenue. The heart of the issue was that Spokane, Washington — while a beautiful community with wonderful people — was over-media’d. There were several TV stations and numerous radio stations, both AM and FM, with a couple of stations already off the air for financial reasons. And it was a market which did not have a strong economy, compared to many other parts of the country, to support all these stations. Upon using our “heads,” and thinking about it long and hard, we concluded there just wasn’t enough potential money in the area to support a station in a niche format like ours.
After I got out of the station 18 months later, my dear, beloved late wife Alicia told me she knew from the beginning that it was a losing proposition, but didn’t have the heart to “burst my balloon.” It cost us a lot of money, but we managed to survive without resorting to living in our car and missing meals! There’s an old saying which goes “hindsight is a perfect 20-20!”
A PRETTY GOOD TRACK RECORD
Thinking clearly and carefully and doing my homework — what people in the business and legal world call doing you “due diligence” before “jumping in” would have been a much more prudent approach. Yet, compared to all of the successes I’ve been fortunate to have over my working lifetime, I guess my average isn’t too bad.
How about you? Has the distance — or disconnect — between your heart and your head ever been an issue for you? If so, when you look back and see the err in your actions and then say “what if” … is it as an old friend of mine loves to say, “Marlin … “shoulda, woulda, coulda?”
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